Getting started: the first two weeks

This page is the thread. It does not explain every button — the individual guides do that — but in which order you proceed and why the order matters.

Expect two to three hours of actual setup time, spread over one or two weeks. The largest part of it is your recipes, and those run alongside everything else.

You do not have to do it all at once. The First steps list on your overview page remembers where you are — not by what you clicked, but by what is actually in your data. You can stop and continue at any time without losing the thread.

The basic idea in three sentences

CateringOS connects three parties: the kitchen that cooks; the facility (nursery, school, care home, company) that is supplied; and the end users — parents, relatives, employees.

Each party maintains exactly what it knows best. The kitchen the menu plan and the recipes. The facility who eats there and who is missing today. The parents whether their child is eating tomorrow.

The quantities follow from that by themselves. You do not enter portion numbers — you enter the foundations from which the portion numbers arise.

Step 1 — Arriving (day 1, 15 minutes)

Sign in and click through the welcome tour. Afterwards you will see the First steps list on the overview.

Set up two-factor sign-in right away. Your account leads to personal data and, in facilities, to health information such as allergies — there will never be a better moment.

→ Your first sign-in

Step 2 — Bringing the team in (day 1, 10 minutes)

Invite the colleagues who will be working with you. This pays off early: entering recipes goes three times as fast with three people, and everyone works under their own name.

→ Inviting colleagues and granting permissions

Step 3 — Checking portion groups (day 1, 10 minutes)

Settings → Portion groups. A portion group is a group of eaters with a factor: crèche child 0.5, school child 0.8, adult 1.0. That is how heads become quantities.

Why this comes so early: the factor sits inside every later number — in the production list, in portioning, in the service statement. Changing it later changes nothing retroactively in statements already generated, but everything about the running quantities.

Check the age ranges in particular. People whose date of birth falls into no range appear later as “Unassigned” and are missing from the weighting.

Step 4 — Ingredients and recipes (days 1–10, the big chunk)

Ingredients first, then recipes: a recipe draws on ingredients, and allergens and nutritional values arise from their data automatically.

Start with ten to fifteen recipes — enough for two weekly plans. The rest grows during operation.

Enter the quantities per ingredient completely (raw weight, cooking factor). They are the basis for “kg raw” and “kg cooked” in the production list and for the shopping list. If they are missing, a tilde (~) appears there — the quantity shown is then a lower bound, and nobody should purchase against it.

→ Create recipes

Step 5 — Defining menu lines (day 2, 10 minutes)

Which lines do you run? Standard always, usually vegetarian alongside; depending on your customers vegan, pork-free, halal, or consistency levels for care homes.

Each line is its own lane in the planner and later its own number at serving.

→ Manage menu lines

Step 6 — Customers and structure (days 2–3, 30 minutes)

Now comes the step with the most riding on it: you create menu-plan groups and assign facilities to them.

A menu-plan group is the answer to “which houses get the same plan?”. Three nurseries with an identical menu plan are one group — you plan once, not three times.

Each assignment comes with:

Service start

From when do you supply? Before this date no quantities arise.

Delivery days

Which weekdays? No delivery day, no demand.

This is the single most common stumbling block. If the production list later reports “no menu plan for this day” although the planner visibly shows one, it is almost never the plan — it is one of these three points:

  • The facility is not assigned to the menu-plan group.

  • The service start lies after the day you are looking at.

  • The weekday is not a delivery day.

Check them in that order and you will find it in under a minute.

→ Assigning facilities to menu planning

Step 7 — The contract (day 3, 20 minutes)

Organisation → Contracts. The contract records whom you supply at what price and with which cancellation deadline.

Contracts come about bilaterally: one side proposes, the other confirms. Only then is it active. That is deliberate — the price you bill at should not be settable by one side alone.

The cancellation deadline is commercially the most important figure on this page: it decides whether a cancellation at 7:30 in the morning still changes anything.

→ Managing contracts

Step 8 — The first menu plan (days 3–4, 45 minutes)

Create the weekly plan, drag recipes into the lines, approve, publish.

A plan passes through four states: draft → planned → approved → published. Only once published do the facilities see it, and only then can parents order.

If your plans repeat, set it up as a cycle right away — then you roll it out weeks in advance instead of planning anew every week.

→ Create a menu plan
→ Cycle and series planning

Step 9 — Bringing the facility in (days 4–7)

Now you invite your customer: Organisation → Access & invitations, the entry for facilities.

The facility then creates its structure itself (groups, classes, wards) and records its people. You as the kitchen do not do this — and you do not see those people by name either.

This is not a convenience decision but the core of the data model: the personal data of end users belongs to the facility. You as the caterer receive exclusively anonymised aggregates — numbers per group and portion group.

You are therefore not the controller for that data, which simplifies your own data-protection documentation considerably.

The parents in turn are invited by the facility, not by you.

→ Facility portal
→ Parent and relative portal

Step 10 — The first real day

From here it is routine. The daily rhythm:

  1. Open Production — what is to be cooked today, in what quantity. Print the kitchen sheet.

  2. Portion out per dish — how it is split across the houses, with a delivery slip.

  3. HACCP — record temperatures where you have to anyway.

  4. Stock → Cook today — book the actual consumption.

→ Production list and portioning
→ Documenting HACCP
→ Purchasing & stock

Step 11 — The first service statement (month end, 20 minutes)

At the end of the month you generate a service statement per facility, check the items and send it for approval. Without an objection it counts as approved automatically after the agreed period.

This is the moment when it pays off that the numbers arose by themselves over the month: you check a result instead of assembling one.

→ Create a service statement

When something is not right

Symptom Where to look first

Production says “no menu plan”, but the planner shows one

Facility assignment, service start, delivery day (step 6)

Quantities too low although everyone is present

Portion-group factors and age ranges (step 3)

“Unassigned” in portioning

The portion groups' age ranges do not cover all birth years

kg figures with a tilde (~)

Incomplete quantities in the recipe (step 4)

The facility cannot see the plan

The plan is not published yet (step 8)

A cancellation no longer changes anything

The cancellation deadline in the contract has passed (step 7)

Trying it out before you start

On demo.cateringos.de everything is already set up. You can sign in with one click as kitchen management, facility management or a parent and walk the same paths without breaking anything — the data is reset overnight.

Particularly worthwhile: look at the same week from all three roles. After that the structure of CateringOS is far clearer than any guide can make it.