Checklist templates

A template is a saved version of a day’s prep checklist. Eight items for the Saturday brunch, twelve for the Friday dinner, five for the daily breakfast prep, twenty for the New Year’s Eve pre-stage. Each template stores the list of preps it should produce — the recipe, the target yield, the kitchen each one belongs to — and applying it to a date drops every item onto that day’s task list, ready for the morning crew to pick up.

This page is for two readers. If you’re the owner, “Why this page exists” explains why a kitchen worth running needs a small library of these. If you’re the head chef who’s already typing the same list every morning, jump to “How to use it”.

Why this page exists

Most kitchens settle into three or four prep patterns. The weekday morning is the same five items at six in the morning. Saturday brunch is the same eight items at four. The pizza station opens with the same three doughs every day except Sunday. Without templates, the head chef types those out each morning from memory — which means an item gets forgotten every other week, the planned quantities drift, and the morning crew sometimes walks in to an empty list because no one had time the night before.

Templates take that recurring backbone and freeze it. The chef writes the morning list once, saves it as Apertura mattina, and from then on tomorrow’s list is one tap away. The frozen list isn’t a contract — the chef can still add, delete, or change items on any given day — but the floor under each day is the same, and the items the kitchen always needs are always there.

The other reason templates live here is staff turnover. The chef who built the Saturday brunch list might leave; the template doesn’t. The next chef opens the templates dialog, sees Brunch del sabato — 8 items, taps it once, and tomorrow’s brunch is set up the way the venue has always done it. The recurring backbone outlives the person who built it.

The rule

A template is a frozen list of preps, applied to a day in one tap. Applying it drops every item onto that day’s task list as a fresh task — independent from then on. Editing the day’s tasks doesn’t change the template; editing the template doesn’t change days already built from previous applies. The template is a starting point, not a binding.

What a template stores

Each item on a template carries the same fields a task carries: the kind (a recipe task or a freeform reminder), the recipe if it’s a recipe task, the planned quantity, the title and any description, and the kitchen the item belongs to. The order is preserved — the order on the template is the order the items land on the day.

What a template does not store: who was assigned to each task, the status (To do, In progress, Done, Skipped), or any completion timestamps. Those are facts about a specific day, not facts about the recurring pattern. When the chef captures today’s checklist as a template, the snapshot strips them out — the template is the backbone, not the history.

A template can have a default kitchen — set when the template was saved, applied to every spawned task that doesn’t specify its own. So the chef who built Apertura panetteria with the kitchen pre-set to Bakery never has to re-pick Bakery on every task; the template carries it.

How to use it

Templates live in a dialog that opens from the daily checklist header on the work-in-progress board.

Opening the dialog. On the work-in-progress page, tap 📑 Templates in the header of the task list. The dialog opens with the date you’re viewing on the title bar and a list of every saved template for the venue — name, item count (with the recipe-versus-freeform breakdown underneath), the optional description, and a small badge on the right if the template is on an auto-apply schedule. Each row has three actions: 🕐 Schedule to wire up the auto-apply, Apply → to drop the list onto the day you’re viewing, a trash icon to delete the template.

Applying a template. Tap Apply → on the template you want. Every item on the template materialises as a fresh task on the day you’re viewing, appended to the bottom of whatever list is already there. A confirmation toast appears: “Added 8 tasks (skipped 2 stale recipe items)”. The skipped count is items whose recipe has been deleted or switched to à-la-minute since the template was saved — the system skips them silently rather than blocking the whole apply on one stale row. The rest land normally and the chef can pick up the few stragglers by hand.

If the chef is on a specific kitchen tab when they apply, every spawned task picks up that kitchen — the visible intent (“I’m in Bakery, apply the morning list here”) wins over the template’s stored default. On the All tab, the template’s own defaults govern. This is the most common per-apply override.

Saving the current day as a template. When today’s checklist already looks like the recurring pattern, the chef can freeze it. Same dialog, scroll to the Save current day section at the bottom, tap 📸 Save current day as template. A small sub-dialog asks for a name (“Apertura mattina”, “Brunch del sabato”) and an optional description. Save. The snapshot captures every task on that date regardless of status — even tasks that ended up skipped or undone — because the goal is to capture the recurring backbone, not whatever happened to be in flight at save time. If the day has no tasks, the save refuses with “No tasks on that date to snapshot.”

Editing a template. Not in version one. The current workflow is apply, edit, re-save, delete the old one: apply the template to a future empty day, change the items on that day until the list is what the chef wants, save that day as a new template under the same name (or a versioned name like Apertura mattina v2), then delete the previous template. Crude but explicit, and it preserves the audit trail of which version produced which day’s list.

Deleting a template. Tap the trash icon on the row. A confirmation asks if you’re sure. On confirm the template row disappears. Tasks already applied from previous runs stay put — they’re independent from the moment they were created, no back-link to follow.

What happens behind the scenes

Each template is one row that carries the item list inline as a structured array — recipe identifier (or freeform marker), planned quantity, title, description, kitchen, in order. Storing the items inline rather than in a second table is deliberate: the list is small (rarely more than fifteen items), edits are atomic, and the list is never queried alone.

Applying a template iterates through its items, validates each one — recipe-kind items skip if the source recipe has been archived or switched to à-la-minute since the template was saved — and inserts a fresh task row for each survivor. The spawned tasks have no back-link to the template; they’re standalone from then on. The sort order is set so the new items append cleanly below anything already on the day’s list.

Saving the current day as a template reads every task on that date regardless of status, sorts by the order they currently appear on the board, and stores only the structural fields. No statuses, no timestamps, no assignees come along. The result is a clean snapshot of the recurring pattern, not a copy of one specific day’s execution.

Deleting a template removes the row. Spawned tasks from previous applies are untouched because there was never a foreign key — they were detached at the moment they were created.

Worked example — the Saturday brunch list

Sara runs your venue. For the last six weeks the kitchen has been doing a Saturday brunch — eggs Benedict, pancakes, hollandaise, sausage patties, brioche French toast, a fresh-squeezed orange juice batch, a cold-brew coffee batch, and a sourdough sandwich loaf. Eight preps, the same every week. For the first month she typed them out on her phone the night before; the third Friday she forgot the hollandaise and the brunch ran out of it at half past noon.

Saturday at three in the afternoon. This Saturday’s prep is done — the eight preps were logged to stock by ten in the morning, the lunch service ran smooth. Sara opens the work-in-progress board on today’s date. The eight tasks are all ticked. She taps 📑 Templates, scrolls to the bottom, taps 📸 Save current day as template. Names it Brunch del sabato, types a one-line description (“Saturday brunch — eight preps, ready by 11”), saves. A new row appears in the template list with 8 items · 8 recipes.

The following Friday at six in the evening. Sara opens the work-in-progress board on Saturday’s date — tomorrow. The list is empty. She taps 📑 Templates, finds Brunch del sabato, taps Apply →. Eight tasks appear on the bottom of Saturday’s empty list, each with the right recipe and the right planned quantity. Added 8 tasks. She closes the dialog.

Saturday at five in the morning. The morning crew opens the same board. The eight tasks are already there. The line cook taps ▶ Start on the hollandaise; the baker taps ▶ Start on the brioche French toast. By eleven all eight cards have cleared off the live batches section and the inventory rows are sitting at the numbers the cooks just logged. No one had to think about the list.

Six months later — a slightly different list. The pancake batter has been replaced by a buttermilk waffle batter, and the kitchen has added a Mediterranean herb butter that takes ten minutes. Sara opens the work-in-progress board on a Wednesday, taps 📑 Templates → Apply → on Brunch del sabato to drop the current eight items onto Wednesday’s empty list, removes pancakes, adds waffle batter and herb butter, taps 📸 Save current day as template, names the new one Brunch del sabato v2. Deletes the old one. From the next Saturday onward the new version is what gets applied. The four Saturdays that already used the old version still show their original eight tasks in history — they don’t change.

One tap, eight preps, zero retyping.

Prep — overview — the entry point to the workflow templates live inside
Work in progress board — the page where the 📑 Templates button sits
Daily tasks — where applied templates land as concrete tasks
Auto-apply schedule — the next layer up, making a template land on its target day with no one in the loop
Prep kitchens — every template item can carry a kitchen, set when saved or inherited from the recipe