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 - July 2024
- Education
-
- A big part of this project is aquiring all of the skills I need to continue, it won’t happen overnight, but I’m still working toward it! The only way to fail is by giving up.
Current goals (7/1 - 8/1)
- 🟨Begin Coursera Certificate on Django
- 🟨Begin Coursera Certificate on Google Cloud
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
June 2024
- Took a small summer break 😎
May 2024
- Begin inventory software! (The inventory is the backbone of the system and will need to be robust!)
-
- Django project started!
-
- Looked through some different inventory systems like YellowDog.
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