It happened again today. We were at three different grocery stores, and still ma

Question

It happened again today. We were at three different grocery stores, and still managed to not buy some of the stuff that we need. I'm getting tired of coming home just to realize I need to go back out again, so I need to automate the tracking of what we consume as a family as much as possible.

I'm looking for software that will run on Windows 7 or higher, which does the following things:

Tracks what I buy, based on me telling it what I've bought
Knows how much of each thing that we typically use, based on how often I tell it that I've purchased something
Gives me a list of stuff that I'm probably out of when it's time to go to the grocery store, and gives me a way to look at its understanding of what we probably have in stock at any point in time.

Basically, a system that learns our consumption over time based on what we buy, and how often we buy it.

Nice to have:

Easy to use mobile app (iOS/Android) which lets me log when I buy something and what I've bought. The easier the better, if it can understand UPC / QR codes, that would be great.
Easy generation of a shopping list that I can either print, email, or send to my mobile device
Price tracking (e.g. you use approximately $1.23 worth of garbage bags per week)

I wouldn't be opposed to something that tied into some kind of web service, but I'm really hoping for a (mostly) stand-alone desktop / phone app. By this, I mean I'd like to interact with the software exclusively on my desktop or mobile device, not through a web interface bolted on to whatever shares the information between my devices.

Does something like this exist? Can you help me not buy a tub of butter three weeks in a row resulting in a surplus that took us months to consume?

Explanation / Answer

After laughing seriously, I got to realize your question is quite reasonable! I don't really know if there is an app like this, however you can set up Excel to do this for you or even use a BI feature, such as Tableau Public which is absolutely free. You can then set up various categories but you'll need to invest a while to enter your shopping info for a month.

Tableau allows forecasting, so you will basically have the option to figure out (based on let's say your groceries for 3 months) how much of each product you are going to need. I don't really know however how to solve the problem with having a software suggest what you may need to buy.

But your question is indeed an awesome business idea...

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