Who/where
The LOCAL Place is a café and ice cream parlor on the square in Centerville, Tennessee. The LOCAL Drive-Thru sits three and a half miles down the road — a separate building, same family, same small team. The two shops share vendors and a crew, so we built one custom inventory app that runs both. It's the same family behind LocalWebRank — which means we live with every rough edge until it's smooth.
The problem
Ordering ran on laminated sheets that got remade constantly. Items slipped through — counted at one shop, forgotten at the other. The two buildings couldn't see each other's stock, so the same case got ordered twice while the other location sat on an overstock. Every order was written up by hand, from memory, under time pressure.
What we built
One app that tracks both locations' stock in one place. Staff sign in, pick their building — Café or Drive-Thru — and count shelves on a tablet. Every count saves the moment it's typed; there's no save button to forget. Vendor tabs let someone rip through a single supplier's items in one pass.
The order list builds itself. Count an item below its reorder point and it's added automatically; recount it at or above and it drops off — nobody writes an order by hand. Flagged items group by vendor, each line carrying that vendor's own item number so you order the exact product. Deliveries get checked off as they're unpacked, by any staff member. Managers set pars and reorder points themselves — no developer needed.
Key decisions
- The count IS the order. Counting flags what's low; the order list is a byproduct, not a second chore.
- Each employee sees only their location — the screen matches the building they're standing in.
- The shop sets its own rules. Pars, reorder points, units, vendors, and per-vendor item numbers are all manager-editable, so the app bends to the business without a code change.
Real use, not a demo
It's been running every week for about a month, across roughly 423 stocked items seeded at launch. The crew has built several real vendor order lists on it — and every time someone said "it'd be easier if it did this," we changed it. That feedback loop is why it fits how the team actually works instead of how a developer guessed they might.
"We've run it every week for about a month now. The crew builds their order lists right on the tablet instead of a laminated sheet, and every time one of them said 'it'd be easier if it did this,' we changed it — so now it actually fits how they work. Fewer missed items, and the two shops finally stopped double-ordering on each other." — Olin West, The LOCAL Place & The LOCAL Drive-Thru
The takeaway
Off-the-shelf inventory software makes you count the way it wants and order the way it wants. This does the opposite: the crew counts, the order writes itself, and the shop tunes it. We build custom apps like this for small businesses — the features you actually need, none of the bloat.