Hajiyaar — How Airbil Helped a Biryani Shop Stop Losing Orders
The problem
A popular biryani restaurant was running one of those operations that thrives on reputation and food quality, but buckles under its own success. Long queues, heavy footfall, and a catering business that was growing faster than their systems could handle. The owner was tracking every pre-order — shop pickups and large catering bookings alike — on paper.
As order volume grew, things started falling through the cracks. Orders got mixed up or forgotten. Catering bookings placed days in advance would slip until it was too late to prep. There was no way to know which items sold most, how much of the revenue came from walk-ins versus catering, or what the cancellation rate looked like. Advance payments and customer notes were scattered across slips of paper.
Airbil came in and replaced that entire system with Hajiyaar — a purpose-built, offline-first mobile app designed around how this specific business actually works.
What changed
Forgotten orders became impossible. Every confirmed order sits in a live pre-orders screen, color-coded by urgency. Cards go amber when pickup is approaching, red when overdue. The app badge shows pending order count without even opening the app. Catering orders now have a built-in safety net. A catering booking automatically schedules six reminders — 9 AM on each of the five days before, and 30 minutes before the booking itself. Shop orders get two. Edit an order and the old notifications cancel; new ones reschedule automatically. The owner can now see the business clearly. An analytics screen shows revenue totals, shop vs catering breakdown, a trend chart with adaptive granularity, fulfillment rate, cancellation rate, and the top-selling items — all filterable by day, week, month, year, or all time, with a comparison to the previous period. Shop and catering are treated as genuinely different things. Shop items have fixed catalog prices. Catering items have custom per-booking pricing, in kg or pieces. Order numbers run independent sequences (S01, S02 vs C01, C02). Every screen filters by type. The two workflows no longer bleed into each other.
The stack
The app is built on React Native with Expo, fully offline using AsyncStorage — no internet required, no accounts, no backend dependency. Notifications run natively. The app works on the owner's phone, out of the box, the same day.
The result
A system that matches the actual complexity of the business — two order types with different lead times, different pricing logic, and different preparation needs — managed cleanly from one screen. No orders forgotten. No catering jobs missed. And for the first time, a real picture of what's working and what isn't.
