How the daily cutoff works

Cutoff is the moment each day when customer choices become kitchen work. Before cutoff, customers pick and change meals. At cutoff, Sahen locks those choices, fills in what is missing, uses the customers' credits and freezes the orders. From that frozen set the kitchen gets its production sheet and drivers get their stops.

The daily cycle

Cutoff runs once for each delivery date. You set the deadline in Business → Operations: a time of day in your kitchen's time zone, and how many days before service it falls. By default a new kitchen's cutoff is 18:00 the evening before delivery.

For a customer who receives one drop covering several eating days, that drop's single cutoff covers all of those days. See multi-day drops.

What happens at the deadline

When the deadline passes, Sahen does four things for that delivery date:

1. Locks picks. Customers can no longer change meals for any eating day in that drop.
2. Applies defaults. Any course a customer left empty is filled from the default picks set when you published the menu. A customer's own pick is always kept.
3. Uses credits. One credit is debited per eating day. A credit is one day of service, however many courses the day holds.
4. Freezes orders. One delivery is created for each drop and one order for each eating day in it.

From those frozen orders, Sahen builds the production sheet, the delivery manifests by zone, and the bag receipts. The customer gets a single "delivery locked" email for the drop.

Cutoff only reads published menus. A day left in draft is treated as a day with no eligible meals.

Why re-running is safe

Cutoff cannot charge a customer twice or cook a day twice. Each run is recorded for one kitchen, one job and one delivery date, and that record can exist only once. Running cutoff again for the same date does nothing to days that are already frozen: it skips customers who already have an order or a recorded credit use for that day, and continues with the rest.

Credit balances are never a number someone types in. A customer's "days left" is always the sum of every purchase and every use, so you can always explain why a customer has seven days left.

Unpaid packs slide instead of freezing

A pack that is waiting for payment is a draft. Its days are not frozen and no food is cooked for it. When its next delivery reaches cutoff, the remaining days move to the next available eating day. The customer keeps every day they bought; the pack simply starts later. Once you record the payment, the pack freezes normally at its next cutoff.

Cash on first delivery

The exception is a pack set to pay cash on the first delivery. Cutoff treats it as active for its first delivery only, so that delivery is cooked and sent even though no money has been collected yet. After that first delivery, if the payment is still not collected, the pack is overdue and treated as unpaid until you mark it paid. The console shows a reminder.

What customers can still change

Cutoff only locks the drop it is running for. Customers can keep picking meals, skipping days, or adjusting their schedule for later days whose cutoff has not passed. Skipping a whole eating day costs nothing.

When something needs attention

The Cutoff page shows each day's status: whether the day is operating, whether its menu is published, the job's state and how many orders are frozen. Most problems fall into three groups.

A meal is missing for some customers

If a customer's program has no eligible meal on the delivery date's menu, Sahen will never send a plate from the wrong diet. It freezes everything else, holds that customer's day, and keeps the cutoff open to retry. Publish the missing meal and the same cutoff picks it up and freezes the held days. If the delivery date passes first, the held day is skipped without using a credit and the customer's remaining service moves to a later drop.

A customer has run out of credits

Cutoff freezes the days the customer can pay for and holds the rest the same way. Record their purchase and the held days freeze on the next retry.

The job failed or is stuck

A temporary failure retries by itself, using the same delivery date, after a short wait. A run that appears stuck for more than about five minutes is picked up again automatically. If your production sheet is still empty after the cutoff time, contact support@sahenos.com and say which delivery date is affected. The team checks the run and restarts the same date; nothing is ever charged twice.

A cutoff that finished with some customers skipped is usually not a failure: customers who skipped or paused are expected to be missing.

Before each cutoff, publish the menu and record payments you have received. Related terms are explained in the glossary.