Log Weather and Temperature for Sales Reports

Hello all,

Did this happened to you? In my coffee/bakery shop, sales are tremendously affected by weather, for example I sell more coffee on cold days, more orange juice on hot days, more croissant and pastries on a rainy day, etc. Many times running out of croissants because of a high demand on rainy day.

I talking about tracking temperature of every day and the weather forecast (sunny/rain/storm/etc. based on city location obtaining that info from a weather server) and link it to Work Period or to each ticket, I guess using entities.

Is it possible? and do you know what resource I can Investigate to make it work?

Thanks in advance!

Yes it’s possible. You can get idea of how if you search the tutorials section and look up weather. We have a tutorial for setting up a tile but you could apply the principle to other stuff.

Have a look at the weather nac screen tile, probably covers a way to get the data.
As for storing it… that is a more interesting part.

There a a lot of different ways that you could log this information:

  • Tasks
  • Ticket Tag
  • Order Tag
  • Text file
  • Entity State Log

I would suggest using Tasks. They are naturally built for logging things, and you can store a lot of information in a Task.

First, you need to choose a Weather Provider, learn their API, register with them (API Key) and use Script Automation to pull weather information from their site. This usually comes in the form of XML or often better, JSON.

You would use something like that ^ to log weather information to a Task, and when you you close a Ticket, maybe do something like Tag the Ticket with the Task ID so you have a relation between the Weather Task and the Ticket.

That is 1 idea anyway, and probably the approach I would start with to see how well it works for Reporting purposes.

1 Like