AX & DX for Food Service
We run a café ourselves. This is what we built for it.
Preferred Inc. runs Slow Rush Coffee, a specialty coffee roaster in Kamakura. Shifts, ordering, payroll and daily reports are handled there by software we wrote — which means everything on this page has been tested against a real shop, real staff and a real month-end close, not a slide.
Where the time goes
The heavy part of running a shop is rarely the cooking. It is the paperwork around it — and it lands on whoever happens to be the most experienced person that day.
Building the shift roster takes a whole sitting
Requests arrive by LINE and paper, then someone reconciles them by hand in a spreadsheet.
How we solved it in our own shop
Requests come in through one form; a script drafts the roster from them.
Payroll is checked by eye, so mistakes slip through
Hourly rates, break rules and minimum wage all have to be checked per person, per day.
How we solved it in our own shop
The sheet is recalculated independently and differences are flagged.
Ordering depends on the manager's gut
If the person who knows is off that day, the order is either late or too big.
How we solved it in our own shop
Yesterday's closing counts drive an alert when stock drops below the reorder point.
Daily reports pile up but nobody reads them
Google Forms collect answers into a sheet that no one opens after the fact.
How we solved it in our own shop
Reports feed the numbers that the next morning's alerts and the monthly close actually use.
What actually runs
Everything below is in production at Slow Rush Coffee in Kamakura. We only list what runs every day — not prototypes.
Mobile order
Customers order from their phone at order.slowrush.jp. Built in-house on Cloudflare Workers.
order.slowrush.jp
Clock-in from Slack
Staff clock in and out with a button in Slack — no separate app, no paper timecard.
Buttons, not commands
One form for reports, shifts and orders
Replaced two Google Forms and an ordering spreadsheet with a single entry point.
13 questions, down from 18
Daily, weekly and monthly runs
Sales reports, ordering alerts, attendance checks and payroll verification run on schedule — not on someone's laptop.
GitHub Actions
Why we run a shop at all
A tool that looks good in a demo often falls apart on a Saturday lunch rush, when the person using it has both hands full. We find that out because we are the ones standing there.
So when we propose something for your shop, it has already survived our own. That is the only real difference between us and a vendor who has only ever seen a restaurant from the customer side.
How we start
We do not start by replacing your POS. We start with whichever task is eating the most hours, and make that one thing lighter.
01
Find where the hours go
A short hearing about who does what, and when. Usually one or two tasks account for most of the load.
02
Fix one thing first
We put one workflow into shape and let the shop use it for a few weeks before touching anything else.
03
Widen only if it held
If it survived a busy weekend and staff kept using it, we extend to the next task. If not, we change it.
Tell us what takes the longest
The first conversation is free, and you do not need a defined requirement. One shop is enough to start.