What a Production Record Is

A production record (PR) is the daily document for one meal at one site. It captures what was planned, what was actually prepared, what was served, and what was left over. PRs are how Gaia keeps your inventory accurate and how your district meets recordkeeping requirements for USDA programs.

Each PR is created automatically from the published menu plan for a given school, meal, and date. You don't create PRs manually — they appear in the weekly production view on the day they're scheduled.

PR Lifecycle

A PR moves through several stages from planning to close-out:

Draft — The PR is open for editing. Forecasts are entered, and after-service actuals (Prepared, Damaged, Discarded, Leftover) are filled in here.
Confirmed — The forecast has been confirmed. Inventory is committed against this PR so the readiness status (Ready / Insufficient) reflects what you'll need.
Submitted — The PR is final. Inventory deductions are applied to on-hand quantities, and any leftover recipes can be assigned expiry dates and added to your leftover inventory.

Once submitted, a PR can only be reopened by a director for the district. Reach out to your director if a correction is needed.

Where to Find PRs

Weekly production view — Shows one production card per meal per day. Each card is a summary of the underlying PR. From the card you can forecast, confirm, open the detail view, print, or run a scan.
Detail view (PR table) — The full grid where you enter actuals after service, view ingredient breakdowns, and submit the record.

Which Menus Appear on a Site's PRs

A site's production records show every menu plan assigned to that site. You control what appears by managing which menus are assigned to the site on the menu plan. If a school should only have certain menus, assign only those.

A common pitfall: assigning a menu directly to the Central Kitchen (instead of to the schools) makes that menu appear on the Central Kitchen's own PRs, on top of the consolidated production it already aggregates from the schools. If you only need a place to enter district-wide totals, ask your Gaia contact for a dedicated forecasting site rather than assigning menus to the Central Kitchen.

Entering Actuals

After service, fill in the required columns on each recipe row:

Prepared, Damaged, Discarded, and Leftover are required for each recipe.
Served is calculated automatically (Served = Prepared - Discarded - Damaged - Leftover).
Point of Sale totals (A la Carte, Child, Adult) are required — enter 0 if a category doesn't apply.

Cell edits save instantly. Inventory is not recalculated on every keystroke — press the Calculate Inventory button when you're ready to refresh the Used column for each ingredient. Notes you typed are preserved when Calculate Inventory runs.

Entering a PR by Scan

Instead of typing actuals into the PR table, you can scan a paper PR with your phone. Gaia's ScanAI reads handwriting via OCR and fills the table for you. See Using ScanAI for handwriting and lighting tips.

How PRs Affect Inventory

When the forecast is confirmed, the required ingredients are committed against on-hand inventory. The readiness status on each recipe (Ready / Insufficient) accounts for both on-hand stock and placed orders.
When the PR is submitted, the Used column is deducted from inventory on hand.
Any leftover recipes with expiry dates assigned at submit time are added to your leftover inventory and become available to add to a future PR.

Central Kitchen PRs

For Central Kitchens, the CK PR aggregates the production from all schools the CK serves. The CK PR is kept in sync with order activity and the underlying school PRs as orders are placed, edited, and received. See Manage Central Kitchen Production.

If a PR Isn't Reflecting the Menu

If you've assigned a menu to a site but its production records aren't showing the expected items — or a published change isn't appearing — you can reset the week to the published menu:

Open the weekly production view for that site.
Open the Tools menu and select Reset Week to Published Menu.
Confirm, then refresh after a minute.

Note: Resetting returns all unforecasted production records for the week to the menu plan and discards any manually added items for that week. Forecasts you've already entered are kept.