Things have been heating up over here at RoastLog.  Working with customers is always one of the best parts of our jobs, and we’ve been cranking out some great new features based on user feedback.  Today, I wanted to highlight one of those.

You know you roast coffee, and you have a sense of how much coffee you’re roasting…but just how long is that seven bags going to last you?  Now, users of our inventory system can leave that math to RoastLog.

Inventory burn down rates, with weekly usage and a projected date for when you'll run out.

Inventory burn down rates, with weekly usage and a projected date for when you’ll run out.

The two columns highlighted relate to the amount of coffee your’re burning down and consist of:

  1. The amount of coffee roasted in the last week (weekly burn)
  2. The day at which you’ll run out of that coffee based on your weekly usage

In the first row, there’s also a “Total”…in our example, we roasted 358.0 lbs last week across all coffees (hey…we’re a new roastery just starting up…the order will eventually start rolling in! 🙂 ). What’s a bit more interesting is when you begin to look at the individual rows for the coffees you’re currently roasting.  As you roast, you should be telling RoastLog how much green coffee you’re roasting in each batch.  With that information, we can start to build trends and do some aggregation.  For our Santa Elena Estate coffee above, we roasted 24 lbs in the last week.  Given that we stay on this trajectory, our 2.6 bags will last until Jan 9th.

Getting coffee into your roastery is a big deal.  Getting coffee into your roastery when you’re running out is an even bigger deal.  With this enhancement, you can now get a snapshot of what’s going on with your business and what needs your attention.  It shouldn’t be a surprise when you get down to that last bag since you’ll have been warned long before.

Of course, this is all calculated dynamically, so throughout the day you can even watch as this changes.  Have a big order or get a big rush on a particular coffee?  The projected zero date will update every hour so you have near real-time insight into your roasting operation.

Like I said, there are a bunch of other things we’ve pushed out recently, and I hope to do a better job of talking about them here.  In the meantime, keep an eye on those zero dates!