Prep Tasks
How a prep plan is built from a menu, the seven stations, and what regenerating it will and will not keep.
Prep tasks live on a catering order, under its Prep tab. They are the list a kitchen actually works from.
The seven stations
Tasks are grouped by station, and there are seven:
Grill · Hot Line · Cold Line · Pastry · Bar · Prep · General
They appear in that order, which is roughly how a kitchen reads a board. A task's station comes from its recipe; a recipe with no station lands on General.
That is the whole set — there is no butchery, produce, sauce or plating station. Prep is the closest thing to a mise en place station, and General is the catch-all.
Two kinds of task
Generated tasks come from the menu. Regenerate reads the order's menu selections, works out how many servings of each recipe are needed, and creates one task per recipe — scaled to that count, with an estimated duration.
One task per recipe, not per ingredient. A tiramisu is one task, not five for mascarpone, ladyfingers, espresso, eggs and cream.
Manual tasks are the ones you write yourself with Add Task: "Marinate chicken breasts overnight", "Prepare allergen-safe plate for Table 7". These usually carry the judgment a menu cannot.
Regenerating keeps your own work
Regenerate replaces the generated tasks and keeps every manual one. The confirmation tells you how many were preserved.
If it fails partway it stops and says so, rather than leaving you with an empty prep plan and a success message.
What a task holds
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Task Name | "e.g. Butcher 40 chicken thighs" |
| Station | One of the seven |
| Priority | Low, Normal, High or Critical |
| Assigned To | A staff member, or Unassigned |
| Duration (minutes) | How long it takes |
| Notes | Additional instructions |
There is also a course picker — General prep (no course), or one of the order's courses. Give a task both a course and a duration and the form works the start time backwards for you: "Start by 4:30 PM to be ready for Entrée." That is the most useful thing on the form and the easiest to miss, because neither field does it alone.
Marking off
Tick a task to complete it. Station headers show a running count and the progress bar tracks the whole order. The same list appears on the Display Board — ticking in either place is the same act.
Finalizing and inventory
Finalize marks the prep plan done and deducts the ingredients from stock, matching each recipe ingredient to an inventory item by name and unit. An Inventory Deduction Preview shows what will come off, and what has no match, before you commit.
Anything unmatched is reported — "3 not in inventory" — rather than silently ignored, and anything matched but not written is reported separately. The two are different problems: the first means your naming does not line up; the second means your stock figures are now wrong.
What is not here
No dependencies between tasks, no per-task due time beyond what the course and duration imply, and no recurring prep. Within a station, it is a flat list.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I assign a task to a specific cook? Yes — Assigned To. It defaults to Unassigned.
Will regenerating delete the task I wrote by hand? No. Only generated tasks are replaced.
Why is my task on General? Its recipe has no station set. Set the station on the recipe and regenerate.
Does finalizing lock the order? It marks prep finalized and moves stock. You can still edit tasks afterwards; the deduction does not reverse itself.
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