How and why to generate supplier purchase orders from your Menus
If you're wondering how to generate purchases from a menu or event and automate your kitchen's supply, tspoonlab lets you turn a menu (such as a daily menu, catering or banquet) into real orders addressed to your suppliers, calculating the quantities of raw materials needed based on the number of confirmed guests (Pax).
By processing purchases directly from the menu, you avoid reviewing ingredient by ingredient manually, optimizing the workload of your purchasing and stores department.
Prerequisites for order automation
To generate orders in bulk from your menu, make sure your database is up to date and your recipe costings are correct, so the system assigns each ingredient to the right supplier, with the right quantity, automatically.
📌 Note: The system will select the supplier marked as "Favorite supplier" for each product. To change a favorite supplier, go to the product record and, in the suppliers section, click the three-dot dropdown menu on the chosen supplier and select "Set as preferred".
Step by step: generate purchases from a Menu
To generate supplier orders and supply your central kitchen or restaurant from one of your menus, follow this procedure:
Go to "Offer" in the top black bar and click the "Menus" section in the gray bar.
In the search bar that opens on the left of the screen, locate the menu you want to activate and click it to open its record.
Click the three-dot dropdown menu inside the menu record, on the right of the screen, and select "Generate order".
When you click Generate order, a pop-up window opens in the center of your screen:
Choose the name to generate for the "Order" within the "Purchases" section, for example "Menu ". You can also apply the menu's default name with the "Retrieve menu name" button.
Select the order date on the calendar.
Adjust the number of event guests. By default it uses the Pax confirmed in the menu record. If the base menu is set to 1 Pax, enter the real number of diners here so the software multiplies the recipe's theoretical quantities by the total number of guests (Pax) entered in this field.
When you confirm, tspoonlab immediately groups the required raw materials by supplier. The software closes the window and automatically sends these lists in "Pending to send" status to the "Purchases" module. Go to the generated order and consolidate quantities before sending it definitively.
Your orders are now ready to send. Learn how in the article How to generate and send orders 🛒, under "Send order to supplier".
Managing multiple menus and delivery days
If your business handles several simultaneous menu types, or needs to split supplier deliveries across several days of the week, the recommended best practice is to split the purchase through Planning.
If your supplier delivers goods two or three times a week, first generate the day's planning into the planning calendar. From there, you can manually move dishes between calendar days to consolidate and launch the purchase order with only the ingredients you need to receive in each specific delivery.
📌 Note: For more on the "Planning" module, see the article Plan on the Calendar from Menus 📅.
You can also generate purchases for more than one event at once from Menus.
From tspoonlab we recommend doing this from Planning, since otherwise the system won't record which events the orders come from.
If you still want to generate orders for more than one event from Menus, without going through Planning, follow this step by step:
Go to "Offer" in the top black bar and click the "Menus" section in the gray bar.
Click the three-dot dropdown menu next to the menu search bar and select "Select and generate order".
A pop-up window opens where you can see the menus; select the chosen events by ticking the green checkboxes. Then click "Generate orders".
An order with a generic name and today's date is generated in the "Purchases" section. You can change the order name and date by going to the dropdown menu inside the order record and selecting "Edit order".
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