An order guide is the list a kitchen orders from. It names the items, the vendors, the pack sizes and the days the trucks come, and it sits in front of whoever is counting the cooler so that the counting turns directly into an order. I have written these, and the useful version reads more like a timetable than a grocery list.

Restaurant Inventory Management: How to Calculate & Use PAR Levels to Reduce Food Waste, Toast, Inc. on YouTube

What the guide holds

Cases of food stacked on a hand truck at a restaurant back door beside a delivery truck

Vendors first, items second

Toast’s article on restaurant order guide templates describes the guide as a standardized order form that organizes food items, delivery schedules and supplier information in one place. Its list of sections is a sound skeleton: supplier details with contact numbers, delivery days and ordering deadlines; food items grouped into categories such as proteins, produce, dry goods and beverages; quantities and current prices; stock levels and par levels; and a place for special instructions and delivery notes.

The ordering deadline is the part most people leave off, and it is the part that decides whether the guide works. A vendor who delivers Tuesday and Friday does not take a call at six on Tuesday morning. Somebody has a cutoff the afternoon before, and the guide should say what it is, in the same place as the phone number.

Grouped the way the cooler is laid out

Toast groups items by type. That is a fine default, and there is an argument for going further and ordering the rows the way a person walks the storage areas: walk-in, reach-in, dry storage, freezer. A guide that follows the walk gets counted in one pass, without anyone doubling back for the one case of butter that lives behind the door.

One item, one unit

Pack size is where the sheet quietly breaks. Altametrics, in its piece on setting par levels, lists mixed units as a common pitfall: counting by the each and ordering by the case, or ignoring pack sizes, and the math stops working. Pick the unit you order in and count in that unit, or print both on the sheet with the conversion beside them.

Par is where you want to end up

Dry storage shelves with cases of flour, rice and canned tomatoes in a restaurant

The definition that stops double orders

The Altametrics piece draws a distinction that fixes a lot of bad habits. Par is the amount you want on hand after the delivery arrives. It is not the amount you order. Each cycle you count, compare the count to par, and order the difference. The source phrases par as “the amount you want to end up with.”

Its formula for the order is par, minus what is on hand, minus what is already on order, and if the answer is negative you order zero. The “already on order” term is the one people forget. A standing order, a back-ordered case from last week or a second call placed by the other manager all count, and leaving them out is how a kitchen ends up with a hundred pounds of something it did not want.

How the number is built

Altametrics suggests a starting par of average daily usage times the days the order has to cover plus a safety buffer. Average daily usage comes from the last two to four weeks. The days of coverage are the days until the next delivery. The buffer, it says, is typically 10 to 25 percent, or one extra day for critical items. A reorder point, which says when to place the order instead of how much, is average daily usage times the vendor’s lead time.

Those percentages are one vendor blog’s rule of thumb, not a standard, and the post that gives them says to adjust from experience. I treat them as a place to start writing numbers down. A kitchen that has never had a par can use a buffer like that and then watch what the cooler tells it.

Delivery days set the size of the cushion

Restaurant365’s guide to par levels and supplier reorders ties the number to the truck: “If your supplier only delivers twice a week, your par should cover the gap plus a safety cushion.” The same item can carry a small par with a daily vendor and a large one with a vendor who comes twice a week. A weekly guide therefore needs delivery days printed next to every vendor, because the par on the sheet is only correct for that schedule.

Restaurant365 also says to consider storage space and how perishable the item is. A par that cannot physically fit in the cooler is a wish. A par on lettuce built for four days of coverage is a plan to throw some of it out.

Altametrics adds item risk to the list of factors. Menu-critical, high-cost, high-waste and high-volume items deserve larger buffers in some cases and closer checking in others, which means the buffer is not one number for the whole sheet. The case of expensive fish that spoils fast gets counted twice a week with a small cushion. The case of paper napkins gets a big cushion and a glance. Marking each row with a risk, even a simple A, B or C, tells the counter where to slow down.

Building the first version

Back-office desk with a blank ruled sheet, pencil, calculator and a stack of paper invoices

Start from last month’s invoices and the prep sheet

Toast suggests starting by looking at how ordering works now to find the bottlenecks and the recurring mistakes. The invoices are the cheapest record of what actually came in. Lay a few weeks of them side by side and the items that repeat are the guide. The items that appear once, a special, a trial case, an emergency run, are not.

Altametrics adds that if history is missing, usage can be estimated from purchases, prep sheets or point-of-sale reports. The prep sheet is the underrated one. If the kitchen keeps a weekly prep list with quantities, the days of the week on it already tell you what the kitchen expects to use.

Test it on one vendor

Toast’s advice is to try the guide with a few suppliers before using it everywhere. I would go further and try it with one, the produce vendor or whoever has the most lines and the most waste. If the sheet works there, it works anywhere. If it does not, the failure is small and has a name on it.

Keep the daily essentials apart from the rare stuff

Altametrics lists overloaded par sheets as a pitfall, the kind that mix rarely used items with daily essentials. The guide that gets used is short enough to count in a sitting. Items that move twice a month go on a second page, or on a shelf list that gets looked at once a week.

Running it each week

One person owns it

The same Altametrics list names unclear ownership as a reason pars fail. If nobody is accountable for the sheet, nobody changes it, and the numbers drift away from the kitchen they were written for. One name goes at the top: the person who counts, or the person who places the order, so long as it is one person.

A set time to review it

Altametrics suggests reviewing pars weekly in a block of 15 to 30 minutes, on the same day each week. Changes should be gradual, by about 10 to 20 percent or by one day of coverage, with a recheck after the next order cycle. The triggers it lists for a change are frequent stockouts, excess stock sitting in back, waste or expiration, menu changes, promotions, seasonal shifts and vendor changes.

Toast recommends reviewing the whole template monthly, for the reason that menus, suppliers and delivery days change and an outdated sheet causes confusion on busy order days. Weekly for the numbers, monthly for the structure is a workable rhythm. It is also a lot of reviewing, and the smallest kitchens will find that once a month for everything is what actually happens. That is still better than never.

Do not rewrite it after one bad weekend

The warning that sticks is against “doubling pars based on one crazy weekend,” which Altametrics gives as a common mistake, along with using an atypical week such as a holiday as the baseline. A par moves when the pattern moves. A single night is a data point, not a pattern.

What the guide does not do

It does not set prices

An order guide records what things cost, and Toast lists price monitoring among the things a good guide supports, but it is not a costing tool. When a price on the guide jumps, the next step is the recipe cost for every dish that uses the item. Dishes get repriced there, not on the order sheet.

It does not replace talking to the vendor

Toast notes that consistent, professional order forms can support better pricing, service and delivery priority. That is the vendor-relations side of the sheet, and it is the claim in this piece I would trust least, since it comes from a company that sells restaurant software. What a clean guide does reliably is make the call shorter and the mistakes easier to catch. The rest depends on the vendor.

For informational purposes only. Par formulas and buffer percentages come from published guides and vary by operation; adjust them to your own sales, storage and food safety rules.

Sources