A restaurant order guide is the list you order from: every item you buy from a vendor, in a fixed order, with the pack size, the par level, and space to write what you have and what you need. One guide per vendor. Someone walks the walk-in with it before the order cutoff, fills in on-hand counts, subtracts from par, and that's the order.
It's the single most load-bearing document in restaurant purchasing, and most of them are a photocopy of a photocopy with prices from two years ago. This guide shows how to build one properly, gives you a template to copy, and covers the part nobody talks about: keeping the pars honest after demand changes.
What goes in an order guide
One guide per vendor, because that's how you order. Each line is one item you actually buy — the vendor's item, not your menu's ingredient. Columns:
| Column | Why it's there |
|---|---|
| Item (vendor's name for it) | So the order reads back to the vendor without translation |
| Vendor item # / SKU | Kills the "which mozzarella?" phone call |
| Pack size (e.g., 6/#10, 25 lb bag, 4×1 gal) | You order in vendor packs, not kitchen units |
| Unit price (last paid) | Price creep is invisible without a written baseline |
| Par | What you need on hand to get to the next delivery, plus a cushion |
| On hand | Filled in during the count |
| Order | Par minus on hand, rounded up to whole packs |
Sequence the lines in shelf order — the order you physically walk the walk-in, freezer, and dry storage — not alphabetically. A guide in walk-in order gets counted in fifteen minutes; an alphabetical one gets counted from memory at the office desk, which is how ghost inventory happens.
At the top of each guide: the vendor's order cutoff time, delivery days, order minimum, and how they take orders (rep's cell, email, portal). That header is the institutional knowledge that walks out the door when your opening manager leaves.
How to set the pars
A par is not a vibe. For each item:
Par = expected usage between deliveries + safety cushion
If you get produce Monday/Wednesday/Friday, the Friday par has to cover Friday through Monday — the weekend par and the midweek par are different numbers for the same item. Rules of thumb that hold up:
- Base expected usage on what actually moved the last few weeks (your POS sales through your recipes), not on what you ordered — what you ordered includes every over-order you've ever made
- Size the cushion to how bad a stockout is versus how perishable the item is: bigger cushion on the center-of-plate protein, near-zero cushion on delicate herbs
- Write pars in vendor packs where you can. A par of "3 cases" gets counted and ordered in one motion; a par of "17 lb" makes someone do math at 10 PM
The formal math behind this — usage rate, lead time, variability — is the par level and safety stock material, and our par level calculator will compute defensible numbers from your actual usage if you want to check your gut.
The template
Copy this into a spreadsheet, one tab per vendor:
VENDOR: Valley Produce CUTOFF: 9 PM for next-day
DELIVERS: Mon / Wed / Fri MINIMUM: $150
ORDER VIA: text Mike 555-0119, fallback orders@valleyproduce.com
ITEM SKU PACK $/PACK PAR(M/W) PAR(F) ON HAND ORDER
Romaine 24ct 1042 case $38.50 2 3 __ __
Roma tomatoes 2210 25 lb $31.00 1 2 __ __
Yellow onion 2004 50 lb $27.25 1 1 __ __
Basil 3300 1 lb $14.00 2 2 __ __
...
Print it, laminate the header, and put a clipboard by the walk-in. Genuinely — the paper version by the door beats the beautiful spreadsheet nobody opens during a Friday count.
If you'd rather not build the spreadsheet by hand, the free order guide builder does this in the browser: vendor header, pars, on-hand counts, computed order quantities with totals, CSV download, a printable count sheet, and a copy-as-message button that turns the finished count into a ready-to-send vendor text. There's also a downloadable CSV template if you just want the spreadsheet.
Keeping it alive (where every order guide dies)
An order guide decays in three specific ways:
- Pars go stale. The menu changed, patio season started, a dish took off — and the pars still describe March. Stale pars are how you simultaneously stock out of the new best-seller and carry three cases of the thing you 86'd.
- Prices go stale. The guide says $31.00, the invoice says $36.50, and nobody notices because nobody reconciles line prices at receiving. Two points of food cost hide in this gap. (Related: why the invoice never matches the PO.)
- The guide forks. The AM manager's copy and the chef's copy drift apart, and the vendor gets two conflicting orders a week apart.
The maintenance discipline is boring and works: one owner per guide, a monthly par review against actual sales, and price updates from invoices at receiving. Almost nobody sustains it by hand — which is the honest pitch for making the order guide software instead of paper. In a closed-loop system the guide is the item-vendor catalog: pars recompute from POS sales through your recipes as demand shifts, prices update from what vendors actually confirm and invoice, the count becomes the order with pack rounding done for you, and the order goes out per vendor — text, email, or EDI — from one screen. That's the workflow LineNow runs for restaurants; the full category breakdown is in Restaurant Vendor Ordering Software.
Start with the paper template — it's a real upgrade over ordering from memory. When the maintenance stops happening, that's not a discipline failure; it's the signal you've outgrown paper.