Why I Do My Weekly Orders This Way (Not the Way the Apps Want)

I have approximately 193 different units to count at each of my stores. And somehow, the software industry has decided what I really need is a barcode scanner. I don't. I run coffee shops. I'm not a distribution center.

By Jade Valore, founder of DeskPanther. Started on a truck, grew it into a multi-location coffee company, still running the shops every day. 🐾

I've spent years figuring out inventory and ordering because, at one point, we were spending WAY too much money and sitting on way too much product. Stores were basically refilling things because that's what we'd always done. Managers were guessing. Product would get shoved somewhere nobody knew about. Someone would forget something on an order, and suddenly we were making a second delivery to a store because we missed one stupid item.

So yes, I care about inventory. I just don't think inventory has to be complicated to be accurate.

I Have Tried the Complicated Way

Fun fact: in 2021, when we opened our third store, I literally built my own Shopify store just so my managers could place their weekly orders. They had a Google Sheet with their pars. They'd count everything, find the par on one sheet, then go into my little internal Shopify store and "shop" for what they needed. It worked. It also took them over an hour to place an order.

I had also seen systems like BlueCart through Beyond the Grind, an Orange County distributor we worked with before it was acquired by Odeko. I liked the idea behind it, but for what I needed inside my own stores, it was way too complicated and expensive. That experience stuck with me. Because every time I looked at inventory software, I kept seeing more. More integrations, more analytics, more scanning, more setup, more theoretical usage, more things connected to the POS. And I kept wanting less.

Count What's There. I'll Handle the Rest.

Here's how we do weekly ordering now. Once a week, someone at each store counts what's physically on the shelves. At my managerless stores, that's usually a shift lead. But honestly, I could teach a brand-new employee how to do it on day one. There's no inventory degree required. Count. Enter number. Next. That's it.

Every item already has a par. If the par for something is 10 and the employee counts 4, DeskPanther does the math. We need 6. The employee doesn't need to calculate anything. They don't need to know what we ordered last week. They don't need to scan a barcode or understand theoretical usage. They just need to tell me what's physically there.

Once they submit it, the completed order lands on my owner dashboard. I can literally be in bed, open DeskPanther, go to the dashboard, pull up the store's order, export the PDF and text it to my warehouse employee. The warehouse pulls each store's order, and I still handle the larger vendor orders coming into the warehouse. That's the process.

What used to take a manager more than an hour now takes around 20 minutes. And we've gone from delivering to some stores twice a week to once a week. That matters a lot more to me than having a pretty inventory graph.

Pars Aren't Magic Numbers

This is probably the part people overcomplicate the most. A par is basically: how much of this should this store have to make it through the week? You don't need an algorithm to start. You make your best educated decision and then watch what happens.

If a store consistently has way too much oat milk left when they count, the par is probably too high. I can lower it from my phone. If they're constantly reporting oat milk as out-of-stock before the next order, the par is probably too low. Raise it. Do that week after week and your pars get smarter. That's how I got really down and dirty with ours. I watched what stores were actually using instead of continuing to throw product at them.

And DeskPanther's out-of-stock alerts give me another signal. If the same store keeps reporting the same item, I don't need a giant analytics dashboard to tell me something is wrong. I can see the pattern. Fix the par. Move on.

And Then Pumpkin Weekend Happens

Of course, no par system can predict insanity. Every year we launch pumpkin and every year it's basically: good luck everybody. 😂 You can look at last year's numbers. You can prepare. You can increase pars. Then customers decide they want 900 pumpkin drinks and suddenly the plan means nothing. That's real operations.

So I added a little Fix button on the employee side of DeskPanther. If somebody submits the weekly order and realizes they forgot something, or the store suddenly needs more because pumpkin weekend went completely off the rails, they can fix the order and send the update back. That feature exists because something happened in an actual store. That's how I want this software built.

We're Not a Distribution Center

This is where I probably disagree with some inventory software companies. A lot of these systems are incredibly powerful. And if you're running a giant operation where theoretical usage, variance, waste, invoice integrations and detailed COGS analysis are critical, absolutely use them. But I think independent operators have been made to feel like that's what "real inventory management" is supposed to look like. I don't agree.

Your 15-person coffee shop does not automatically need barcode scanners. You don't necessarily need every pump of syrup connected to what somebody rang into the POS so software can theoretically calculate what's left in the back room. Think about what has to happen to make that perfect. Every recipe has to be entered correctly. Every modifier has to be mapped correctly. Every employee has to ring every drink correctly. Every waste event has to be recorded correctly. Every recipe change has to be updated. Now somebody accidentally rings the wrong drink and your beautiful theoretical inventory isn't quite so theoretical anymore.

And before you've counted a single bottle, you've spent hours building the system that's supposed to save you time. That's where you lose me.

Less Is More

I've operated stores doing $10,000 to $15,000 in sales in a day, and I still come back to this. Less is more. I need accurate counts. I need good pars. I need to know what every store needs. I need that information organized and readable quickly because my brain is already processing a million other things when I'm placing orders. What I don't need is my employee worrying that they somehow messed up an inventory algorithm because they accidentally rang in the wrong drink.

Their job is incredibly simple: look at the shelf, count what's there, tell me the number. DeskPanther does the math. I review the order. My warehouse gets what each store needs. We move on.

Complexity isn't automatically sophistication.

Could I build something more complicated? Absolutely. But sometimes sophistication is taking something that used to require an hour, multiple spreadsheets, double-checking, guessing and two deliveries a week... and turning it into: count it, order it, done.

Prove me wrong. 🎤