Running a shop means the numbers you need are buried: yesterday's till, the shelf, and the reorder list all live in different places, and by the time you have checked them the day has started without you.
Reggie, the AI store manager from Idle Work, does that walk-through for you before you open. Every morning it reads your register, your books and your bank, then sends you a few plain sentences in the chat apps you already use: what sold, what needs you, and what it has already got ready. Nothing changes in your store until you say yes.
What you actually get
The product is a morning brief. Reggie goes through yesterday by the numbers and sends you a few plain sentences before you open, so you start the day already knowing where it will bite.
Here is a sample morning at an imaginary corner store, so you can see the shape of it:
- Yesterday's net sales and number of transactions, as of before opening
- Register 2 ran 14 voids on the evening shift, over your line of 6
- Pull today: 7 items expired overnight, 5 of them in dairy
- Order before Thursday's delivery: 18 items will run out before the next truck
- Dead stock: 41 items that have not sold in 60 days, tying up shelf space
- 9 items fell under your price floor after last week's cost increase
- Your retail license renews in about 50 days
The counts and the shifts and the dates are examples from the sample on the page, not a template. Your brief will show your own stock, your own till and your own dates, because Reggie reads the register you already run.
Waiting costs you twice
Most of what the brief flags gets more expensive the longer it sits.
Expired stock is the clearest one. The register does not track dates, so spoilage gets discovered by a customer, or during a stock count weeks late. Reggie keeps the dates your register does not and tells you each morning what to pull, before the doors open.
Running out works the same way. An item that sells well does not feel like a problem until the shelf is empty, and then the sale you already made is the one you cannot fill. Reggie reorders to your delivery days, so the order goes in before the shelf is empty.
Dead stock is slower. Items that have not sold in two months sit on the shelf doing nothing, and every week they stay there they take up space a moving item could use. The brief counts what is sitting and how long.
And the till. Fourteen voids on one evening shift might be a training gap, a scanning problem or something worse. You will never know from the day's end report. You need it flagged the morning after, while the shift can still remember.
You stay in control
The worry with handing work to software is that it will do something you did not ask for. Reggie is built the other way. It starts narrow and grows only as far as you allow.
- Watch: it reads the register, books and bank, and tells you what it sees. It changes nothing.
- Suggest: it tells you what it would do and why, with the numbers, and leaves the call to you.
- Act with your OK: it prepares the change and waits. Nothing happens until you say yes.
- Act within your limits: inside limits you set, it gets on with the job and tells you what it did.
You raise each level yourself, one at a time. Reggie can suggest it is ready. It can never raise its own level.
On top of that sit hard limits that never move: Reggie will never ring a sale, void or refund one, open the cash drawer, move money, text a customer who did not opt in, tell a customer it is a person, or change a price without your OK. At every level, whatever else you turn on, price changes always need your approval.
It connects through the provider's own sign-in screens, one system at a time, and nothing is connected until you connect it. You can revoke any connection and the agent loses that access immediately.
If you would rather do it by hand
The brief is one message a day, but every part of it is a job you can do yourself. If you are not ready for an agent, this is the checklist Reggie works from:
- Pull the expired stock before opening. Walk the dairy, the cooler and anything with a printed date. Anything expired goes in the bin, not back on the shelf.
- Check the shelf against your next delivery. Anything that will run out before the truck arrives goes on the order today.
- Ask what has not sold in 60 days. Pull the sales report, sort by last sale date, and walk the bottom of the list. Those items are your markdown candidates.
- Read the voids and refunds by shift. Anything above what a normal day looks like deserves a question, not a shrug.
- Check which items sell below your price floor after the last cost increase. If your costs moved and your prices did not, some items are selling for less than they cost you.
None of that needs software. It needs fifteen minutes a morning and the discipline to do it every day. Reggie does it because it never forgets, never gets rushed, and never calls in sick.
Getting started
Reggie is $50 a month, setup included. A 14 day trial, then $50 a month from day 15, and cancel before day 15 if it is not for you. It connects to the register you already run: one small program run once on each register, which reads and never rings a sale.
Book an assessment and Idle Work comes back with what they would automate first, and what they would leave alone.