one question · one answer
What system suits a coffee shop with two locations
Keep the till you already have and do not migrate it. What a second location breaks is not the till — it is comparison: you can see each shop's day, but not the two of them beside each other, and nobody notices when one drifts. Add one layer that pulls both tills into a single set of numbers with a location column, and set two or three thresholds that tell you when a shop moves away from its own four-week normal. That is the whole requirement until you reach four or five locations.
A full retail ERP at two locations costs more in setup time than it returns. The thing that pays for itself is the comparison and the alert, not the module list.
Why the second location is the break point
One shop fits in a head. The owner is in the room, sees the queue, knows Tuesday was slow and roughly why. Two shops do not fit: you are physically in one of them, and the other exists as a number you look up if you remember to. Most problems at two locations are not dramatic — they are a slow drift. Average check at the second shop slides four percent a month. Waste goes up on Mondays. A supplier quietly raises a price at one delivery point and not the other.
None of that is invisible in the till. It is invisible in time: you find it in the quarterly numbers, four months after it started, and by then it has cost more than any software would have.
What you actually need, in order
- Both locations in one table, with a location column. Not two dashboards side by side — one dataset you can slice. Otherwise you compare by memory.
- Each shop measured against its own history, not against the other one. A location in a business district and one by a station have different weeks; comparing them directly produces noise, and after a month of noise nobody looks.
- Two or three thresholds, in your own words. “Tell me if average check at either shop drops below X.” Not a report you have to open — a message that arrives.
- Somewhere to put the resulting task. The alert is worthless if the response lives in a WhatsApp thread that scrolls away by Thursday.
What you do not need at two locations: stock accounting to the gram, a staff scheduling module, a loyalty programme with tiers, or anything that needs a consultant to configure. Those become worth their setup cost at a different scale.
What it should cost
A useful rule: the monthly cost of the layer should be less than one slow week at one location. For a two-shop café that is usually somewhere between €50 and €150 a month. Above that you are buying modules you will not open; below that you are usually buying a spreadsheet with a nicer skin.
The bigger cost is not the licence — it is the hours of getting your till to speak to anything. Ask any vendor how your specific POS gets in, and get a straight answer before you sign. “We have an API” is not that answer.
Where Ovirno fits, and where it doesn't
Ovirno is that layer: your data in one place, with a location column, an analyst that re-reads the numbers every hour and writes when a rule you wrote breaks, and a Telegram bot you can ask out loud between customers. From €99 a month, everything included, and one button exports the lot as CSV if you leave.
Where it does not fit: there is no POS integration. If your till has no export and no API, the numbers get in as a CSV you upload or a sheet on a schedule, and if that sounds like a chore, it will be one. We also do not do stock to the gram, staff rotas or payroll, and we say so on the features page rather than in a footnote.
If this sounds like your situation, the way to find out is not a demo of somebody else's data: send one export of your sales and thirty minutes later you are looking at your own business, with observations computed from your own numbers. Ask for that, or write on Telegram — the person who answers is the one who builds the thing.
Asked before every one of these
Do I have to replace my till?
No. The till keeps taking money the way it does now. What you add is a place where both tills' numbers land together, so the two shops can be compared and watched.
Is a spreadsheet enough for two locations?
It is enough to hold the numbers and not enough to watch them. A spreadsheet does not notice a four percent drift and does not message you on a Tuesday. If somebody is reliably updating and reading it every week, keep it.
At how many locations does a full ERP start to pay off?
Usually four or five, or earlier if you run your own production or hold real stock. Before that the configuration effort is larger than the return.