Canteen management in one traceable flow.
A staff canteen repeats the same cycle every day: plan the menu, count who is eating, record who brought a guest, check whether the kitchen meets safety standards, and then ask why the cost per head keeps drifting. Each of those steps tends to live in a different spreadsheet or on a different person's phone. Tenderely BPM ties daily menus, attendance, guest meal approvals and food safety records into one structured flow — without code — so the answers are there before the auditor asks.
What does a canteen operation repeat every day?
01
Planning the daily menu
A menu has to be set, communicated and confirmed before the kitchen can order ingredients. When the plan changes at the last minute and nobody is told, food is wasted and complaints follow.
02
Recording who is eating
Counting meals served is the basis for every cost and procurement calculation. A head count done on paper or by memory is always approximate and usually wrong.
03
Calculating cost per head
The finance team and the canteen contractor both want to know what a single meal costs this month. When attendance figures and invoices live in separate files, reconciliation is a manual project.
04
Guest and visitor meals
An employee bringing a guest to lunch needs clearance, and the cost needs to be attributed to the right department. Without a formal step, those meals simply disappear from the accounts.
05
Food safety checks
Temperature logs, hygiene inspections and sample records have to exist in writing. During an audit, a missing or illegible paper log becomes the finding.
06
Contractor and invoice review
Whether the contractor delivered what was agreed — the right number of meals, the right quality — needs to be signed off, not assumed. Disputes without records are hard to settle.
Where does this break down today?
Attendance is guesswork
Sign-in sheets get lost, counters are misread and sick-day adjustments are made from memory. The figure that reaches finance is an estimate, so the cost per head is an estimate too.
Guest meals are invisible
There is no approval step, so there is no record. The department that sponsored the guest never sees the charge, and the canteen operator cannot reconcile the difference between planned and served meals.
Food safety records are paper
Temperature logs filled in by hand are hard to retrieve, easy to falsify and impossible to aggregate. An auditor asking for three months of records means someone searching through folders.
Costs only make sense at month end
By the time the invoice is received, matched against the attendance log and broken down by department, the month is already over. Any overspend is discovered too late to correct.
What changes with Tenderely BPM
01
Attendance becomes structured data
Meals served are entered on a grid against each day and each meal type. Because the figures are in one record, cost per head is calculated from real numbers, not estimates.
02
Guest meal approval is a step in the flow
The request goes to the responsible manager, the approval is recorded, and the cost is attributed to the right department automatically. Nothing slips through uncounted.
03
Food safety checks are on the record
Temperature readings, hygiene inspections and sample results are entered into a structured form. When an auditor asks for the last quarter, the records are searched and exported, not hunted through folders.
04
Approval steps chase themselves
Give a step an SLA and it sends a reminder when time runs out. A pending guest meal approval or a missing safety check does not wait quietly for someone to notice.
05
Costs are visible now, not at month end
With Tenderely BPM, daily attendance and approved guest meals feed a dashboard, so cost per head and department-level spend are visible throughout the month, not only after the invoice arrives.
06
Approvals happen on mobile
A manager who is out of the office approves a guest meal or reviews a food safety escalation from the iOS or Android app with a single tap. The flow does not stall while they are away.
FAQ
Can we give the canteen contractor access without exposing internal data?
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Yes. A contractor can be connected as an external user with access limited to exactly the records relevant to them — daily menus, attendance confirmations and their own invoices — and nothing else inside your workspace.
Can employees submit their own meal preferences or dietary requirements?
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Yes. A public or internal form can be published for employees to submit preferences, allergies or special meal requests. Those submissions land as structured records that the kitchen team can act on directly.
How does the food safety check record hold up in an audit?
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Every entry is timestamped, attributed to the person who made it and stored with a full audit history that shows whether it was edited and by whom. The record cannot be quietly revised after the fact, which is exactly what an auditor needs to see.
Can different departments see only their own meal costs?
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Yes. Role- and unit-based permissions mean a department head sees the attendance and cost figures for their own team, while finance sees the full picture. No configuration requires code.
Is there a ready-made setup or do we start from scratch?
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The Canteen Management package opens with forms, approval flows and a dashboard already in place, so a working setup is available within minutes. You then adjust menus, approval chains and check templates to match how your canteen actually operates.