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A week in a pantry

What using Laevo actually looks like

Not a feature list. An ordinary week at a pantry serving a couple of hundred households a month, from the Monday somebody sets it up to the report at the end of the month.

A community hall set up before a distribution: a long trestle table with packed paper bags, stacks of flat bags and crates of tins, empty chairs along the wall.
Monday

Somebody types in what is on the shelf

Item, how you count it, and roughly how much you like to keep. Cans, bags, loaves, pounds — whatever you actually say out loud. This takes about ten minutes for a normal pantry and it is the thing that makes everything afterward easier.

Worth knowingYou are not required to do this. A pantry can run the window without the shelf and add it later. But every waste warning and every low-stock warning comes from here, so it is worth the ten minutes.
Tuesday

The food bank delivery arrives

One screen: what came, how much, and roughly when it goes off. Pick the source from a list you build as you go. Two minutes for a pallet.

Worth knowingLaevo does not require a date on anything. If you do not know, leave it blank — the warning simply will not fire for that lot, which is honest, rather than inventing a date to fill a field.
Thursday

The shelf tells you what needs moving

Open the shelf and the top of the screen says what is closest to its date and what has fallen below the level you set. Not a report you have to remember to run — the screen you already had open.

Worth knowingThe warnings are in plain words: "14 loaves of bread go off in three days" rather than a red dot on a row. Then you decide what to do about it, because that decision is yours.
Saturday morning

The window

Type three letters of a name, or a phone number, or the short card code the household carries. The record comes up with the household size and what they cannot eat. One big button records the visit.

Worth knowingIf it is a new household, adding them takes one screen and only a name is required. If the queue is long you can serve everybody first and record afterwards — nothing in Laevo stands between a person and a bag of groceries.
Saturday, still

Laevo notices a possible duplicate

If a new household looks like one you already have — same phone, same date of birth, a surname spelled slightly differently, a first name that is a nickname of the other — Laevo puts the two side by side and asks you.

Worth knowingIt never merges anything on its own, and it will tell you exactly why it thinks they might be the same person, in words: "same phone number, first name is a nickname of the other." You decide. It is a lookup table and some careful string comparison, not a model guessing.
Sunday

The rota fills itself in

Volunteers claim shifts from a public link you can put in a newsletter or a group chat. No account needed on their end. Everyone signed up gets a reminder two days before.

Worth knowingThe coordinator's job stops being transcribing everyone's availability out of text messages and becomes filling the gaps that are still open — which is a much smaller job.
End of the month

The report is already drafted

Households, individuals, first-time visits, age bands, broken out for the period you choose. Built from the visits you already recorded during the month.

Worth knowingClick any number and Laevo shows you the visits that produced it, so you can check it rather than trusting it. Then a person reads it, signs it, and files it — because a person is accountable for it, and no software should pretend otherwise.

What Laevo does not do

Being clear about this is more useful to you than another paragraph about what it does.

  • It does not work offline. You need a connection to save a visit. Keep the paper.
  • It does not file your reports for you. It drafts the numbers and shows its working. A person checks and submits.
  • It does not share records between agencies. If your community runs a shared client network, Oasis Insight does that and Laevo does not.
  • It does not do accounting or donor fundraising. It tracks gifts of food, not gifts of money.
  • It does not decide who is eligible. There are no built-in rules and no automatic visit limits. Those are yours.

Questions

How long does setting up take?

About an hour if you type your shelf in by hand, or an afternoon if you are importing records from another system. You do not have to finish setup before you start using it — a pantry can check people in on its first day with nothing in the shelf at all.

Do we need internet at the pantry?

Yes, for now. Laevo needs a connection to save a visit, and we would rather say that plainly than promise an offline mode we have not built. This is why the paper fallback exists and why it is a designed-in part of the product rather than an embarrassment.

Can two people use it at the same time?

Yes, on as many devices as you like, with no extra cost. Two volunteers checking people in at two windows both see the same records immediately.

Try all of this in the demoMoving records over