Andrew Burke describes Bean Counter Technology as a side hustle, but it’s a side hustle that has already grabbed clients across the country and was showcased at a recent national trade show.

Halifax-based Bean Counter has developed a mobile app that helps the owners of coffee and vending machines manage the way these machines are stocked. It helps monitor the replenishing of the machines, control inventory and administer accounts.

Burke and his partner Doug Leblanc are working on it part-time (or as a side hustle, to use the modern parlance) but they’ve been gaining clients at an impressive clip. Already, the app is used to monitor 700 machines and has helped with more than 50,000 visits to them.

“Yes, it’s been a side hustle but we decided to really go for it,” said Burke in an interview this week. “The people who like it really like it, and we’ve shown there is a need for it.”

The story of Bean Counter began when Burke, a hired-gun developer, was doing some work with the Halifax-based mobile development company MindSea in the old Roy Building. The company had a really great coffee machine, and Burke got to know Leblanc, owner of Social Bean Gourmet Coffee Co., when he’d come to fill the machine.

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Leblanc explained the problems he had overseeing all his machines — keeping track of their locations, when each was filled, removing and replenishing the change. He asked Burke if he could come up with a digital tool to help with the problem. And thus Bean Counter was born.

Large companies that own hundreds of machines have the resources to produce their own automated system, said Burke, but he and Leblanc learned that small and mid-sized companies suffer the same problems as Social Bean. In a recent presentation at Democamp Halifax, Burke said that you can often see a notebook and pencil in the bottom tray of a vending machine, and that’s how these companies still keep their records.

“You’ve got dozens and dozens of machines all over the place and most of this stuff is done on paper,” he said. “So Doug knew some people in the industry and brought them in. (Bean Counter) proved useful and it was the validation we needed.”

Bean Counter modernizes the process. Anyone tending to the machine uses the app first to locate each machine on a digital map. Once they’re on location, they can track inventory in the machine, what they’ve added, and the money added to or taken from each machine. Back at head office, they have a real-time record of each person’s visits and up-to-date accounts for the entire company.

Earlier this month, Burke and Leblanc took the product to the Canadian Vendor Trade Show in Quebec City, where it had its own booth. Burke said this week it was too soon to determine the results because he still had to follow up on the leads he’d generated at the event.

Overall, he said, people like the product and he can foresee a day when it is used by a broad swath of the industry and has a staff to oversee the company.