Practical resources for better restaurant operations.

The library is built to mix a few formats so each resource arrives in the shape that actually suits it. Reference material and long-form guides tend to be PDFs you can read, print and pass around. Anything with numbers in it — a costing sheet, a rota planner, a stocktake template — tends to be a spreadsheet, usually an XLSX you can open in the common spreadsheet apps and edit in place. A handful of items are interactive, meant to be filled in or worked through rather than just read. The important caveat is that the format labels shown on the cards on this page are examples chosen to illustrate the range, not a guarantee for any specific item, so please confirm the actual format on the resource itself before you plan around it — a guide you expect as a spreadsheet might be a PDF, or the reverse. If you need a particular resource in a format it does not currently come in, tell us through the contact page; we cannot promise every conversion, but it is a reasonable thing to ask and worth flagging.

No — and this is the one answer on the page worth reading slowly. Everything in this library is educational: practical starting points, worked examples and checklists meant to help you think a problem through and get organised faster than starting from a blank page. None of it is legal, tax, employment, food-safety or health-code advice, and none of it should be treated as a compliant document you can adopt as-is and rely on. The rules that actually bind you depend on where you trade — they differ between countries, and often between a state, a province or a city — and they change over time, which is exactly the sort of thing a general resource cannot track for your specific situation. So use these as a prompt and a scaffold, not as an authority. Before you rely on anything here for a decision that carries legal, financial or safety weight, take your specific circumstances and your specific jurisdiction to the relevant authority or a qualified professional — an accountant, a lawyer, your local licensing or environmental-health office — and let them confirm what applies to you. Downloading a checklist from this page does not make your business compliant, and we would ask you not to read it as saying otherwise.

Yes — that is the whole point of them. These resources are meant to be adapted, not framed on a wall. Take a template, strip out what does not fit, add the lines that match how your own site actually runs, change the numbers to your own, and reshape a checklist around your menu, your suppliers and your rota. A costing sheet built around a generic menu is only useful once your own dishes and prices are in it; a stocktake template earns its keep when it matches what actually sits on your shelves. Two things to keep in mind while you do. The first is that once you have adapted a resource, it is your document, and you are responsible for checking that it is accurate and appropriate for your situation before you run your business on it — a formula you did not verify, or a checklist item that does not apply where you trade, is now yours to catch. The second is the point from the compliance answer above: adapting a resource does not turn it into advice, so where a decision carries legal, tax or safety weight, verify it with the relevant authority or a professional rather than trusting the template. Beyond that, make them yours.

New resources are added to the library over time rather than on a fixed timetable, so the honest answer is that it grows steadily as we build things worth sharing rather than to a schedule we can promise you a date against. The counts and the set of items shown on this page are an illustrative snapshot, not a live feed, so treating them as the current, complete contents of the library will mislead you — the practical way to know what is available now is simply to look at the library itself, and to ask if something you need is not there. And yes, you can absolutely request one. If there is a guide, template or checklist you wish existed — a planner for a particular job, a checklist for a part of the operation we have not covered, a resource in a format that would suit you better — tell us through the contact page. We cannot commit to building every request, and we cannot put a date on the ones we do take on, but the requests genuinely shape what gets made next, and the resource you ask for is often one other operators would use too.