I Built a Restaurant Inventory & Kitchen Dispatch System with ChatGPT AI

A restaurant inventory and kitchen dispatch system built for a real problem: a restaurant group with five branches ordering from one central kitchen every night, where nobody could say how much stock was sitting in any branch at any given moment. It runs on Google Sheets, so there is no server and no per-branch licence.

What it does

Branches raise purchase requests with a required date, a priority — including emergency — the service they are for and the expected covers. The request shows what is actually available before it is submitted, and the admin approves or rejects it. The central kitchen then dispatches against approved requests, generating an invoice and an A4 printable document, and the stock moves out of one location and into another with a full ledger behind it.

Stock control that matches a kitchen

Items are held in whatever unit makes sense — grams, kilograms, millilitres, litres, gallons, pieces, packets, boxes, cartons, rolls — with conversions so a goods-received in litres and an issue in millilitres still reconcile. Stock counts open by location and sub-location (dry store, freezer) with a blind-count option and admin approval on the result. Adjustments carry a reason that a chef would recognise: spoilage, expired, over-production, staff meal — and a shift, so waste can be traced to morning, evening or night.

Highlights

• Recipes with component items, quantities, method notes and holding time, plus production runs that consume them
• Par levels with minimum and maximum per location, so reorder points are per branch rather than global
• Vendor 360 view — total purchases, price list, timeline — and vendor price lists with pack size, lead time and minimum order
• Batch and expiry tracking showing days remaining by location
• AI assistant answering questions like "what was dispatched today and what is it worth", using your own OpenAI key
• Four roles — admin, storekeeper, kitchen manager, branch manager — with a live permission matrix
• Multi-language interface, colour themes and dark mode

Who it is for

Restaurant groups, cloud kitchens and catering operations running a central kitchen feeding multiple outlets, where the food cost leaks between the store and the pass.