CodeNXT Lab · Case study 02 / Barberbase
Barberbase.
Point-of-sale and operations infrastructure for barbershops. Offline-tolerant, hardware-integrated, designed around what actually happens at the counter.
Visit barberbase.in →01
The brief.
What they came with, in their words.
We wrote this brief for ourselves, at a counter, watching a till fail because the shop’s connection dropped mid-transaction. The requirement was simple and unusual: the shop keeps trading when the internet does not.
02
Constraints.
The real ones, not the stated ones.
- Connectivity at the counter is intermittent, not absent. The system has to keep taking money through a dropout and reconcile afterwards.
- The hardware is whatever the shop already owns. We do not get to specify the printer.
- The operator is not technical and is mid-haircut. Anything that needs a decision at the counter is a design failure.
03
What we built.
The system, and what it runs on.
The counter terminal writes to a local store first and treats the network as an optimisation, not a dependency. A sync worker reconciles against the operations API when the connection returns, so a dropout costs a delay rather than a transaction.
One Flutter codebase covers the counter and the owner’s phone, dropping to native only where the hardware integration requires it.
In pilot · 1,000 transactions processed
Flutter · Dart · Firebase · Fastlane
04
The system.
One drawing. No screenshots.
05
What we did not build.
Every scope carries an exclusions list.
- No online booking portal. Barberbase runs the counter; it does not compete with the booking tools shops already use.
- No payroll, accounting, or tax filing. It records what was sold and hands the numbers over.
- No customer-facing app. There is nothing for the person in the chair to install.