How Golden Crust Bakery got 4 hours back every week

A small neighborhood bakery was losing half a workday to copy-paste. One Python script fixed it in an afternoon.

The problem

Golden Crust Bakery (a fictional client) takes online orders through their website, which arrive as confirmation emails and a daily CSV export. Every morning, the owner opened each email, copied the customer name, items, and quantities into a spreadsheet by hand, then retyped the totals for the baking schedule.

It took about 4 hours a week. Worse, manual copying caused mistakes: wrong quantities, missed custom notes (like "no nuts"), and the occasional duplicated order.

The solution

A single Python script that runs every morning. It reads the order CSV export, cleans up the data, and writes a tidy daily baking summary. The owner now opens one file instead of forty emails.

Before and after

The script

The actual script is short on purpose. It uses only Python's built-in libraries, so there is nothing to install and nothing that can break on update day.

# daily_orders.py, reads orders.csv, writes baking_summary.csv
import csv
from collections import defaultdict

FIXES = {"jonh": "John", "sourdogh": "Sourdough",
         "cookiess": "cookies", "choc": "Chocolate"}

def clean(text):
    text = text.strip()
    for wrong, right in FIXES.items():
        text = text.replace(wrong, right).replace(wrong.title(), right)
    return text

orders = defaultdict(lambda: {"qty": 0, "notes": ""})
with open("orders.csv") as f:
    for row in csv.DictReader(f):
        key = (clean(row["customer"]), clean(row["item"]))
        orders[key]["qty"] += int(row["qty"])
        if row["notes"].strip():
            orders[key]["notes"] = clean(row["notes"])

with open("baking_summary.csv", "w", newline="") as f:
    w = csv.writer(f)
    w.writerow(["Customer", "Item", "Qty", "Notes"])
    for (customer, item), d in sorted(orders.items()):
        w.writerow([customer, item, d["qty"], d["notes"]])

print(f"Done: {len(orders)} unique orders summarized.")

The result

The bakery's morning routine went from an hour of careful copy-paste to opening one file. Order errors dropped to zero in the first month, because the script merges duplicates and standardizes names instead of relying on tired eyes at 6 AM.

Total build time: one afternoon. Total maintenance since: none.