- What is Census Forecasting?
- Forecast Exceptions for Census Forecasting
- Manually Adjusting Census Forecasting Amounts
- Tutorial Video - Census Forecasting Method (2:01)
What is Census Forecasting?
Census forecasting generates serving amounts of each menu item equal to the diet order census in your account.
Census forecasting is commonly used if your account does not have people profiles in the system, such as would be the case with an adult daycare.
Alternatively, census forecasting may be used when there are people in the system, but their assigned service types are non-select, so that the system can automatically calculate the forecasting. For example, some locations commonly have breakfast as non-select, but lunch and dinner are select (i.e. advanced ordering or table select).
What is the Diet Order Census?
The diet order census is the number of diet orders (i.e., diet type and texture type combinations) a dining area supports and is used in forecasting calculations and production reports so that production staff know the servings of each menu item to produce.
The diet order census is built by diet order assignments to people (who in turn are assigned to dining areas). For example, you have 20 people with the house diet type/regular texture type, three people with the vegetarian diet type/regular texture type, and two people with the house diet type/mechanical soft texture type.
In addition, or alternatively, the diet order census can consist of a dining area set up with a manual diet order census.
Forecast Exceptions for Census Forecasting
The census forecast method allows you to configure "forecast exceptions" to apply either percentages forecasting or total needed forecasting, or not apply a forecasting, to a special event menu, an also available menu, or a liquid menu. See Creating "Forecast Exception" for Special Event, an Also Available, or a Liquid Menu to create a forecast exception.
Manually Adjusting Census Forecasting Amounts
With the census forecast method, it is expected for you to access the forecasting worksheets and manually adjust the serving amounts based on your estimations. To do so, see Manually Adjusting Forecasting Amounts on a Worksheet.