Snap the cafe's paper inventory sheet and get a shopping list split by store from ChatGPT
Cole Morgan, owner of Coffee & Kindness, a coffee shop in Nashua, New Hampshire, on his own blog
He built a custom GPT, "C&K Inventory Manager", and trained it with an XLS list of every inventory item and the vendor it comes from. He uploads the photo of the day's sheet; it returns a markdown checkbox list grouped by vendor (Sams Club, Hannaford, Restaurant Depot, Boston Artisan) that he pastes into Obsidian, and asks about any item missing from the sheet, such as whole milk.
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ChatGPT, Slack, Obsidian
The problem
The cafe has no single major supplier, so he drives to several stores. Staff fill in paper inventory forms for the coffee bar, kitchen and paper goods every day and upload them to Slack, and turning them into a checklist per store took him 2 to 10 minutes. An off-the-shelf OCR tool that worked well cost over $250 a month, and his own Python script wasn't accurate enough.
What happened
He says accuracy and detail improved immensely with newer ChatGPT models without changing his instructions, though it sometimes asks too many questions and he tells it to just output the list. No time-saved figure is given beyond the 2 to 10 minutes the manual list used to take.
Quoted in the source: Cole Morgan, owner, Coffee & Kindness. Source: Cole Morgan's blog: How I automated my cafe inventory ordering with ChatGPT (2025-01-12) · Added 2026-10-16.
How to set it up yourself
- What Coffee & Kindness used: a custom GPT trained on an XLS of every inventory item and its vendor, fed a photo of the daily paper inventory sheet that staff post to Slack, returning a checkbox shopping list grouped by vendor for Obsidian.
- Make a spreadsheet with two columns, item and vendor, for everything you stock. Personal ChatGPT plans can't create new custom GPTs, so select New project in the sidebar instead, name it "Inventory" and add the spreadsheet as a project file.
- Under ••• > Project settings, paste the prompt below as the instructions. Each day, upload the photo of the inventory sheet into a new chat in the project.
- Read the list against the sheet the first few weeks, since handwriting can be misread. If it asks too many questions, reply "just output my list".
Copy-paste prompt
You are the remote inventory manager for {CAFE NAME}. When I upload a photo of today's inventory sheet, compare it with the item list in the project file and output only a markdown checklist of items to buy, with checkboxes, grouped by vendor ({VENDORS, e.g. Sams Club, Hannaford}). Before finalizing, ask me about any item on the list that isn't on the sheet. Don't add items that aren't on the list.One short email a day: 3 new AI use cases from real small businesses, each with its source and setup steps, plus a Tool of the Day. Free, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Tools used
ChatGPT
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