It's a good idea to use a patchbay to the recorder inputs, that way if you want to patch in a compressor or some other device after the pre you can easily. Usually the group outputs of the board are run the the patchbay and normalled to the recorder inputs so that you can take any channel to any recorder input as well.
The recorder outputs would then be also be run into the patchbay and normalled to the tape inputs of the board. This is handy if you want to re-amp something. You can take the output of the recorder and run it into an amp, and feed the studio with it, or a guitar amp, etc.