Could TW be a cash register?

#1

I need your help and advice. I run a tea house / cafe and English school in rural Japan.

I wondered if I could use TiddlyWiki as a way to keep track of the orders and the prices. Because it has a created time stamp. Could I maybe create a new tiddler for every order? Then to speed things up, I simply have tags for all my items (there aren’t many) and the tags would include the prices: Example 1 cup of coffee: 200 yen. If a customer ordered 2 cups, I’d have another tag for that. And other tags for other items. Even tags for the age group of the customers, perhaps. And also a tag for “paid” so that I know the order is not active.

Then, if a customer asks for a receipt, I could export the tiddler to HTML and have it printed out or if it’s a regular customer, I could email it. (without the age group thing, of course).

What do you think. When tax time comes (April, here), I won’t be missing information.

And I could also keep track of purchases and inventory. Although, I haven’t thought of a way to do that. Have any of you tried something like this?

Your thoughts.

#2

I don’t think tiddlywiki is the best solution for this, there are dedicated till programs for a cash register.

#3

I have to agree with @buggyj that this is likely not the best idea. The dedicated tools for this are a better bet. You might search for “point of sale” systems. There are plenty of sites that will give you best-of comparisons.

But it is still fun to imagine how we might do this in TiddlyWiki!

I don’t think tags on an order would do. Imagine a group of five that comes in and spends some time, consuming seven teas, three coffees, two bottles waters and one fruit juice along with four scones, three muffins, and five pastries. How could you use tags to capture this?

Instead, I would expect an Order to consist chiefly of a collection of Line items. Each of these would hold an Item, a quantity, a unit price. The Order would also connect to payments. It’s easy enough to imagine a UI for this.

I fiddled with this design in my SQL Playground. Open up any of the Order tiddlers, say #110, to see it on action.

#4

TiddlyWiki is just a data container just like anything else (a plain text file, a database etc), hence I perceive your question more about generally preserving the history of changes. For this you make abstraction of TiddlyWiki and focus on

  1. Version control
  2. Backups

If you want to use TiddlyWiki because you feel like you are fluent enough to solve your use case, there’s nothing wrong about using it.

My only concern about versioning the changes in TiddlyWiki would be if single HTML encrypted wikis are involved. Diffs of those would not be view friendly.