Turn a photo of a cafe's daily inventory sheet into shopping lists for three suppliers with a custom GPT
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- by Cole Morgan (personal blog)
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Evidence: Described by posterThe person describes what happened in words, without screenshots or video.
Outcome
Cole Morgan runs a small cafe with no single major supplier, so they drive to three stores. Staff fill in two paper inventory forms each day and upload them to Slack, and turning those into a checklist for each store took 2-10 minutes. An off-the-shelf OCR tool that worked well cost over $250 a month, and a Python script they had ChatGPT write wasn't accurate enough. So they built a custom GPT, 'C&K Inventory Manager', trained on a spreadsheet of every item and its vendor. Now they upload the sheet photo and get a checkbox list grouped by vendor, ready to paste into Obsidian. It asks about items missing from the sheet, such as whole milk. Accuracy improved with GPT-4o with no change to the instructions, though it sometimes asks too many questions and they have to tell it to just output the list.
Agent
Prompt Original prompt
Exact prompt as published in the source.
You are a coffee shop manager overseeing inventory remotely for a cafe. Your primary goal is to ensure the shop is stocked with all necessary ingredients without having the authority to respond to anything beyond supply checks. Employees report inventory counts, and you identify if anything critical is missing, prompting staff for any overlooked items. When responding to reports, ask about any unmentioned items from your internal list before finalizing the supply order. you are to only output markdown, formatted in a list format with checkboxes and grouped by the vendor the item is purchased from. The items must be grouped by vendor.
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Optional stronger version
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Run this task now, exactly as written below. Everything you need is here, so start straight away and only stop if something required is missing or a rule below tells you to. Goal: Turn a photo of today's stock count into a shopping list for each supplier I buy from. Fill in before running: - A photo of today's inventory sheet: [ATTACH] - My item list with the supplier for each item: [ATTACH] - How I want the list (checklist, app it goes into): [DETAILS] Rules: - Read every line of the sheet and list anything you can't read. - Ask about any item on my master list that isn't on today's sheet before you finish. - Group the shopping list by supplier, then by section (produce, dairy, paper goods). - Output only the list, as checkboxes, with nothing else around it. - Check facts that can change (prices, opening hours, dates, availability, rules) against the official source, and tell me anything you couldn't verify. - Flag any item ordered much more often than usual this week, in case the count was wrong. Output: One checklist per supplier, ready to paste into my notes app. You'll know it worked when: I can shop all three stores without re-reading the paper sheet. Before you finish: re-read my goal and constraints, check your answer against each one, and list anything you assumed or couldn't confirm.
Customize the stronger version
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A photo of today's inventory sheet
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My item list with the supplier for each item
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Your prompt
Run this task now, exactly as written below. Everything you need is here, so start straight away and only stop if something required is missing or a rule below tells you to. Goal: Turn a photo of today's stock count into a shopping list for each supplier I buy from. Fill in before running: - A photo of today's inventory sheet: [ATTACH] - My item list with the supplier for each item: [ATTACH] - How I want the list (checklist, app it goes into): [DETAILS] Rules: - Read every line of the sheet and list anything you can't read. - Ask about any item on my master list that isn't on today's sheet before you finish. - Group the shopping list by supplier, then by section (produce, dairy, paper goods). - Output only the list, as checkboxes, with nothing else around it. - Check facts that can change (prices, opening hours, dates, availability, rules) against the official source, and tell me anything you couldn't verify. - Flag any item ordered much more often than usual this week, in case the count was wrong. Output: One checklist per supplier, ready to paste into my notes app. You'll know it worked when: I can shop all three stores without re-reading the paper sheet. Before you finish: re-read my goal and constraints, check your answer against each one, and list anything you assumed or couldn't confirm.
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Source
https://www.colemorgan.com/posts/how-i-automated-my-cafe-inventory-ordering-with-chatgpt/
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