🍲 rest-staff

Staff / Family Meal

Staff / Family Meal logs what the kitchen cooks for the whole team before each shift — dishes, portions and estimated cost, who actually ate, and whether the spend stayed inside your per-head policy cap — so staff feeding is tracked and costed separately from wastage or guest comps.

📍 Menu path: Staff & HR → Staff / Family Meal

👤 Who uses it: All roles with the Ingredients feature enabled; policy configuration is intended for management use

Overview

Distinct from Wastage Log (unsold/spoiled food, not intentional feeding), Void & Comp Log (guest comps on paid orders), Kitchen Requisitions (raw ingredient requests) and Pre-Service Briefing (what staff need to know, not what they ate).

Each log entry belongs to a shift — Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner or Late Night — and records the dishes served (name, portion count, estimated cost per portion) plus an attendance list of staff who actually ate, each tagged with their role.

Total food cost for a log is simply portions × cost-per-portion summed across every dish; cost per head divides that total by how many staff are marked as having eaten.

A configurable policy sets a monthly staff-meal budget, a per-head cost cap per shift, and which roles are entitled to a meal — entries whose cost per head exceeds the cap are flagged for review.

A daily summary rolls up total food cost, head count and cost per head for that log; a separate monthly view compares total spend against the configured monthly budget.

"Print" produces an accounts-facing daily summary of what was served, who ate, and the total cost — useful for reconciling kitchen ingredient usage against staff feeding rather than sales.

Before You Start

You must have the Ingredients feature enabled on your plan.
Set the staff-meal policy (monthly budget, per-head cap, allowed roles) once from the policy config panel so cap flags are meaningful from day one.

Step-by-Step Guide

1 Log today's family meal

Click "Log Meal" and pick the Shift (Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Late Night).
Add each dish served with its portion count and estimated cost per portion.
Mark which staff on the attendance list actually ate, tagging each with their role.
Save — the entry's total cost, head count and cost per head are calculated automatically.

2 Set or update the staff-meal policy

Open the policy config panel.
Set the Monthly Budget and Per-Head Cap Per Shift.
Choose which roles are entitled to a staff meal, and update the policy note shown to staff, then save.

3 Review costs at month end

Open the monthly roll-up view.
Compare total staff-meal spend for the month against the configured Monthly Budget.
Investigate any daily entries flagged for exceeding the per-head cap.

Every Field & Button, Explained

Field / Button	What it does
`Shift (Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Late Night)`	Which service the family meal was prepared for; each shift gets its own log entry for the day.
`Dishes (portions × cost per portion)`	What was cooked for the team; total food cost for the entry is the sum of portions × cost per portion across all dishes.
`Staff attendance list`	Who actually ate, each tagged with name and role; head count and cost per head are both derived from how many are marked as having eaten.
`Per-head cap flag`	Highlights any log entry whose cost per head exceeds the policy's Per-Head Cap Per Shift, prompting a review of portion sizes or ingredient cost.
`Monthly Budget`	A policy-level ceiling on total staff-meal spend for the month, checked against the sum of all logged entries.
`Allowed Roles`	The policy-configured list of roles entitled to a staff meal (e.g. Head Chef, Waiter, Captain, Dishwasher); used as guidance when marking attendance.

Tips & Best Practices

Log the meal right after service prep rather than at the end of the day, while portion counts and who actually ate are still fresh in the kitchen's memory.
Set a realistic Per-Head Cap based on your actual ingredient costs — an unrealistically low cap will flag nearly every entry and stop being a useful signal.
Print the daily summary regularly and hand it to accounts alongside your regular food-cost reporting, so staff meals are never silently absorbed into overall food cost without visibility.

Troubleshooting & FAQ

An entry is flagged even though the meal seemed reasonable.

The flag compares cost per head (total dish cost ÷ number marked as having eaten) against the policy's Per-Head Cap Per Shift — check whether the head count is accurate (unmarked attendees make the per-head cost look artificially high) before assuming the food itself was over budget.

The monthly total doesn't match what I expect.

The monthly roll-up sums every logged entry's total food cost across all shifts in that month — confirm every day's family meal was actually logged, since an unlogged meal simply won't appear in the total.

A staff member who is entitled to a meal isn't on the attendance list.

The attendance list is built manually per log entry, not auto-populated from the staff roster — add them directly when logging that shift's meal.