Startup Idea: EBT Transaction Software Development for Grocery Retail

Startup idea to develop an add-on or patch to handle EBT transactions for existing Point Of Sale systems in the grocery business. The add-on should be able to deal with changing tax rates associated with EBT card purchases. The target software is an open source project called Unicenta POS, written in java, javabeans, and MySQL.

I work in the retail industry, specifically the grocery business in the state of Ohio. There are quite a few Point Of Sale systems for general retail and a few for the grocery business.

The general problem is EBT transactions are not handled by most software. The software that does handle EBT transactions is horribly dated and closed source.

The specific problem is that products have different tax rates if they are purchased by EBT cards.

An open source project, Unicenmta POS handles the grocery business well, but not EBT transactions. If you search the forums, plenty of people are asking for an EBT patch and are willing to pay for it. Unicenta is written using java, javabeans, and MySQL. We use software which processes dbf files. I think it is possibly dbase, but no source code. Contact me if you would like more information.

Submitter: Mark Baker (view contact info)