What you'll need
Three or four accounts depending on your stack.
n8n
Free self-hosted, or n8n Cloud starting $20/mo
OpenAI API key
Pay-as-you-go, ~$0.0005 per anomaly
POS + accounting + inventory APIs
Square, Toast, Shopify, QuickBooks, Xero — pick what you use
Slack workspace
For the alerts
The math
What this is worth, conservatively
Time to detect a sustained sales drop manually (weekly report)
5-7 days
Time with this workflow
~4 hours
3-store restaurant, $2K/day per store, 1 outage/quarter caught early
~$6,000 recovered/year
Plus: shrinkage and fraud caught faster
industry data: NRF puts retail shrinkage at 1.6% of sales
Cost to run this template forever
~$6/year
Recovery estimates assume early detection prevents at least 50% of a multi-day outage cost. NRF National Retail Security Survey 2023 for shrinkage rate.