Restaurant Prep Sheet Generator

A prep list that only prints par levels makes the kitchen do the subtraction — twenty times, at seven in the morning, against a fridge nobody has counted yet. This builds the sheet the other way round: you enter the par and what is already there, and it prints what to actually make, grouped by station, with a box to tick.

The formula, in the open

• To prep = par level − what is on hand, floored at zero. Being over par is not negative work, so a well-stocked item prints as at par rather than as a negative quantity.
• Items to prep counts only the lines where that figure is above zero, so the header tells you how much of the list is real work.
• Rows are grouped by station and stations are listed alphabetically, so one sheet can be torn up and handed to four sections.
• Quantities are deliberately not rounded. 7.5 litres of sauce is a real answer; rounding it to 8 over-preps every service.

A worked example

Friday dinner, four items. Tomato sauce has a par of 12 L and 4.5 L in the walk-in, so 7.5 L to make. Dough balls: par 80, 26 left, so 54. Diced onion is at par with 6 kg against 6 kg, so it prints as at par and nobody wastes an hour on it. Chicken marinade: par 10 kg, 2 kg left, so 8 kg.

Four items, three needing prep, across four stations — and the one that does not need doing is the one most likely to get done anyway if the sheet only shows par levels.

What moves the number

Par levels are the whole game, and they are usually set once and never revisited. A par that is too high shows up here as prep that gets thrown away on Sunday; one that is too low shows up as a station running out mid-service. The honest way to tune them is to run this sheet for a fortnight and note which lines finish the week at zero and which finish it full.

The PDF

Download PDF produces a real file, laid out as a kitchen sheet: station headings, a tick box against every item, the par and on-hand figures in brackets so anyone can check the maths, and the quantity to make on the right. It carries a "Powered by OotaOS.com" credit in the footer. Nothing is uploaded — the file is generated in your browser.

Try it

The rows below are the worked example. Replace them with your own pars.