Running the centre
Headcount forecast
A headcount forecast is the estimate of how many people will eat at each sitting, built from who lives in the residence, who has said they will not come and how each day of the week usually behaves. It is the number the kitchen uses to decide how much to prepare.
Also known ascovers forecast · meal count · kitchen forecast · number of servings
How it is used in a residence
The kitchen works with two numbers. One is the count: everyone who lives in the residence minus the cancellations, packed lunches and nights away that have been reported. The other is what actually happens, which never quite matches, because there is always someone who does not say. A Monday is not like a Friday, and exam week is not like the week everyone comes back from holiday. A Sunday in a long weekend, even less so.
A useful forecast starts from the count, corrects it with what has been seen on the same day in other weeks, and says by how much it tends to be wrong. It is fed by the dining-hall cancellation, the packed lunch and the room rack, and the better people report, the less it has to guess. How Bedel calculates it is explained in dining hall.
Worth knowing
What people take for granted: that the count is the real number. The count only includes people who report. Whoever does not come and says nothing still counts as eating, and no system knows otherwise without a check at the dining-hall door.
Related terms
- Room rackA room rack is the grid that crosses rooms or people with the days of the month and shows who occupies each bed each night. In student accommodation it usually lives in a reception spreadsheet, and arrivals, departures and nights away are all read from it.
- Packed lunchA packed lunch, in a residence dining hall, is the lunch or dinner the kitchen prepares to take away instead of serving it at the table, for residents who have class, a placement or an exam at that time. It is ordered in advance and replaces that meal's serving.
- Dining-hall cancellationA dining-hall cancellation is the notice that someone will not have lunch or dinner at a particular sitting. It is given before the cut-off time the residence sets, so the kitchen prepares the right number of servings instead of throwing away the ones nobody collects.