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Recipes

Most spreadsheet review is the same file arriving again. A recipe captures everything you set up the first time and reapplies it to next month's export in one click — so the work of configuring a review is done once rather than every close.

What a recipe stores

A recipe is a named snapshot of how a file should be treated:

• Column roles — every correction you made to how columns were classified
• Quality check settings — the checks you switched off because they were noise for this particular file
• Computed columns — the derived columns you added, as formulas
• Dashboard and report configuration — card order, hidden cards, KPI goals, chart choices
• Branding — what appears on exported reports

It also remembers the column headers it was saved against, which is how it recognises the same report next month.

The privacy invariant

That matters because recipes are the one thing in Prism designed to be shared. A colleague can take your month-end setup without receiving any client data along with it, and an exported .prismcfg file is safe to email or commit to a repository.

Using one

1. Set a file up properly once. Fix the roles, disable the checks that do not apply, add the computed columns you want, arrange the dashboard.
2. Save it as a recipe from the sidebar and give it a name you will recognise — "Supplier ledger, monthly" beats "Recipe 1".
3. Open next month's file. Prism compares its headers against your saved recipes and, when one clearly fits, offers to apply it.
4. Apply it. Roles, checks, computed columns and report configuration all land at once, and Prism reports what it applied.

How matching works

Files are matched on the set of column headers, not their order. Prism scores the overlap between the recipe's headers and the file's headers, and offers the best recipe scoring above 0.6 — roughly "clearly the same shape of file", while tolerating a column or two being added, dropped or renamed.

Column order does not matter. If a source system reorders its export, the recipe still matches.

When a recipe only partly fits, Prism says so by name rather than applying it silently — you are told which configured columns were not found in this file, so a renamed column shows up as something you decide about instead of a setting that quietly stopped working.

Why this is the part that saves real time

The first review of a file is genuinely analytical work. The second is mostly re-doing setup: re-fixing the same three misread columns, re-disabling the same check that always fires on the same optional field, re-adding the same computed column.

That repeated work is what a recipe removes. It also makes the results comparable — this month's quality score reflects the same configuration as last month's, so a movement in the number means something changed in the data rather than in your settings.

Managing them

From the Recipes panel in the sidebar you can apply, rename, delete, export or import. Recipes live in your browser's local storage on that device, like everything else. Exporting one as a .prismcfg file is how you move it to another machine or hand it to a colleague — there is no cloud sync, because there is no cloud.