Prep List Template for a Restaurant Kitchen (and How to Stop Guessing Quantities)
How to build a prep list that matches what you will actually sell, not a guess — par levels, using sales history, and what to do with what is left over.
A prep list is the kitchen's plan for the day: what to make, and how much, before service starts. Get it wrong in one direction and you run out mid-service; get it wrong in the other and you throw out what you over-prepped at close. Most kitchens start with a paper list based on the head chef's gut feel, which works until that person is off, or the restaurant grows past what one person can hold in their head.
What actually belongs on a prep list
A useful prep list has three things for every item, not just a name and a tick box: what it is, how much to make, and by when. "Tomato gravy — 8kg — before lunch service" is a prep list. "Tomato gravy" on its own is a reminder, not a plan.
Where the quantity should actually come from
Guessing is the normal starting point, and it is fine for a new restaurant with no history yet. Once you have a few weeks of sales data, the quantity should come from what you actually sold on comparable days, not a fixed number that never moves. A weekday prep list and a Saturday prep list for the same dish are rarely the same number, and a kitchen that preps both days identically is either running out on the busy day or wasting on the quiet one.
Building it from averages, in practice
- Pull how much of each prepped item you actually used over the last several occurrences of that day of the week (not the whole month blended together — a Tuesday should be compared to other Tuesdays).
- Add a small buffer for the item's own volatility — a slow-moving side needs less buffer than something that sells out first on a busy night.
- Subtract what is already in stock from a previous prep before deciding how much more to make today.
- Adjust for anything you already know is different — a holiday, a booking for a large party, a local event — since no average accounts for that on its own.
What to do with what's left over
Log it. A prep item that's consistently left over at close is telling you the quantity is wrong, but only if someone records that it happened — otherwise it just quietly becomes wastage that never gets traced back to the original estimate. The same goes the other direction: an item that runs out early and often is underprepped, not unlucky.
A short list, not a long one
The instinct is to put everything the kitchen makes onto one prep list. In practice, a handful of high-volume, perishable items (the things that actually run out or actually spoil) matter far more than a full inventory of every ingredient. Start with your ten most-prepped items and expand only if it's actually useful — a prep list nobody finishes reading gets ignored the same way a checklist does.
Where EasyBills fits
EasyBills builds today's prep list from your own sales history — comparing today against the same day of the week over recent weeks, not a blended average — and lets a manager confirm or adjust the suggested quantity before it goes to the kitchen. Whatever's left over at the end of the day can be logged as waste with a reason in the same screen, so the next day's suggestion already accounts for it, rather than the same mismatch repeating indefinitely.