Office Supplies Request & Replenish

The problem this kills

It's always the same. Someone messages "we're out of toner again" in the team channel. Two days later, three different people have asked for the same printer cartridge - and nobody knows whether anyone actually ordered it. The kitchen runs out of coffee. The first-aid box is empty. And the office manager finds out by being cornered in the hallway, places a rushed order at full price, and then does it all again next week.

There's no list. There's no batching. There's no budget check until the card statement arrives. Requests are scattered across chat, sticky notes, and "hey, can you grab..." conversations, so the same item gets ordered twice, or not at all, and reordering happens in a panic instead of on a cadence.

This tool replaces the chaos with one simple flow: staff request supplies from a known catalog, the app consolidates everyone's requests into a single clean order, and the office manager approves the whole thing - quantities and budget - in one sitting.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Shows staff a catalog of stocked supplies (item, supplier, unit cost) so they request real things, not free-text guesses.
• Lets any staff member submit a request for one or more items with quantities and an optional note.
• Batches duplicate requests - if five people ask for the same coffee pods, that becomes one order line with the totals rolled up, not five separate orders.
• Applies an optional per-department budget cap and flags when a consolidated order would go over.
• Gives the office manager a review-and-approve screen: see the batched order, adjust quantities, check the budget, and approve in one click.
• Generates a reorder list from the approved order and exports it as CSV in the columns your supplier or punchout system expects.
• Keeps a request history and a complete audit trail of who requested what and who approved it.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how supply requests reach you today, what's actually in your catalog and how items are named and coded, who your staff and departments are, whether you run budget caps, how often you reorder, and your messy edge cases (one-off requests, urgent items, things not in the catalog). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to how your office actually restocks, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model.
• The full build: database, login, the catalog, the staff request form, the consolidation engine, the budget check, the office manager's approval screen, and the reorder export.
• The hard human approval gate - nothing becomes a reorder until the office manager approves it.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to a supplier system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a facilities team actually needs:

• Login so only your team can see or submit anything.
• Row-level security so people only see their own organization's catalog, requests, and orders.
• A complete audit trail - every request, edit, approval, and export is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the app drafts the consolidated order, but the office manager must review and approve before any reorder list exists.
• Duplicate guards - the same person can't double-submit the same open item, and duplicate requests fold into one order line instead of becoming repeat purchases.

Who it's for

Office managers, facilities admins, and executive assistants who are tired of being the human spreadsheet for "what do we need to order this week." If your supply restocking lives in chat messages and your own memory, this gives you a real, auditable request-and-approve tool without hiring a developer or buying a procurement platform. You don't need to write code. You need your catalog, your staff list, and an afternoon.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.