How the Automated Meal Counter Works in Dormefy

Dormefy counts mess meals automatically by applying each resident's default meal pattern every day, letting residents toggle individual meals on or off from their phone until a cutoff time you set, and building the daily total in real time. Nobody keeps a tally sheet, and nobody reconstructs the month from memory.

Default meal patterns

Every resident has a default pattern — which meals they take on a normal day. Dormefy applies it automatically each morning, so a resident who eats lunch and dinner every day never has to touch the app unless something changes. This is the difference between an automated counter and a digital tally sheet: the system assumes the routine and only asks humans about the exceptions.

Set the pattern when you add the resident, and change it whenever their routine changes. The pattern is per-person, so a dorm can mix full-board residents with people who only take dinner.

One-tap ON/OFF toggles

When a resident is going home for the weekend or skipping dinner, they toggle the meal off themselves. The manager and cook are notified instantly, the daily count updates at the same moment, and the resident's bill stops accruing for meals they will not eat. Guest meals work the same way in reverse — turning a meal on adds it to today's count and to the ledger.

Because the resident makes the change directly, nothing depends on a message being relayed. The count the cook sees is the count the residents created.

Cutoff times

A meal count is only useful if it is final when the shopping happens. Dormefy lets you define the deadline after which meals can no longer be changed for that day. The cutoff enforces itself: after it passes, toggles for today are locked, the shopping list is stable, and late changes cannot distort the ledger. Pick a cutoff that matches when your cook actually buys — a dorm that shops at 7 a.m. wants an earlier cutoff than one that shops after lunch.

Real-time totals and the month-end bill

Every confirmed meal is counted the moment it happens, so the manager always knows how many people are eating tonight and exactly what the month owes so far. The advanced meal counter can also project counts across an entire month for planning.

At month end there is nothing to compute. Per-resident consumption already exists in the ledger, deposits have been netted against it continuously, and the itemised bill is generated from the same records every resident has been able to check all month. Most billing disputes disappear because the numbers were never hidden — see how rent, deposits, and billing fit together.

Next steps

• Track rent, deposits, and expenses
• Set up your dorm from scratch