Coffee & Cream — How the Whole Machine Runs

Internal system guide · v1 · July 2026

How Coffee & Cream runs, end to end.

A plain-language tour of every tool we built — what each one does for you, and how they all talk to each other. One store, one shared database, and a set of tools sitting on top. No code required to read this.

Live in daily use Beta working, still tightening Soon next up talks to which tools it connects with
01

The journey of one order

The simplest way to see the whole machine: follow one bag of coffee from a supplier's shelf all the way to a customer's door — and the money back to us. Each stop below is handled by one of our tools.

Price
Watch competitors, set the price
Forecast
Predict what will sell
Buy
Raise a purchase order
Receive
Book stock in, set cost
Store
Track & count inventory
Sell
Store, app & marketing
Support
Answer the customer
Pick & pack
Fulfilment on the floor
Ship
Bosta to the door
Get paid
Cashouts & reconcile
Learn
Profit, reports, repeat

Every stop reads from and writes back to the same two foundations — here's what they are.

02

The two foundations everything shares

You don't have eleven disconnected apps. You have two shared foundations, and every tool plugs into them. That's why numbers match across the whole system.

Shopify — our store

the front desk · ~4,000 SKUs

Where customers actually shop and where every order, product and customer record is born. It's the single source of truth for "what did we sell and to whom."

The database — our memory

Supabase · the shared brain

A copy of everything, organised so our tools can slice it fast, add cost & profit, and write decisions back. This is what makes reports instant instead of slow.

Shopify store Shared database Every tool below
03

The tools, station by station

Every tool we've built, grouped by where it sits in the journey. Each card links straight to it (login required) and shows which other tools it talks to.

04

Meet Adam — the operations co-pilot

Adam is the newest piece: an AI assistant that watches what's happening in the store and helps handle it. The key thing to trust: Adam never touches money or orders on his own — anything risky waits for a human's OK.

AI operations agent · Control Center

How Adam works

Think of Adam as a very fast junior operations teammate. He reads every new event, figures out what's going on, and drafts what should happen next — but he stops and asks before doing anything that affects a customer's order or money.

1 · Watches
New orders, payment flags, customer messages and agent requests all land in the Control Center.
2 · Understands
Pulls the full picture from the database — the order, the customer, their history.
3 · Proposes
Drafts the action: cancel this order, mark this one paid, or reply to the customer.
4 · Gate safety
Risky actions stop here and wait for a human to approve. This is the guardrail.
5 · Acts
Once you approve, Adam carries it out in Shopify and the database — cleanly.
6 · Records
Every step is logged, so you can always see what Adam did and why.

The gate is the whole point. Adam can read, think and draft freely — but cancelling an order or marking it paid always passes through a human approval step first. Nothing money-related happens without you.

Live today: watching, understanding & drafting Coming next: approval-gated cancel & mark-paid Coming next: secure agent hand-offs
05

Who sees what

Access is by role, so people only see the tools they need. If someone hits a page they're not allowed to open, they get a friendly "no access" screen — never a broken error.

Admins / Management

Everything — finance, profit, the exec overview band, and all tools.

Warehouse team

Fulfilment, stocktake and receiving. No finance or customer data.

Procurement

Purchase orders, vendors, restock and pricing. Costs, not full P&L.

Changing access

Managed centrally; changes take a few minutes to apply everywhere.

Links below open the real tools and require login. If any path has moved since this guide was written, tell me and I'll update it — everything under merkatech.net is our internal system.