How to track your orders' average prep time

What the Dashboard actually measures

Average prep time is one of the four cards at the top of the Restaurant Dashboard. It takes the orders the kitchen completed today, measures how long each one took from being sent to being ready, averages them and shows the result in minutes. Below comes the line that explains the number: how many orders went into the calculation and the house target you set.

Each order gets two time stamps. The send time is saved when the waiter taps Send to kitchen; the completion time, when the whole order becomes Ready on the display. The calculation covers the current day and resets at midnight. An order still in the station's queue isn't counted — it only shows up in the average after it's marked done, and until an order has been completed the card shows no data today.

Why this number matters day to day

• You see the bottleneck the same day. The current day's average moves while the dining room is full. If it went up from lunch to dinner, you can shift people around or slow the dining room's pace that same day, instead of finding the problem only at the end of the month.
• The target becomes an agreement with the team. A number on the screen is easier to talk about than "the kitchen is slow". The house target always appears next to the actual time, so everyone knows the goal and how far off today was.
• The guest gets a more honest forecast. The table page shows a "Ready in about N min" calculated from your restaurant's real history. A faster kitchen turns into a shorter promise to the guest, without you touching anything.
• The number gives away a forgotten order. The cycle only closes when the last item goes out, including one from another station. An oddly high average with few completed orders is almost always a card stuck on the display, waiting for someone to mark it READY.
• Measuring doesn't change your routine or cost anything. qmen.us is free for the restaurant, with no commission per order, and runs in the browser — there's no app to install. The measuring happens on its own with the same buttons the waiter and the kitchen already use.

How to track average prep time in 7 steps

Seven steps: find the number on the Dashboard, say what your target is and understand exactly where the clock starts and where it stops.

1. Open the Dashboard and find the card

   Go to the Restaurant Dashboard. The top strip of the screen has four cards — Active orders, Occupied tables (or tabs, if that's what your restaurant calls them), Revenue today and Average prep time. The last one shows a big number in min and, below it, how many completed orders went into the calculation and the house target. If nobody has completed an order today, no data today appears instead of the number. The Dashboard updates itself while it stays open, so you can leave it in a tab and glance at it now and then.

2. Set your house target

   Open Settings and scroll to the end of the General block: that's where the Prep time target (min) field is. It comes filled in with 18 and accepts 1 to 240 minutes. Tap Save and that's it, the target starts appearing on the Dashboard next to the day's actual time. Pick a number your kitchen hits on a normal day, not the dream: the target is a reference for reading the number, not a promise to the guest.

3. Understand where the clock starts

   Each order's count starts at Send to kitchen, the button in the waiter app. While the order is in Draft, nothing is measured — the time the waiter spends chatting and building the list is left out. An order the customer builds on their own through the chat counts the same way: what matters is the send. And a new item added later to an order already sent goes in as an addition to the same order, without starting a new clock.

4. Close the cycle on the kitchen display

   The clock stops when the whole order becomes Ready. With Complete item by item on in Settings, each line on the display gets the READY? button; with it off, the card has a single ORDER READY? for the whole order. Either way, the cycle only closes when the last item goes out, including one from another station: if the bar's drink is forgotten in the queue, it holds up the whole dining room's average.

5. Read the number together with the sample

   Always look at the big number and the line below it together. Three completed orders, one of them forgotten on the display, are enough to push the day's average way up; thirty orders tell a much firmer story. The calculation covers the current day and resets at midnight — it's there for you to act today, in the middle of the rush, not to close the month.

   Tip: An order still on the display doesn't count toward the average. An order sent at noon and marked ready at 12:50 doesn't appear in the 12:30 figure: it only counts after the station marks it done.

6. Compare with other days in Reports

   To see a trend instead of a single day, use Reports, the button at the top of the Dashboard next to Settings. There the Prep time card shows the average for the chosen period — 7 days, 30 days or 90 days —, the change from the previous period and a small day-by-day chart. Below it, the same reference repeats: average · target X min.

7. See how it shows up on the guest's page

   On the page the guest opens through the Table QR code, the tracker says Ready in about N min while the kitchen works. That N isn't your target: it comes from your restaurant's last 60 completed orders, and we use a value from the high end of the range instead of the average, so we don't promise too short. Only when your restaurant doesn't yet have at least five completed orders does the target take its place. With less than two minutes left, the text changes to Ready any minute now.

Frequently asked questions

Glossary

Dashboard

The owner's screen, at qmen.us/restaurante/painel/, with active orders, occupied tables, today's revenue and a shortcut to Settings.

Send to kitchen

The button that sends everything on hold at once. On an order that was already sent, those items go as an addition to the same order.

Kitchen

The display where orders show up and move from Preparing to READY.

Kitchen display

The wall screen that shows that prep station's queue live, protected by a password.

Ready

An item's status after the prep station marks it done; the waiter is alerted right away.

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