Kitchen Dashboard
Live orders from room service, restaurant, and guests — with automatic dietary flags, recipe details, and inventory tracking. On screen the moment it's placed.
The Problem
Here's a scene that plays out in hotel kitchens across the UK every single day. A guest with a severe nut allergy checks in at reception. The receptionist writes it down. Maybe it goes into a booking system. Maybe it goes on a sticky note. Maybe the receptionist mentions it to the duty manager, who says they'll pass it on.
That evening, the guest picks up the phone and orders room service. The order comes through to the kitchen — scrawled on a docket, or shouted across the pass by a waiter who took the call. There's no mention of a nut allergy. Why would there be? The person who took the order didn't know. The booking system and the kitchen don't talk to each other. The chef starts cooking. The dish has satay sauce.
Beyond the safety risk, there's the daily operational friction. Room service orders come in by phone and get written on paper tickets. The kitchen has no idea what's coming or when. There's no way to see how long an order has been waiting. Special instructions get lost in translation between whoever took the call and whoever's cooking the food.
And then there's the waste. Food goes off because nobody's tracking what's actually being used. Stock runs low and nobody notices until service. Menu items get ordered that you've run out of — because the kitchen and the front of house are working from different versions of reality.
Your kitchen staff are professionals. The problem isn't their skill. It's that they're working without the information they need, at the moment they need it.
How It Works
Not a booking system with a kitchen tab bolted on. A dedicated interface designed for how kitchen teams actually work.
Every food order placed in your hotel — room service, restaurant, waiter app, guest portal — appears on the Kitchen Dashboard the moment it's placed. Dietary flags from the guest profile appear directly on the order card. Bold. Visible. Before the chef picks up a pan.
Four-column kanban — New, Accepted, Preparing, Ready. Tap to move orders through each stage.
Automatic allergy flags — nut allergy, coeliac, dairy-free, vegan — pulled from the guest profile and displayed in bold on every order.
Colour-coded timers — green under 15 minutes, amber 15-30, red over 30. See at a glance if anything is running long.
Special instructions — "no onion," "well done," "sauce on the side" — visible on every order card alongside the source label.
The kitchen controls what's available. Every menu item shows its dietary suitability — vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free — and can be toggled on or off with a single tap. When the sea bass is sold out at 8pm, the guest browsing room service at 8:01pm won't see it.
Dietary suitability labels — V, VG, GF, DF, NF tags on every item so chefs can check allergen suitability at a glance.
Toggle availability — mark dishes unavailable when you run out. They vanish from guest-facing menus immediately.
Edit prices and descriptions — adjust for seasonal changes, daily specials, or new dishes without waiting for a manager.
Each menu item has a linked recipe with exact ingredients, quantities, and preparation notes. Recipes connect directly to your live inventory — so you can see at a glance whether the ingredients are in stock and when perishable items expire.
Recipe detail panel — ingredients, quantities, and stock status for each dish. Critical for dietary queries and allergy checks.
Live stock levels — current quantities with use-by dates for perishable items and low-stock warning indicators.
CSV export — download stock levels and daily usage as spreadsheets for reporting, ordering, or sharing with suppliers.
Food waste costs money, and most hotel kitchens don't track it properly. Log each waste entry with item, quantity, cost, and reason. The daily summary shows exactly how much waste is costing per shift — and the data feeds into the Manager Dashboard's analytics.
Daily waste log — every waste entry tracked with item name, quantity, cost, and reason. Patterns emerge over time.
Running cost total — see how much waste is costing you per shift, per day, per week. No more guessing at food costs.
Built-in issue reporting — broken equipment or a fridge temperature climbing? Tap "Report Issue" and it goes straight to Maintenance as a tracked ticket.
| Item | Qty | Reason | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smoked Salmon | 150g | Past use-by date | £3.80 |
| Mixed Salad Leaves | 200g | Wilted — not served | £1.20 |
| Bread Rolls (6) | 6 pcs | Over-ordered — stale | £2.40 |
| Hollandaise Sauce | 300ml | Split — remake required | £1.60 |
| Chicken Breast | 400g | Incorrect prep — trimming | £3.40 |
| Daily Waste Total | £12.40 | ||
In Practice
A head chef's shift on the Kitchen Dashboard.
The head chef opens the Kitchen Dashboard on the wall-mounted screen. The greeting says "Good evening, Chef Dani" and today's date. Three KPI cards show the current state: six active orders, forty-seven items prepared today, and £12.40 in waste so far. Below that sits the live order queue — orders sorted by age, oldest first, so nothing gets forgotten.
A new order arrives from the guest portal — a Thai green curry for Room 14. The order card shows the guest name, the room number, the item, and a special instruction: "extra spicy, no prawns." Right there on the card, in bold red text: Allergy: Nut. Chef Dani sees it before touching a pan. She checks the recipe, confirms the curry paste is nut-free, substitutes the garnish, and starts prep. The guest eats dinner safely. Nobody relied on a sticky note making it from reception to the kitchen.
She also logs the day's waste: 150g of smoked salmon past its date, some wilted salad, a batch of hollandaise that split. The waste log shows a running total of £12.40 — well within budget. This data feeds straight into the Manager Dashboard analytics, so the general manager can see food cost trends without interrupting service.
At 9pm, the extractor fan starts making a grinding noise. Chef Dani taps "Report Issue," describes the problem, sets it as high priority, and it goes straight to the Maintenance App as a tracked ticket. No phone call to reception. No email that gets buried. A proper ticket with a timestamp.
There's no booking calendar. No revenue chart. No staff rota. The Kitchen Dashboard shows what the kitchen needs: what to cook, who it's for, what to watch out for, and what supplies you have to cook it with.
Connected to Everything
Reception adds a guest's dietary requirements at check-in. The Kitchen Dashboard shows those flags on every order from that guest — automatically, every time.
Guests browse the menu and place orders from their phone. Those orders appear in the kitchen in real time — no phone call, no waiter relay, no miscommunication.
Orders taken tableside on the waiter's phone appear on the Kitchen Dashboard within a second. No handwritten tickets, no walking back to a terminal, no miscommunication.
The restaurant sends table orders to the kitchen. The kitchen marks them ready, and the restaurant team sees the status change instantly. No shouting across the pass.
Kitchen data flows into the central analytics — order volumes, popular items, waste tracking, inventory levels — giving the general manager a complete picture without interrupting service.
Issue reports from the kitchen become maintenance tickets with priority levels and assignment tracking. A broken dishwasher becomes a tracked ticket, not a verbal complaint that gets forgotten.
The Kitchen Dashboard manages bar menu items alongside food items through a dedicated bar menu page. When the kitchen marks a drink ingredient as out of stock, the bar sees it. Two access points, one menu system.
This is what "connected" actually means in practice. A guest's nut allergy entered at reception shows up in the kitchen without anyone passing a message. A menu item marked as sold out in the kitchen disappears from the guest's phone. An equipment failure reported by the chef becomes a maintenance ticket with a deadline. Every app sees what it needs to see, the moment it needs to see it.
FAQ
Get Started
The Kitchen Dashboard is included in every Prisma plan — from the £49/month B&B tier to Enterprise. Every feature described on this page is available at every price. No add-ons. No upgrades required.
No credit card. No contract. No setup fees. Full access to every feature — including the Kitchen Dashboard — at every tier.
Prisma is a UK hotel management platform with 10 purpose-built department apps. Kitchen Dashboard is one of ten dedicated applications included in every plan. Pricing starts at £49/month for properties with up to 10 rooms.
