Wastage and Spoilage Log with a Weekly Loss Report

Wasted food and stock is money you paid for and never sold. Most kitchens and shops know it happens but not how much, why or where, because nothing is written down at the moment it is thrown away.

Each loss is one line: item, quantity, unit cost, reason and station. Picking an item from your list fills the unit and cost, so it takes about ten seconds on a phone. The weekly report adds up the loss and splits it by reason, item, station and day, compares it with last week and with the target you set in dirhams and as a percentage of the week's sales, and gives a plain suggestion for the biggest reason. After one week of honest entries you can see the three things worth fixing first.

What is inside:

• Log, Weekly report, Targets and lists and Start here tabs
• Editable lists of items, reasons and stations, and a choice of week start day
• Weekly sales entry so waste is shown as a percentage of sales
• CSV import and export of the log, JSON backup, print or save as PDF
• A worked example for a cafe: six weeks, 150 entries

Who it is for: cafes, restaurants, bakeries, groceries and canteens that want to see waste as money.

What it is not: it records what you tell it. Food safety decisions, such as what may be reused or how long food may be kept, belong to your own food safety plan and your municipality. The suggestions are prompts to look, not findings.

How it differs: the Restaurant Daily Operations Pack in the catalogue has printable checklists and an Excel waste log with a weekly review. This app is a log you fill on a phone, with reasons and stations of your own, the percent-of-sales target and the weekly comparison, in one file with no spreadsheet.

Tested: weekly totals, breakdowns, week-on-week change and percent of sales were compared with a separate Python implementation on randomised logs, 769 values, with no differences. 18 scripted browser checks cover adding entries with validation, the report, CSV import, backup restore, print and the 375 and 1280 pixel layouts, with no console errors. Browser tests ran in Chromium and WebKit; Firefox, a real phone, a real printer and a real scanner were not available, so they were not tested.