Case study
Patrono: the restaurant in your hand.
Our own SaaS product for running a hospitality venue. Business overview, finances, shift scheduling, food cost and HACCP records, in the browser and on the phone.
- Type
- Own product · SaaS
- Platform
- Web + mobile
- Stack
- Next.js · PostgreSQL · Vercel
- Status
- In production
A problem we watched up close
Our team comes out of hospitality, delivery and franchise management, so we did not have to research this one through surveys. A venue owner typically runs the business on spreadsheets, a messaging group for shifts and a paper HACCP folder. The data exists, but it is scattered, and how much a dish actually earns or how the month is going arrives too late to act on.
Patrono is the answer we built: one platform where the owner, the shift manager and the staff work in the same tool, each with their own permissions.
What we built
The platform covers operations and finance for a venue, without changing how people work and without new hardware:
- Business overview: the owner and the manager know where the venue stands at any moment.
- Finance: supplier invoices with payment status and due dates, plus a monthly summary ready for the accountant.
- Shift scheduling: the manager lays out the week, staff see their shift on their phone, hours add themselves up.
- Food cost: recipes per dish, cost calculated from purchase prices, and one ingredient price change reflows margins across the whole menu.
- HACCP: temperatures, goods receipt and opening routines on the official forms, timestamped and signed, ready for an inspection.
- A staff directory with documents in one place.
Integration instead of migration
The key design decision: Patrono does not issue receipts. It connects to the point of sale the venue already uses and which already meets Croatian fiscalisation rules, so adopting it requires no hardware swap and no change at the till. Revenue from delivery platforms lands in the same overview, commissions included, so the channels can finally be compared.
How it is built
Patrono is a Next.js application with a PostgreSQL database on European infrastructure, deployed on Vercel. It runs as a PWA with push notifications, so staff open schedules and checklists from their phones without installing anything from a store. Analytics is Plausible, cookieless and without individual tracking, and the data belongs to the customer.
The product is developed continuously; a point-of-sale and real-time revenue module is in active development.
Result
34% → 26%
At Papoy Munch & Brunch, a partner venue in Zagreb, the food cost module brought the cost of food down from 34% to 26% of revenue. It gave the owner and the manager back over 10 hours a week previously spent on administration in other tools, and retired both the messaging group for scheduling and the paper HACCP folder.
Contact
Building something similar?
Tell us about the project. For smaller ones we send an analysis and a quote within a few days. For larger and more complex work we agree the scope of that analysis with you first.