What a custom agent looks like inside an independent restaurant or small group — the ten roles in your language, and what each plugs into in an operation running Toast, Square or Lightspeed alongside scheduling and inventory.
last reviewed
A restaurant's margin is decided by two numbers that move daily — food cost and labor cost — and by a third that is invisible until it is too late, which is what a supplier quietly charged this week versus last. Operators know this. What they do not have is time, because the same person running the floor is also writing the schedule, checking invoices, answering messages and posting to social media at eleven at night.
The honest version of "does it integrate with my software." These are the systems this industry actually runs on, and what each one means for a build.
The system of record for sales, menu, labor and increasingly online ordering, all with accessible interfaces that make them a natural anchor.
Where shifts, availability, swaps and labor cost against sales are managed for an hourly workforce.
Purpose-built for reading supplier invoices into food cost and recipe costing, which is exactly the reconciliation problem most operators cannot staff.
Broadline and specialty distributors with order guides and prices that move weekly, mostly communicated by email and portal.
DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, each with its own dashboard, its own fees and its own reconciliation problem.
OpenTable, Resy or built-in tools holding guest history and no-show patterns.
Google, Yelp and social platforms, where response speed and consistency matter and nobody has time.
Each of these is a real build, not a feature of a product you already pay for. Follow one through to see how it works in general.
Nothing you are owed gets dropped.
Whatever arrives, in whatever format, becomes a clean record.
Writes the recurring document from your own past work.
Knows what expires, renews or comes due — and says so first.
Answers from your own records, not from the internet.
The conversation becomes the record, without anyone typing it up.
Assembles the recurring report from systems that do not talk.
Matches two sets of records and queues only the exceptions.
Two systems that do not talk, now talking.
Applies your rules, escalates only what needs judgment.
If that is a job in your business, the next step is half an hour on a call. Bring whatever you know about the volume — how many a month, who owns it now, which systems it touches. That is enough to scope it properly and quote it flat before anything starts.
Everything in this library is built to order rather than bought off a shelf — and whatever I build, I host and maintain. The rest of the library is here.