You hired someone to watch the till, and they clock in before you do. The morning questions pile up the same way every day: what expired, what runs out before the next delivery, what has not sold in two months, which register ran strange voids last night. By the time you have answered two of them, the doors are open and the day has started without you.
Reggie, the AI store manager from Idle Work, works those questions before the doors open. Every morning it reads your register, your books and your bank, then sends you a short brief in plain sentences and drafts the fixes, from pull lists to reorder orders to mark-downs. You say yes or no to each one. Nothing moves a price or touches your till without your OK.
What you actually get each morning
Reggie sends its brief to the chat app you already use, before opening time. The Reggie page shows a sample screen from an example store, made up to show what the message looks like. It is an example, not a report on a real store. In the sample, the brief says:
- What yesterday did: net sales and the number of transactions.
- A register that ran more voids than usual, so you can look at the evening shift before tonight.
- Items that expired overnight, with the pull list ready.
- Items that will run out before the next delivery, with an order already drafted.
- Dead stock: the money sitting in items that have not sold, and a drafted mark-down waiting for your OK.
- Prices that slipped under the price floor after a cost increase, with a price preview ready.
- Dates that matter: the license renewal that is coming due, while there is still time to deal with it.
You reply to any line the way you would reply to a text. In the sample, the owner says "Yes, draft the markdown" and Reggie drafts it, keeping every item above the 25 percent price floor set in the example, then holds it until you say OK. This is a sample screen. What your own brief contains depends on what your register shows.
Why waiting makes it worse
These are not big problems on day one. They are small ones that compound, and every one of them gets more expensive the longer it sits.
- Expired stock that nobody pulled eventually reaches a customer, and now you are handling a complaint instead of a pull list.
- Stock that was fine for a reorder last week runs out this week, so the sale goes to whoever did restock.
- Dead stock does not get better on the shelf. It stops earning and starts costing, one month at a time.
- A cost increase you did not pass on quietly applies to every sale until you catch it, which is exactly when a person is busy with customers.
- Void patterns and till discrepancies are easy to explain this week and hard to reconstruct a month later.
None of these needs a meeting. They each need somebody to look, once a day, at the right numbers. That is not a time problem you can solve with more effort. That is the work that has to be separated from the day entirely, done before the doors open, by something that never gets pulled onto the floor.
You stay in control
Reggie starts at the lowest level and moves up only when you move it. The four levels on the Reggie page explain how this works:
- Watch. It reads the register, the books and the 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 gets the change ready and waits. Nothing happens until you say yes.
- Act within your limits. Inside limits you set, it gets on with the job and reports what it did.
You raise each level yourself, one at a time, in the app. Reggie can suggest it is ready for the next one. It can never raise its own. That is the design behind the hard limits, which apply at every level: Reggie never rings a sale, never voids or refunds, never opens the cash drawer, never moves money, and never changes a price without your OK. The small program that connects it to your register reads data. It cannot ring, void, refund, or touch the till.
Connections work the same way. QuickBooks, your bank, your email, your social pages: you connect each one yourself, when you want Reggie to use it. Nothing is connected until you do it.
Do it by hand: a fifteen minute daily walk
You can get most of this value without any product. The work is the same every day, which is why it also suits an agent. If you want to see how it feels, spend fifteen minutes each morning on this:
- Compare yesterday's void, refund and discount counts by register and shift against your normal line. Anything odd, note it while it is fresh.
- Pull anything expiring on or near today's date, and anything expiring before the next delivery day. Keep the dates written down somewhere your register does not track.
- Check stock on the items that sell fastest against your next delivery. Order now for anything that will not make it.
- Walk one aisle and pick any item that has not sold recently. Mark it down or pull it. Do one section a day, not all of them at once.
- Look at anything you repriced or received a cost increase on, and confirm nothing sits under the price floor you set.
- Glance at the calendar for renewals and due dates. Sixty days out is when it is cheap to handle.
Do that for two weeks and you will know exactly where your mornings go. If keeping it up is the hard part, that is what a store manager is for. Reggie does that same walk every day without being asked, and hands you the findings with the fixes drafted.
Put it to work
The next step Idle Work offers is an assessment: you book it, describe what you actually do all day, and they come back with what they would automate first and what they would leave alone, in writing. If you want to judge Reggie before any of that, try it live on the Reggie page. It is $50 a month, with a 14 day trial where you are never charged if you cancel before day 15. Book an assessment when you are ready to talk specifics, or find your agent if a store is not what you run.