Hospitality
For cafés, bars and kitchens, where stock is counted by hand on a busy shift, some of it goes off, and the question that matters is whether you can still make everything on the menu tomorrow.
What we hear
Ordering from a guess.
Somebody walks the shelves, counts what they can, and the order is whatever looks low.
An empty shelf you find out about at the counter.
Nobody can say which drink an empty shelf will stop until a customer asks for it.
Everything counted in the wrong unit.
Milk comes in bottles, beans in bags and cups in sleeves. A sheet that counts all of them the same way gets all of them slightly wrong.
Orders chased from memory.
Was it ordered, from whom, and when does it arrive? The person who knows is usually not on shift.
A stock system for a coffee shop
Oatley Coffee count what is on the shelf, and we built the system those counts live in. Every countable line in the shop sits in one list, grouped the way the shop is walked and held in the unit it is counted in: bags, bottles, boxes, units. Each line says its state as a word, not only as a colour: fine, low, out, oversold, or waiting on a count. It is live, and in use every week.
Under the list sit the two answers a shop wants from a count. One costs the drinks list against what is in stock and names the single ingredient holding each drink up. The other says what is already on order, from whom, and where it has got to, in plain words rather than a status code.
Built for a count done on your feet
Counting is its own mode. One category fills the screen at a time, with a large stepper for each item in its own unit, a skip for anything not being counted today, and a line saying how far through you are. Nothing is saved as it is typed: the whole walk is sent as one batch at the end, and if that save is refused nothing half-written lands and the numbers stay on the screen.
A needs-attention filter cuts the list to what is low, out, oversold, or has gone too long without a count. Opening a line shows what it uses in a day, when it was last counted and delivered, its supplier, and the two numbers that decide when it goes on the next order, which can be changed right there.
Where we would start
With the count you already do. If somebody counts the shelves, you already have the data. The work is keeping it in one place, in the right units, and turning it into the next order instead of a guess. If your till or your suppliers can share their data, we join that in too, so fewer numbers are typed twice.
The work behind this page
How we usually help
Tell us the job that still gets done by hand. We will tell you on the first call whether it is worth building.