Coffee Commune
The Cafe Daily Report
Filed 2026-08-17
Before: A cafe could not afford to collect, compare and explain this much information every afternoon before AI.
Old way: Stock and staffing calls leaned on experience, scattered reports and informed guesses.
Now: Fifteen minutes after close, the manager gets the evidence and Phil Di Bella's coaching logic in Teams, ready for tomorrow's decisions.
“Everything I want, Ed, is back-end efficiency so they can spend more time front-end — heart to heart.”
Phillip Di Bella, Founder, Coffee CommuneA cafe already has the raw material for better decisions. The point-of-sale system knows what sold and when. The rostering system knows who worked and what the labour cost. Weather and school holidays help explain why one Tuesday may not behave like the four before it. The hard part was pulling those signals together quickly enough to matter.
The Cafe Daily Report does that shortly after close and posts the result into the team's normal Teams chat. It compares the day with comparable trading days, shows category and hourly movement, puts labour beside sales, and calls out the context that can distort a simple comparison. The manager can adjust tomorrow's stock, staffing and service plan while the day is still fresh.
Then it adds the layer that turns a report into coaching. The suggestions draw on Phil Di Bella's decades of cafe and hospitality experience and the lessons he teaches cafe owners. The manager does not just see that a number moved. They get an experienced prompt for what to check and decide next.
That is the game-changing bit. Decisions that used to rely on an informed guess now arrive with the evidence and the coaching logic attached.