Production Plans — What to Make, and What to Buy
A production plan answers one question: for the orders due in these days, what does the kitchen have to make, and what do you need to have on the shelf to make it?
It counts your open orders, takes off what you already have, follows recipes that are made from other recipes (a sauce inside a dish) all the way down to the raw ingredients, and tells you which of those you're short on. When you're happy with it, one click schedules the production runs.
Plans work for any business that makes things from recipes. You don't need menus or catering to use them.
Making a plan
Open Production → Plans and click New plan.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | Anything you like. Left blank, it's named after the dates. |
| From / To | The days you're planning for. An order is counted when its delivery date falls in this range. The first and last day can be up to 62 days apart. |
| Kitchen warehouse | Where you make things. Finished stock and ingredients are counted in this warehouse only. Quarantine warehouses can't be chosen. |
Click Compute plan and you land on the plan.
Only orders with a delivery date, an event date or a menu-cycle day are counted. An order with none of them isn't on any plan, because there's no day to plan it for. Draft, cancelled and already-shipped orders aren't counted either. If part of an order has shipped, only what's still outstanding counts.
Tomorrow's prep
If you take catering orders, Tomorrow's prep (next to New plan) makes a plan for tomorrow's catering events in one click and opens it. It counts catering events only, on the day of the event in your time zone, so retail orders due the same day don't end up on the event kitchen's list. It uses your default warehouse as the kitchen.
- If there are no catering events tomorrow, nothing is created.
- Pressing it again while that plan is still a draft refreshes the same plan instead of adding a second one. Once you've committed it, the next press starts a new draft, so an event booked since is counted.
- A plan made this way keeps counting only catering events when you recompute it.
How a plan works it out
1. What was ordered
Iraca adds up the outstanding quantity of every open sales order due in the range. A kit (a product made of other products) is broken into its parts, the same way a pick list does it, so you plan the components, not the box.
2. What you already have
For each item, Iraca takes off the finished stock in your kitchen warehouse, and anything another committed plan for the same days has already set aside (see Two plans for the same days).
Ordered 100 Chicken Bowls, 30 on the shelf → 70 to make.
3. Sub-recipes
What's left to make is worked out through its recipe. If an ingredient is itself made from a recipe, it becomes something to make too, and goes through the same steps. That repeats as deep as your recipes go.
| Item | Ordered | On the shelf | To make |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken Bowl | 100 | 30 | 70 |
| Sauce (3.5 kg, used in the bowls) | 3,500 g | 500 g | 3,000 g |
Things to know:
- Quantities are rounded once for the whole batch, not order by order. If a bowl takes 15.4 g of spice, ten bowls need 154 g, not ten rounded 15 g portions. That's also how a production run draws stock when it starts, so the plan matches what really comes off the shelf.
- A sub-recipe used by two dishes is planned once, with both dishes' needs added together. The tree on the plan shows it under each dish.
- Deepest first. The list puts the sauce before the dish that needs it, because you make the sauce first.
- If recipes use each other in a loop (Dough needs Starter, Starter needs Dough), Iraca stops and names the loop: "Dough → Starter → Dough." Fix one of those recipes and compute again.
- An item that's sold but has no recipe is marked Bought in. There's nothing to make, so it goes straight to the shortfall list below.
4. Ingredients
Raw ingredients — anything with no recipe, or marked as a raw ingredient or supply — are totalled across the whole plan and compared with what's on hand. Each shows Needed, On hand, and Short if you don't have enough. If other committed plans have already counted on some of that ingredient, it's shown as Held by other plans.
Ordering what's short
Under the ingredient table, Order what is short lists one draft purchase order per supplier. Click Create purchase order and the Purchasing page opens with the order already filled in: the supplier, the warehouse, and each line in the pack size you buy it in.
- Quantities are what you're short, less anything you already have on order, so a second click doesn't order the same thing twice.
- Ingredients with no preferred supplier are grouped together, never hidden. Set a preferred supplier on a product and it's grouped under that supplier next time.
It's the same suggestion engine as the reorder banner on the Purchasing page. See Reorder Suggestions.
Draft and committed plans
A new plan is a draft. Nothing has been scheduled, and you can change your mind.
- Recompute recalculates a draft against today's orders and stock. Do it whenever orders have changed. It replaces the numbers on the screen.
- Commit plan schedules one production run for each item that needs making, deepest sub-recipes first. The runs carry the plan's name in their notes, get lot numbers, use the recipe's ingredient quantities scaled to the amount, and are scheduled so the sauce comes up the list before the dish. What gets committed is what's on screen, so recompute first if you aren't sure the numbers are current.
- Delete removes a draft. A draft has made nothing, so only the plan goes away.
From the moment you commit, the runs are ordinary production runs. Start them, complete them, and Iraca does the rest exactly as in Production Runs: stock moves, lots are created, the journal is posted.
After you commit
A committed plan is never rewritten. Instead, the plan keeps watching.
When new orders arrive after you committed, a yellow box appears:
3 orders have arrived since this plan. Add 12 pcs of Chicken Bowl Add 100 g of Sauce
Click Add extra runs and Iraca schedules runs for only what's still missing. The runs you already scheduled aren't touched. Orders that have since shipped, and stock that's since been made, are taken into account, so you aren't asked to make something twice.
You can't recompute or edit a committed plan. If you need to start over, cancel its runs on the Production page.
Two plans for the same days
If you commit one plan and then make another that overlaps its days in the same kitchen, the second plan treats what the first one has set aside as already spoken for. Otherwise both would count the same 30 bowls on the shelf.
Good to know:
- Only committed plans claim anything. A draft claims nothing.
- A committed plan's claim lasts until its date range has passed. It isn't released order by order as they ship, so a second plan errs on the side of making a bit more, not less.
- Plans for different kitchens, or for days that don't overlap, don't affect each other.
Orders waiting on a planned run
This part protects your stock.
Normally, if a product is short when you fulfil an order, Iraca makes up the difference from its ingredients (and leaves a draft run as a reminder). But if a committed plan already has a run making that product for the order's date, that run is going to use those same ingredients. Doing both would use them twice.
So in that case Iraca doesn't use the ingredients for the order. It tells you the product is short and names the run:
Insufficient stock for Chicken Bowl: production run #42 for this item isn't finished yet.
Complete the run, then fulfil the order. If you'd rather not wait, choose the option to ship what's available now when you fulfil: the part that's on the shelf goes out and the rest follows once the run is done (see Partial Fulfillment).
This only applies when all of these are true: the plan is committed, its dates include the order's delivery date, the run for that product hasn't finished (scheduled, in progress, or in quality check), and the run is in the same warehouse the order ships from. Orders outside any plan, orders with no delivery date, and runs that are finished or cancelled behave exactly as before.
Printing the plan
Print opens a clean one-page version for the kitchen wall: what to make (deepest first, with quantities), the sub-recipe tree, and the ingredients to have ready, with anything short flagged. It prints black on white whatever your screen theme.
Printing container labels
Print labels makes one PDF of container labels for the plan: one per unit to be made, or one per order unit with the customer's name and day. Each carries its run's lot number and a use-by date. See Container Labels for a Production Plan.
Who can do what
| Owner / Admin | Team members | |
|---|---|---|
| See plans, print | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create, recompute, commit, add extra runs, delete | ✓ | — |
Plans are part of the Production module. If your plan doesn't include it, Plans won't appear in the menu.
What a plan doesn't do (yet)
- It doesn't count orders that have no delivery date.
- It doesn't split a plan across more than one kitchen.
- It doesn't release a committed plan's claim as its orders ship.
- Committing never starts a run for you. Starting is still a person pressing Start.