Kitchen production

Run a production unit day to day — accept outlet orders, work the make list, log batches, and dispatch finished goods to the warehouse.

The production unit (kitchen) sign-in gets its own console — separate from the procurement console and the outlet staff app. It’s built around one loop: demand arrives, the kitchen accepts it and makes it in batches, and the output either goes on the host outlet’s menu or travels to the warehouse. Kitchen users never see the procurement tabs, and procurement users never see these.

This page is about running the console. For what a production unit is and how to set one up — commissary or on-site outlet kitchen — see Production units.

Your account must be assigned to a production unit. If you sign in and see “No production unit assigned”, ask an admin to assign you to one under Settings → Users.

An owner or admin who is not tied to one unit picks which kitchen they are looking at with the kitchen switcher, in the sidebar’s Kitchen heading and in the top bar on every kitchen page. Until one is picked, the console asks you to Pick a kitchen rather than showing a tenant-wide mixture. Picking one rescopes the whole console: Today, orders, the make list, stock, recipes and the production-order badge in the rail.

New to the terms here (batch, requisition, GRN)? See the Glossary.

Finding your way

The kitchen sidebar has five groups:

• Home — Today, your start screen.
• Production — Production orders, Make list, Transfers.
• Inventory — Requisitions, GRN, Stock, Wastage. A stock take is started from a button on the Stock page rather than its own row.
• Library — Recipes.
• Admin — Menu status, the read-only view of your submitted menu items (see Menu and pricing), and Kitchen staff.

An owner reaches the same screens from a Kitchen group in the main console sidebar, where the labels are prefixed to tell them apart from the procurement ones: Kitchen transfers, Kitchen requisitions, Kitchen GRN, Kitchen stock.

Everything you see is scoped to your production unit — its stock, its recipes, its costs, and (for a unit that produces for an outlet) that outlet’s menu only. You never see another unit’s or another outlet’s numbers.

Note: on a phone the console drops to the slim kitchen app — a tab bar with Today, Reqs, GRN, Stock and Wastage, which is the receiving-and-counting half of the job. Recipes, the make list and menu status stay on a tablet or desktop.

Today — your home screen

Today greets you with the day at a glance: four tiles for New orders, Batches to run, Ready to transfer, and Below par — each tappable to jump straight to the right screen.

Below the tiles:

• Orders waiting on you — each new production order as a card, with its lines, who raised it, and its need-by time. Review opens the detail; Accept & queue batches accepts it and puts its batches on the plan in one go.
• Below par — kitchen ingredients running low, with a Raise requisition · below par shortcut.
• Quick actions — Receive, Log wastage, Recipes, Make list.

Production orders

Outlet demand arrives here as production orders. Their document numbers start with IND. On the raising side of the app they are abbreviated PDO.

The list has a search over the order number and the requesting outlet, and tabs — New, In progress, Done, All — that filter by status. Columns are the order number, who is requesting, its lines, when it was raised, its need-by date and its status.

1. Open Production orders and pick an order from the New tab. It opens in a drawer.
2. Review its lines, the requesting outlet, and the need-by date. If your kitchen is short of ingredients for it, the drawer says which ones and offers Raise requisition, which opens the requisition form with those lines already in it. It is a warning, not a block.
3. Tap Accept & queue batches. The order is accepted and a batch for each line is queued onto the make list for the required date.

Accepting is the head chef’s. A junior kitchen account can open the order and read it, but has no accept button.

Which kitchen an order goes to

A production order is routed to the production unit named on the recipe that makes the item. When every item in a request is made at one unit, that unit is chosen for you. When they are made at different units, a request fans out into one production order per kitchen.

Raising an order by hand, the kitchen is pre-selected the same way, and if the items disagree the field is left blank with a note saying so, for example “2 items are made at the central kitchen, 1 at the barista unit. Pick one kitchen, or raise two orders.” Choosing a different kitchen anyway is allowed, but you are asked first: Send to a different kitchen?

If an item’s recipe names no producing unit and your business has more than one kitchen, the request cannot be fulfilled until somebody sets it. The app says which item and what to do.

Make list — plan, start, log

The Make list is the kitchen’s working board. A Monday-start week strip lets you look at any day — today is where the action is; future days are for planning ahead. Two views: Today’s plan (the batches) and Forecast (expected demand for that day of the week, next to what’s already planned).

Batches are sorted so what matters is on top: overdue carry-overs first (the outlet is already waiting), then batches in progress, then the rest by need-by time. Work top to bottom — start, log, done.

• Add to plan queues a batch of any active recipe onto the selected day — pick the recipe, set the quantity (defaults to the recipe yield), add an optional note. The form shows what the batch will consume from stock, scaled to your quantity, and flags any ingredient you’re short of.
• Start marks a batch as being made.
• Log opens the batch log: confirm the actual yield, the ingredient quantities consumed (pre-filled from the recipe), the cook, and any in-batch wastage with a reason.

Logging a batch is what moves stock: ingredients are consumed from kitchen stock per the recipe, and the output is added. A finished-goods batch at a commissary lands in the transfer tray, ready to dispatch; a semi-finished batch stays on the kitchen shelf for use in other recipes; a menu item made at an outlet kitchen simply sits in that kitchen’s stock until the counter sells it. Unfinished batches carry over to the next day automatically and are marked as carried.

Transfers — dispatching finished goods

Transfers is how finished goods leave a commissary — a production unit that produces for warehouses. Completed batches collect in the transfer tray as draft transfers; tap Send to warehouse on a draft to dispatch it. The transfer stays open until the warehouse confirms receipt.

Note: a commissary never ships straight to an outlet. The warehouse receives your dispatch, and the app automatically creates a warehouse → outlet transfer to the outlet that originally ordered the goods. From the outlet’s side, kitchen goods simply appear in their Ready to Receive list.

A production unit that produces for an outlet has no dispatch step at all: its menu items sell on that outlet’s POS, and each sale depletes this unit’s own stock directly. See Production units.

Requisitions — asking for ingredients

The kitchen orders its own ingredients the same way an outlet does — with a purchase requisition (see Purchase requests).

• Requisitions lists only what your own kitchen has raised on the warehouse. It is not the tenant’s requisition list and it does not show production orders. Rows carry the requisition number, its department, its items, when it was raised, and where its warehouse leg stands (awaiting dispatch, dispatched, received). Search over the number or an item name, filter by department, and switch between All, Open and Received; a heading counts how many are open. Raise requisition opens the form with your below-par raw materials prefilled; add more from warehouse stock or explode a recipe for a number of batches, then tap Send requisition.
• GRN is where deliveries land. Anything the warehouse has dispatched to you shows under At the door: tap Receive, check the quantities line by line, and Post GRN — posting is what moves the goods into your kitchen stock. See Confirm GRN.

Kitchen stock and wastage

• Stock is the kitchen’s own read-only on-hand view, split into Raw materials, Semi-processed, and Below par tabs, with clear status pills (OK / Below par / Critical).
• Wastage is the kitchen’s write-off log — summary tiles plus every entry. Log wastage posts the loss straight to the ledger with a reason (spoiled, expired, spill / over-prep, dropped, training, other). Only managers can edit or void an entry afterwards, and a void needs a written reason — so a mistake is corrected on the record, never silently.

Recipes

The recipe library lives in the kitchen console too, under Library → Recipes, and it lists only your unit’s recipes and costs. Building and costing recipes is covered in Recipe builder — and once a menu-kind recipe is submitted, its approval runs in the POS app’s Menu section while you track it on Menu status (see Menu and pricing).

Every production unit can make all three types — Semi-finished, Finished good and Menu item. What differs is where a menu item can be sold: an outlet-linked kitchen’s dish turns up on its own outlet’s POS straight away, while a commissary’s dish reaches no counter until someone maps it to the outlets that sell it, in the POS app. See Production units.