A week on Dyner, in the order it actually happens

Tuesday, twenty to seven. The dry goods are on the pavement and the driver wants a signature before he has finished unloading. You sign, because you always sign, and the invoice goes into the folder by the office door along with the other eleven.

None of that is a software problem yet. It becomes one at month end, when somebody has to turn a folder into a cost of sales figure and finds that three of the eleven are photographs, two are for a sister site, and one is a statement rather than an invoice at all.

So rather than list screens, take the week Dyner is built around. Not every kitchen runs on this exact rhythm, but most run on something close enough to recognise.

Tuesday: the delivery

The invoice goes in once, in whatever state it reached you. A PDF off the supplier's portal, a phone photo with a thumb in the corner of it, a scan of a scan. Dyner reads it without much caring about the layout, because every supplier has their own and waiting for the industry to agree on one is not a plan.

Then the part that takes a person twenty minutes and a machine no time at all. Every line is matched to an ingredient you already carry, allowing for the fact that the supplier calls it BEEF SHRTRIB BNLS and you call it short rib. Pack sizes are converted, so a 4.5kg case and a 5kg case both land as kilograms on the same ingredient. Prices are written. Anything that moved since the last delivery is flagged.

Credit notes and supplier statements come through the same door and are treated as what they are, which matters more than it sounds. A credit keyed in as though it were another bill leaves the cost sitting on your books and the money sitting with your supplier.

Wednesday: what to order, and from whom

Predictive ordering keeps a list of what is due, worked out from how fast you actually go through things rather than from a par level somebody set in 2023 and never revisited. Each suggestion carries a date. If that date passes without a goods received against it, the item moves to overdue, and you can filter the list down to just those on a morning when there is no time for the rest.

Suggestions can be dismissed. That sounds trivial and is not: a list you cannot argue with becomes a list you stop opening.

Alongside it sits price benchmarking, which sets what you paid for an ingredient beside what the wider market paid over the same weeks, ex VAT, and lists the other suppliers who carry it. The useful reading is not where you are being fleeced. It is where you were fine in March and are not fine now, because that is the drift no one would have caught.

Thursday: the count

Counting is the part of the job nobody enjoys and nobody gets to skip. What makes it survivable is splitting it up. The walk-in and the bar are two sheets rather than one long queue, so two people can be halfway through at the same time, on their own phones, with cold hands.

The awkward movements are the ones most systems leave out, and they are the ones that decide whether the month adds up. Waste has to be recorded at the bin and not remembered on the thirtieth. A case sent across town has to leave one valuation and arrive in the other. And a hundred portions of pulled lamb that went into the oven as two shoulders has to come out the far side valued as pulled lamb.

Friday and Saturday: service

A busy Saturday throws off more exceptions than the rest of the week put together, and on the night not one of them looks like anything. They surface later as a void rate that is fine on average and not fine between eleven and midnight, or as one till whose refunds all happen after last orders.

The detectors run across the weekend so the queue is waiting on Monday, with the underlying bill behind every flag. Each one takes an owner and a status before it can be closed. That is the difference between a report and a control, and it is not a subtle one: an exception with a name against it gets resolved, and an exception in a summary gets scrolled past.

Which detectors run is your call. The ones that earn their place are usually specific to the building rather than to the trade.

Sunday: what it cost

Cash-up and day-end runs pull the takings together. Reconciliations put the till against the bank and against the card batches, day by day, and mark the days that do not agree.

The labour side is a comparison rather than a report. What you rostered, what the clock says happened, and what is queued to go out on payday, all in one view, while there is still a week left to do anything about the gap. Twenty-six hours of variance found on a Wednesday is a conversation. Found on the payslip, it is a cost.

Month end, and the questions that come with it

Stock valuation and variances, margin tracking, menu profitability. The last of those sorts the menu by what each plate actually left behind after the recipe was paid for, which is the only sensible basis for deciding whether the braised beef stays on at that price.

And when the report does not answer the question you had, you ask. Athena takes a question in ordinary English and comes back with the number, the chart under it, and the query it ran, so you can check the answer rather than believe it. Give it something large and it lays out a plan before starting, which is a habit borrowed from good analysts.

What it will not do

It will not count your stock. Somebody still has to walk into the cold room with a phone. It will not stop a supplier putting a price up, only make certain you know about it the day it happens rather than the month after. It will not work the anomaly queue for you.

What it removes is the retyping, the reconstructing and the fortnight-long wait to find out something you could have acted on. Which, if you have ever spent a Sunday with a shoebox of invoices and a calculator, turns out to be most of it.