Kitchen settings

The initial setup screen captures the basics, but most of those settings change over time. You add a prep day, change opening hours, or move to a new address. Kitchen settings is where you adjust them. This article covers the Kitchen and Integrations sections. Team management, dashboard customization and billing each have their own articles.

Changes in these two sections take effect when you click Save changes at the bottom of the panel. Cancel discards them.

The Kitchen section

The Kitchen section holds the restaurant-wide settings that decide how Rinvy buckets time and projects demand.

The Kitchen settings panel with the left section nav and the Hours block: Operating days and Prep days chips, then the Timezone, Currency and Number format dropdowns and the Business-day cutoff time

Operating days

The weekdays your kitchen is open. Used by:

The order list when computing the next available delivery day (closed days are skipped).
Burn rate calculations. Closed days are excluded, so a restaurant closed on Mondays doesn't get penalized for "zero usage" on Mondays.
Demand forecasts. Closed days won't have predicted sales.

Toggle the chips Mon–Sun. Changes apply going forward.

Prep days

The days you typically run prep shifts. The prep list recommendations use them: recommended batch counts assume prep happens on these days. If your kitchen preps Mon/Wed/Fri, set those three.

Timezone

The IANA timezone string (e.g., America/Chicago). Zone names come from the IANA Time Zone Database, which is updated when governments change UTC offsets or daylight-saving rules. A named zone follows those changes, so you don't adjust anything when the clocks change. Every date-sensitive feature uses the timezone:

Reports group by restaurant-local day.
Expiration alerts, price alerts, stockout alerts run on restaurant-local time.
Daily charts use local boundaries.
The 6 AM stockout check fires at 6 AM your time, not server time.

Currency & number format

Two fields control how money and numbers appear in every price, cost, report, PDF and email in Rinvy:

Currency sets the currency symbol and code (e.g. US Dollar, British Pound, Euro). The default is US Dollar.
Number format sets how thousands and decimals are separated (e.g. 1,234.56 in the US vs 1.234,56 in Germany). The default is English (United States).

Separators and symbol placement differ by country. The Unicode CLDR project, which supplies the regional formats that phones and computers usually show, notes that formatting numbers and currencies is far more complicated across regions than most people expect.

With the defaults, US kitchens see no change. Changing either field is display-only. It reformats existing figures. It never converts amounts or restates prices.

Business-day cutoff

The hour (0–23) that separates one business day from the next. Default 4 AM. A POS sale made before this hour counts toward the previous business day. This applies to sales from Toast, CSV uploads and emailed sales reports.

Rinvy also uses the cutoff to decide which business day it is now. The order list, the pull list and prep planning use that day. Counts, receipts and waste logs do not use the cutoff. They use the calendar date in your restaurant's timezone. Food cost is the one exception. It puts a count started before the cutoff on the night before, so a 3 AM count after close lines up with that night's sales.

For a bar that closes at 2 AM, the 1 AM last call counts as Friday's sale, not Saturday's. For a coffee shop that opens at 6 AM, the default 4 AM is fine, because nothing happens between midnight and 4 AM.

Demand forecast context (Pro)

A free-form text field (up to 2,000 characters) for anything the AI should know about upcoming demand: recurring events, marketing patterns, seasonality, unusual staffing. The demand forecaster reads it verbatim every time it runs.

The AI context block in Kitchen settings: the Demand forecast context field filled with a plain-language description of the restaurant, with a character counter below it

Editing the context marks the current forecast as Outdated ("Your business context changed"), so the forecast page prompts you to regenerate.

Update this whenever your business context shifts. Examples:

"Restaurant Week starts Monday — expect 30% lift on pasta dishes through Sunday."
"New patio opens Saturday; expect 15% bump on patio-friendly items in good weather."
"Lunch service suspended on weekdays this month."

See demand forecasting for how this gets used.

The Integrations section

The Integrations settings panel showing the City + state field under Weather, and under Invoice intake the Forwarding email address with a Copy button and the Auto-approve invoices toggle

Weather location (Pro)

If demand forecasting is enabled, enter a location in City + state under Weather (max 200 characters). Rinvy fetches the OpenWeatherMap forecast for that location and feeds it to the forecaster. Patio dishes get a bump on warm days, soups on cold ones.

The location also drives observed past weather. Rinvy backfills what the weather actually was on the days in your sales history (cached per location and day, up to 90 days). The forecaster then compares rain-vs-dry and warm-vs-cold demand from your kitchen's own numbers instead of a generic assumption.

Weather is optional. Without it, demand forecasts still work, but they don't reflect weather effects.

Invoice forwarding email (Standard and Pro)

If invoice ingestion is enabled and you have supplier management permissions, the Invoice intake block shows your restaurant's inbound address under Forwarding email. Supplier invoices forward to it. If you don't have an address yet, click Generate invoice email. See invoice email forwarding.

Auto-approve invoices (Pro)

A toggle. When it is on, invoices from a known supplier where every line item matches a known product code skip the manual review queue and create a receipt automatically. It works for any supplier. Match accuracy depends on whether you've already confirmed product-code mappings for that supplier's line items. Leave it off while you still want to check each invoice yourself. On Standard the toggle is locked and every invoice goes through review, because auto-approve requires Pro.

Where are billing, team and notification settings?

Billing, team and notification settings each have their own section in Kitchen settings, and most sections have their own article:

Dashboard — see dashboard customization.
Accounting — see export purchases to QuickBooks or Xero. (Visible to users with the manage-accounting permission.)
Organization — see group your kitchens. (Owner-only. It groups several kitchens you run for the cross-kitchen rollup report.)
Team & roles — see invite users. Owners and Managers see it. Only an Owner can invite people or change roles. The Costs switch here controls whether Staff and Viewers see money figures (see permissions and roles).
Notifications — see push notifications.
Billing — Owner-only. Tier selection, payment method, invoices.

Common mistakes

Changing timezone after a month of operation

Past reports keep using the old timezone, so the boundary you see this month differs from the boundary you saw last month. If you have to change it, expect a one-time blip in reports across the boundary date.

Forgetting to update operating days when hours change

Adding a Sunday brunch but forgetting to enable Sunday operations leads to wrong order projections and a missing forecast for the new day. Update operating days the same day the schedule changes.

Treating demand forecast context as a "set and forget" field

The context is read on every forecast run. If it says "Restaurant Week Mon–Fri" and Restaurant Week ended three weeks ago, the model is still using that as context. Clear or update it when reality changes.