necessities
An all in one solution to a fully-functioning, no-profit grocery store.
❓ What is necessities?
tl;dr A hopeful project to help create an affordable planet by offering good food as cheap as possible.
Necessities is an ambitious project to create a fully-featured suite of software, guides, SOPs and resources to open a one-of-a-kind grocery store that calculates the exact margin to keep the doors open and the staff paid, but not a penny more.
🤔 How is this supposed to work?
Ideally, this is a package so that any community can open their own grocery store, in the perfect version, we’d also include marketing and fundraising tools so that the store can be owned by the people who are actually going to shop there daily. The idea is for people to invest in their own community and neighborhood and keeping more of their money in their own town instead of to whatever supermarket conglomerate is in their area.
By having tools for inventory, POS, business administration, HR and timekeeping all under the same software, an algorithim will determine exactly how much profit needs to be made on any item in order to keep the staff with a living wage, the lights on and the morgage paid. (No executive yacht included) The daily (or perhaps even hourly) price margin and total store expenses will be on display at all times, so you don’t have to wonder where your money is actually going.
🏃 I’m in, how can I help; what’s the plan of attack?
So far, this repository is mostly empty - this idea has lived in my head for years and I’ve slowly been gaining experience in POS, business management, tax code, inventory and other relevant fields and I feel like I’m at a good place to begin. If you want to help, I’m just a dude 🤷, so send me a message! I’m available during business hours for the most part (flexible day-job) so let’s jump on a call and colaborate!
Roadmap
My Github contrubutions
Present - May 2024
- ✅ Learn Django!
- ✅Begin inventory software! (The inventory is the backbone of the system and will need to be robust!)
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- ✅Django project started!
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- ✅Look through some different inventory systems like YellowDog.
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- ✅Frontend project
Current sprint (5/1 - 5/15)
- Django Projects are split into apps, I’ll be working on the authenticator app first so that I can have a proper login with google authenticator and begin editing the admin panel.
- Ideally, I’ll also begin on the inventory app.
Next sprint (5/15 - 6/1)
- Creating the skeleton of the inventory system completely and robustly.
Previous sprint (4/14 - 4/30)
- This period of time was almost entirely dedicated to learning Django. I created multiple small projects as a result.
Future
Inventory
- Push inventory
- Retrieve inventory
- Add counts
- Create different quantities (case, pack, pallet)
- All quantities need to be editable
- Create API for inventory
- Track expiry dates
- Enable donation feature for non-sellables (past expiry) - Is this legal? 🤔
- Location tracking (by asile, warehouse, department, ect)
- Create restock notices
- Add reporting for spills, spoil, theft and waste.
- Archive
POS
- Add items to cart
- Pull price from central database
- Manual price adjust
Business Admin
- Add fixed expenses like morgage payment
- Add fluid expenses like water and power bill
- Research relevant tax documents (State and county/borough)
- Contracts
- Camera system! (Should probably be hosted locally)
HR
- Add Employees
- Edit Employees (name, phone number, gender identity and address change)
- Record of timekeeping
- Payroll
- Benefits (Ability to edit)
Feature creep!
- Membership (investors or shoppers who live in the area get a different margin than visitors)
Past
April 2024
- Purchansed the necessities.systems domain! It’s hosting this readme currently!
- Create interactive roadmap.
- Backend package selected! (We’re doing Django! 😎)
- Spent 100 hours learning Django.
- Began inventory software skeleton
March 2024
- Offically began project!
- Added this snazzy readme
- Outlined for the future
September 2022
- Initial idea