Home / About

Our story

Built behind a counter, not in a boardroom.

I have been a software engineer since 2012 and a shopkeeper since 2015. epos-365 is what happened when the two stopped being separate jobs.

The people behind the EPOS system

Five years of building a point of sale system for shops like the one we ran, rather than a general-purpose till adapted afterwards.

Why it exists

The counter came first. The code came after.

I learned retail before I learned to ship software, and I have never stopped doing either. I am a software engineer by trade and a shopkeeper by choice, and epos-365 exists because those two jobs kept showing me the same unsolved problem from opposite ends.

Every EPOS system I paid for as a retailer had the same gaps: ordering that guessed rather than knew, no honest view of which retail space earned its keep, nothing that took shrink seriously, and reports written for a boardroom rather than for whoever opens the shop tomorrow. So I built the one I wanted to buy, and I put it on my own counter before I asked anyone else to trust it.

  • 2015Trading from his own shop, and still is
  • 5 yrsBuilt in evenings, around an engineering job
  • 2023Replaced the EPOS on his own counter
  • 2024Released to other retailers

Venkata SeeramreddyFounder, epos-365

✓ Five years in the build✓ Written by a shop owner✓ Proven on his own counter first

“Publish the price. Include the features. Answer the phone.”

The whole brief, on a Post-it. Everything in epos-365 follows from it: the price is on the website, every feature is inside the monthly cost, and the person who answers you knows the software because Venkata Seeramreddy wrote it.

Company
AVS Digital Ltd
Retailing since
2015, and still trading
In build
2018 to 2023
Launched
2024, after a year on our own counter
Built in
The United Kingdom

How it happened

Fourteen years, in order.

The short version is above. This is how it actually went.

  1. At university

    Part-time on a shop floor

    Stock, offers, customer service, and eventually the buying. The owner handed me the ordering because I asked what the margin was on things.

  2. 2012

    Software engineer — and still am

    I finished my masters and went into engineering. That has been my trade ever since, which is why this was built in evenings rather than on funding.

  3. 2015

    Opened my own shop

    Not standing behind someone else’s counter any more. Every penny that left the door was mine, and that changes what you notice.

  4. 2015–2018

    What the counter actually taught me

    That margin is counted in pennies, not percentages. That compliance reporting is not paperwork until the day it is. That any job at the till needs doing in under three clicks, because a queue in a local shop has far less patience than a queue in a supermarket. And that the biggest single loss in retail is not shoplifting.

  5. Along the way

    Other owners, one shop to twenty

    Running a shop puts you among people running shops. The problems scaled but never changed shape, and the ones with twenty branches were solving the same things with more spreadsheets.

  6. 2018

    Started building

    The gaps were always the same: ordering that guessed, no honest view of which space earned its keep, nothing useful on shrink, and two thousand boardroom reports that never answered an owner’s actual question.

  7. 2023

    Put it on my own counter

    Five years in, it replaced the EPOS in my own shop. That is the only test that counts, and it is not a comfortable one.

  8. 2024

    Launched under AVS Digital Ltd

    After another year of tuning it against a live shop and real trading, it went out to other retailers.

What that changed

Built for the shop, not the boardroom.

Fourteen years of standing on both sides of this decided what got built and, just as often, what did not.

Under three clicks

Every job at the till is measured by how many taps it takes, because a queue in a local shop is far less forgiving than a queue in a supermarket. Speed at the counter is not a feature, it is the product.

Reports an owner opens

Not two thousand of them. The handful that answer what you were actually going to ask on a Monday morning — and the compliance ones you will be very glad to have the week somebody asks for them.

Enterprise, at independent prices

Multi-site stock, supplier price feeds, card at a published rate and real reporting. All of it built for a shop that counts in pennies, because it was built by one.

How we work

Three things we will not do.

Hide the price

Both our rates are on the pricing page, along with the hardware and the card rate. You should never have to book a call to find out what something costs.

Raise it mid-contract

Whatever you sign at is what you pay for the whole term. No annual uplift letter, no renegotiation you did not ask for.

Sell you the wrong thing

If your trade needs something we do not do yet, we will tell you on the first call rather than on install day.

Beyond the till

Some of it is best shown, not listed.

Ordering, forecasting, retail space and shrink are where a shop quietly makes or loses its year. What this does with them goes further than the pages on this site describe, and it lands better against your own numbers than in a bullet point. Ask on the call.

The advantage

We are our own hardest customer.

Every release runs on a real counter before it reaches yours. When something is slow at five o’clock on a Friday, we feel it the same week you would — which is why the till keeps trading when the broadband does not, and why the Z-read ties out first time.

Talk to the person who built it.

No script, no callback queue. Tell us what you run and we will tell you honestly whether we fit.