The unlikely story of Cash-thing.com

What does prize-winning tech startup and a million colourful buttons have in common? Pretty much everything when it comes to cash-thing.com, the web-based cash-register for market vendors made by APB.

Jane Walsh has been making funky button based jewellery since around 2007 and now runs Button Studio full time.

Her unique pieces have received national media coverage and are stocked all over Ireland — but it’s still a very local operation. Jane works from her small studio, producing every single piece by hand, and often travels to craft fairs and shows to meet her customers in person. It was at one of these fairs that the concept of a cash-register for market vendors came about.

Eureka!

I had been helping Jane with her stall and witnessed the state of cash-register apps first hand. The user experience was terrible. The UI was clunky and slow. Documentation was rarely understandable. The organisation of items was a mess and there were no reporting features within an affordable price range. This meant Jane had to sit down and meticulously go through every sale she made to make sure her stock was right for the next day.

It didn’t take long for before I decided I could do better, and so cash-thing.com was born.

The app

Jane was nice enough to sign up to be my first customer, even before I wrote a line of code. So I designed it with Jane in mind, as my target audience.

Cash-thing.com needed to be:

• Portable, so she could bring it to events with a small cash-box.
• Usable offline, when the internet was expensive or just not available.
• Backed up when online so she could go back to her hotel and save everything.
• Simple to use so she wouldn’t have to figure things out when things were hectic.
• Useful to Jane.

With these in mind, I decided to make cash-thing:

• web based, so it would work on any device.
• usable Offline, with html5 localstorage and the appCache manifest.
• syncable to a database in the cloud!
• totally straightforward.
• with all the analytics, statistics and feedback that Jane needed, built in.

The result was a simple, clean design that worked anywhere!

Jane was able to jump straight in and track her sales from anywhere and get a full list of how much she sold and when she sold it.

Awards

In 2015, the cash-thing.com team won the NUIG Entrepreneur Society Entrepreneur of the Year award. We were delighted to accept the prize which reflected a year of hard work and concerted effort.

Conclusion

Jane was delighted with the app and continues to use it today. Cash-thing.com has now handled thousands of transactions by all of our customers and is celebrating it’s 4th birthday this year!

Check out cash-thing.com today!