Kitchen settings

The initial setup screen captures the basics, but most of those settings change over time — you add a new prep day, change opening hours, move locations. 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.

The Kitchen section

These are the restaurant-wide settings that affect how Rinvy buckets time and projects demand.

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 Monday-closed restaurant 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

Which days you typically run prep shifts. Feeds the prep list recommendation engine — 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). Every date-sensitive feature uses this:

  • 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.

Business-day cutoff hour

The hour (0–23) that separates one business day from the next. Default 4 AM. Anything that happens before this hour counts toward the previous business day.

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, leaving the default 4 AM is fine — nothing happens between midnight and 4 AM.

Demand forecast context (Pro)

A free-form text field (up to 2,000 characters) describing anything the AI should know about upcoming demand — recurring events, marketing patterns, seasonality, atypical staffing. Read verbatim by the demand forecaster every time it runs.

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

Weather location (Pro)

If demand forecasting is enabled, set a city + state (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.

Weather is optional. Without it, demand forecasts still work; they just won't reflect weather effects.

Invoice forwarding email (Pro)

If invoice ingestion is enabled and you have supplier management permissions, this is where you find (or generate) the per-restaurant inbound email address that supplier invoices forward to. See invoice email forwarding.

Auto-approve invoices (Pro)

A toggle. When enabled, invoices where every line item matches a known product code skip the manual review queue and create a receipt automatically. Works for any supplier — match accuracy depends on whether you've previously confirmed product-code mappings for that supplier's line items. Toggle off when you want to manually verify each invoice during the trust-building phase.

Other sections in Kitchen Settings

Kitchen Settings also includes these — each has its own doc:

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.

Related