Cost-Management SaaS for Coffee Roasters

A coffee roaster’s margins live and die on cost of goods sold — green beans, roasting loss, packaging, per-café pricing. Most operators only learn their real COGS weeks later, from their accountant. This SaaS shows it in real time.

Solution & architecture

The product pairs a React front end (Tailwind CSS) with a C# ASP.NET Core Web API over SQL Server. Dashboards track real-time COGS and profit analytics, and multi-location access gives owners visibility into each café and roastery.

The data that drives those numbers comes from where the business already lives: Shopify for online sales, Square POS for the counter, and QuickBooks for accounting — integrated so the dashboard reflects reality without manual imports.

Key technical decisions

• API-first split. A React SPA over a Web API fits a SaaS with integration-heavy backends: the API owns the business logic and the third-party syncs; the front end stays a pure consumer.
• SQL Server views and query optimization. Analytics over sales and cost data is where dashboards usually get slow. Heavy read paths were tuned at the SQL level — optimized queries and views — rather than papered over with caching.
• Integrations as the moat. The product’s value is having Shopify, Square, and QuickBooks data in one costing model; the integration layer was treated as core product, not an add-on.

Outcome

Built so roasters and café operators see their cost and profit position as it changes, per location, without waiting on month-end accounting. Client identity is withheld by agreement.