Operations Ordering App

[OpeThereItIs]

I work for a retail small business and would like to use the combination of google sheets and glide to make an app for employees to use during our weekly re-order. I’m pretty good at understanding stuff but really don’t know where to begin making this.

I’ve poked at the editor a bit, linked a test sheet to my app, and am struggling to figure out how to set this up from that point. I imagine the sheet being organized something like the image attached, with each column being a new screen. E.g. Tap Snacks in Department, new screen has Chips, Cookies, & Crackers. Tap Chips, new screen has Lays, etc. Tap Lays and then there’s all flavors listed with the ability to enter how many need to be ordered.

After the employee is done ordering I’d either like to update the “Qty” column with the counts, or have it email a .csv that I could import into sheets. I did see something about limited updates when using the free plan, so whichever way helps keep me in the free area for now is preferred. If there’s already tutorials on how to do this I’m happy to follow along to those.

[ThinhDinh]

@OpeThereItIs

I imagine the sheet being organized something like the image attached, with each column being a new screen. E.g. Tap Snacks in Department, new screen has Chips, Cookies, & Crackers. Tap Chips, new screen has Lays, etc. Tap Lays and then there’s all flavors listed with the ability to enter how many need to be ordered.

It’s not that it can’t be done with this structure, but a cleaner solution would look like this to me.

Department table: Department name, rowID
Category table: Department’s rowID, Category name, RowID
Brand table: Category’s rowID, Brand name, RowID
Item table: Brand’s rowID, Item name, Quantity

Then, create relations from upstream to downstream using the rowIDs, display them using collections.

@OpeThereItIs

After the employee is done ordering I’d either like to update the “Qty” column with the counts, or have it email a .csv that I could import into sheets.

What exact number do you expect here? Wouldn’t the quantity already be edited when the user “enter how many needs to be ordered”?

[OpeThereItIs]

I don’t know how the data submission works, and I’m still very new to this platform; I’m still trying to figure all this out. I have dabbled with a miniscule amount of coding, and I’m pretty solid in excel/sheets, but I’m very unfamiliar with how to use Glide still. I’ve only been poking around the editor trying to find a way to accomplish this goal.

I picture using it somewhat sort of like a eComm site or even amazon, where all items that we need to order have their quantities updated in the app (or even added to a cart), the employee hits submit, and then I get a file that can be used to guide the person who is entering the orders on the wholesalers’ websites. If it can update live then that’s fine as well. I don’t much care if it can update a sheet on its own or if I have to import a .csv so long as I can continue using this on the free plan and not get pushed into a corner where I either pay or I can’t use the app. Whichever is most efficient for Glide’s free plan. We would be using this at just my location to start off, and it should only be once a week we’d need it. I’m just trying to migrate our ordering off hand-written legal pads into something a bit more formal and modern. Also looking to this to avoid anyone from missing something that may be sold out and is escaping their memory as they order.

Regarding your suggested structure, are you saying it’d be cleaner to have each “table” as you said be its own sheet within the master file?

[ThinhDinh]

@OpeThereItIs

I picture using it somewhat sort of like a eComm site or even amazon, where all items that we need to order have their quantities updated in the app (or even added to a cart), the employee hits submit, and then I get a file that can be used to guide the person who is entering the orders on the wholesalers’ websites.

I think you can dabble around with the concept of a cart.

Shopping Cart Concept for demonstration purposes

First of all, I want to say that I’m personally not a big fan of ecommerce type apps with Glide. There’s a lot of complexity to them and everybody has a different view for how they should work. Because of that, I generally don’t give advice on how to do things with them. Glide has said that ecommerce is not the direction they are focused on and I think Glide is short on some logic and functionality to properly handle the purchase and inventory side of things. With that said, I still made an …

This one was built on Classic Apps, but would still enable you to copy and have a look on how you can enable a flow like that.

I don’t think you need a file to enter the orders on the wholesalers’ website. You can just show the finalized order in your app to the person.

[OpeThereItIs]

I will take a look. The file I wish this to create isn’t for interfacing directly with the wholesalers’ sites. It’s simply to move our ordering from writing it down on legal pads and then entering the orders into the sites from there over to a digital format that’s easy and clean to read for the person who has to enter the orders on the respective websites. On the back end I also plan on having the inventory broken out by which site the items come from, so on the front end the user doesn’t need to worry about that but then the order placer can see it broken out easily

[ThinhDinh]

@OpeThereItIs

The file I wish this to create isn’t for interfacing directly with the wholesalers’ sites.

Yeah I get this, I mean I don’t think you need users to download anything to use the output on the wholesalers’ sites. You can just show them the list of items that are in each order, using Glide.