AI Restaurant Expense Tracker
WHY I BUILT IT
A long-time client of mine owns a couple restaurants and runs everything off his phone.
He won't touch a computer.
We handle a lot for him, but cost tracking has never been one of them. Labor, food costs, fixed expenses… all the stuff he should've been tracking years ago just wasn't happening.
This morning he called me and said someone gave him an Excel spreadsheet, and he couldn't even open it on his phone, but he wanted to start tracking everything.
I already knew how that was going to go.
He's never going to use Excel. Not now, not ever.
So I asked him straight up, “Do you want me to show you how to use that, or do you want me to build something that actually works for how you operate?”
He told me to just do my thing.
WHAT I BUILT
A simple, mobile-friendly expense tracking system tailored specifically to how he runs his business.
I took the spreadsheet, ran it through AI, stripped out everything unnecessary, and rebuilt it as a clean web-based tool.
No fluff. No extra features.
Just:
Daily numbers
Labor totals
Vendor bills
He logs in once a week, enters the numbers, and it calculates everything automatically.
We even removed things like detailed timesheets because he's not going to use them.
Everything is built around how he actually works, not how a system expects him to work.
WHAT HAPPENED
He uses it.
That's the whole win.
Could it have been done in Excel? Sure. But he wouldn't have used it.
And if it's not used, it's worthless.
This fits into his workflow, so it actually gets done.
WHAT DIDN'T WORK
Nothing really failed, but it's extremely specific.
This isn't a general tool. It's built for one person, one use case.
Not something meant to scale or be turned into a product.
CURRENT STATE
Live and in use.
Single-user system.
No plans to expand it.
Just a simple tool built in under 30 minutes that solved a real problem.