Par-Level Supply Tracker: Count on Your Phone, Reorder Exactly to Par

The problem this kills

You keep the building stocked — paper towels, hand soap, coffee, bandages, toner — and the way you decide what to reorder is somebody walking the storeroom with a clipboard and a gut feeling. Half the time you over-order and the shelf is buried; the other half you run out of the one thing everyone notices, on a Friday, right before a big day. The "system" is a spreadsheet that only one person understands, counts that never get written down, and orders sized by vibes instead of by how much you actually keep on hand.

The fix isn't a warehouse inventory platform with barcodes and a six-month rollout. It's a small tool that lets whoever is standing in the supply closet count what's there on their phone, and then does the one piece of math everyone gets wrong: how many packs to order to get back to par. You set the par levels once; the tool handles the rest. You don't need to be a developer to build it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool. You import your existing par list — each item with its par level (how many you want on hand), its pack size (how it's sold), its supplier, and its storage location. Staff open the tool on a phone, pick a location, and count what's on the shelf. For each item the tool computes reorder = par − on-hand, then rounds that up to the pack size so you only ever order whole packs. If a count looks wildly off versus last time — half what it was, or triple — the tool flags it for a recount instead of trusting it. The proposed reorder list lands in front of a supervisor, who reviews count-versus-par line by line and approves before it becomes an order. Approved orders export as a CSV grouped by supplier, and every count is kept as history so you can see how fast each thing really moves.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — what your par spreadsheet columns are named, how you name items and locations, whether par levels differ per location, how things are packed and ordered (each, case, box of 12), who is allowed to approve an order, and the messy edge cases (shared supplies, seasonal spikes, items counted in different units) — and then it tailors the data model, the reorder math, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reads a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the import, the phone count screen, the reorder math with pack-size rounding, the implausible-count flag, the supervisor approval gate, and the CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no connection to your purchasing system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is the thing that turns into real purchase orders, so it ships with the controls a facilities team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's data, a complete audit trail of every count and every approval (who, what, when), and a hard human-approval gate so no reorder list becomes an order until the supervisor signs off. Counts that look implausible are flagged for a recount instead of quietly driving a wrong order. And a duplicate guard keyed on item + location + count date means the same shelf can't be counted twice in one session and double the order.

Who it's for

Facilities and janitorial supervisors, office managers, and site admins who own the supply closet and are tired of either drowning in stock or running out at the worst moment. If you can tell someone what "fully stocked" looks like for each item, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll be counting a real shelf into a clean reorder list the same afternoon.