khiet-order-system - brandon lin

This is a project to help my friend run her small bakery. One time while hanging out with our friend group, I noticed that for each order, she had to type it into a Google Sheet on her phone, and it seemed really tiring. Google Sheets on mobile is not exactly ideal for data entry, so I decided to help her.

I wanted to save her from having to input everything into the sheet by hand, so I built a website that parses the orders and inputs them into the sheet for her.

How it works

Input — staff paste the customer’s order (a standard DM template: name, phone, items + toppings + quantity, address, delivery time, discount, payment method) into a Flask web form.
Parse & clean — the app parses the template, cleans the fields, and categorizes each item.
Price — totals are calculated automatically, including discounts and freebies.
Record — the structured order is written straight into the Google Sheet she already used (via gspread), so her existing workflow — and everything downstream of it — didn’t have to change.
Schedule — delivery times are captured so orders can be planned a day ahead.

Did it work?

The thing is, it’s great on paper, but in practice it’s not that different from a Google Form. I believe that’s a flaw of this project, and it ended up not being used at all. However, I had a lot of fun doing this project, since it’s the first time I built a pipeline to input data.

My lesson

What I learned through this project is not just about the tech — it’s that the way to approach problems is to talk with the customer more. What my friend really wanted was those beautifully customized sheets, and that’s not doable by code at all. I think that’s why we couldn’t agree much on the output.

I really had fun with this project in the end, but I also learned some important things.