How to add catering to your restaurant or café

To add catering, decide first what you will and will not do (collection, delivery or staff on site, how many guests, how much notice), then price every job from written rules rather than a guess, take a deposit when the customer says yes and the balance before the day. On Mosey you switch catering on, mark which menu items are sold for catering, and every request, quote, payment and prep sheet sits in one place in your dashboard, with the money paid to your own Stripe account.

Is catering worth it for a small restaurant or café?

Usually, if you do it on your terms. Your kitchen already has the equipment, the suppliers and the people. A tray of sandwiches for an office on a Wednesday uses prep time you were paying for anyway, and a christening on a Sunday morning lands before your lunch service starts.

The trouble is rarely the cooking. It is everything around it:

• A quote written on the back of an order pad that undercharges for the drive and the extra pair of hands.
• A customer who adds twenty guests the night before.
• A balance you end up chasing a week after the plates came back.

Fix those and catering pays. Leave them and it eats a Saturday.

Decide what you cater before you price anything

Write down the limits first. Every one you skip becomes a phone call later.

• How you cater. Collection, delivery, or staffed, where your team serves on site. If you deliver, set a radius: a customer further away cannot ask for delivery at all.
• Group size. A minimum and a maximum number of guests. Twelve sandwiches is a lunch order; two hundred is a different kitchen.
• Notice. The minimum number of hours between a request and the event. Be honest about your ordering cycle: if your bread supplier needs a day, so do you.
• Occasions. Office lunches, meetings, birthdays, christenings, communions, funerals, Christmas parties and more. Tick the ones you want; leave them all unticked and you are shown for every occasion.
• The menu. On Mosey, each catering item is marked in Menu Builder as sold per head, as a platter or tray that serves a set number of people, or each by the piece. A catering item comes off Order Ahead and Delivery automatically, so a forty-person tray never turns up in somebody's Tuesday collection order.

How do you quote a catering job without undercharging?

Most underquoting comes from the costs that are not food: the drive, the staff, the Saturday, the small order that was barely worth the van. Write those down once as rules and let every quote start from them.

Mosey has five kinds of pricing rule:

• Travel: a charge per kilometre after a free distance, or set fees by distance zone.
• Staffing: staff hours for a staffed event, from how many guests one person looks after, their hourly rate and the hours.
• Surcharge: a percentage or a fixed amount on certain days or occasions.
• Minimum spend: tops the food up to a floor, so a small order still covers the trip.
• Service charge: a percentage of the food.

Rules are internal by default. They fill in your quote builder, where you can still change any line, and the customer sees only the quote itself. You can choose to show a rule if you want customers to know about it in advance.

Use the menu price calculator for the per-head and platter prices themselves. Catering portions are not restaurant portions, so do not copy your à la carte prices across.

Take a deposit, then the balance, without chasing anyone

You set four things once:

• Deposit. A percentage, paid when the customer accepts your quote. Set it to zero and the booking is confirmed straight away, with everything due as the balance.
• Balance due. How many days before the event the rest is due. The customer is sent a payment link for it, and if it is still unpaid the day before, you are told.
• Quote validity. How long a quote stays open. An accepted quote whose deposit is never paid expires, and the date is freed.
• Changes cut-off. How many hours before the event the customer can still change numbers or the menu, so you can shop and prep against a list that will not move.

Nothing is ever charged automatically. A change after confirmation is a revised quote the customer accepts or declines; if they decline, the accepted quote stands, and if the new figure is below what they have paid, the difference goes back. After the event you can send a final adjustment: an extra for the bottles they added on the day, or a reduction when fewer guests came than were booked.

The conversation about all of it runs in the chat you already have with that customer in your inbox, so the quote and the questions are in one place.

What happens if a catering booking is cancelled?

You set refund tiers: how much of what the customer has paid comes back, depending on how close to the event they cancel. Three weeks out costs you little; two days out costs you the shopping. Price the tiers to match.

If you cancel, the customer is refunded in full, always. That is the right rule and it is a good reason to set your notice and group size honestly in the first place.

From quote to prep sheet

A confirmed booking goes on your catering calendar, a month at a time, or as a list when you open it on your phone.

For the kitchen, each booking has a prep sheet built from the quote the customer accepted, not their first request: every item and quantity, the date and time, the address, the contact and their phone, the service style, the number of staff, dietary notes and, where guests filled them in, a count of each requirement. Print it and pin it at the pass.

Office customers need paperwork. Each payment has a VAT invoice carrying your VAT number from your Stripe account and their purchase order number if they gave one, and a refunded payment says so on its invoice.

Catering has its own analytics too: requests, bookings, average order, how many quotes became bookings, cancellations, repeat customers and your typical reply time.

What catering on Mosey costs

• 3% commission on the catering total, plus 23% VAT on that commission.
• A booking fee for the customer, added on top of your quote and capped however large the order.
• Stripe's card fee, passed on at cost.

No monthly fee, and nothing to pay until you are paid. The money goes to your own Stripe account; see how payouts work.

Catering ratings are kept apart from your main star rating. Customers rate the job on its own terms, including value for money and whether the price matched the quote, and you can reply to every one.

Switch it on in an afternoon

1. Switch catering on in your account's features. Owners and managers can quote; other staff cannot, because a quote sets a price.
2. Fill in your catering settings: styles, radius, guests, notice, deposit, balance, cut-off and refund tiers.
3. Mark your catering items in Menu Builder.
4. Add your travel, staffing and minimum-spend rules.
5. Write your description. Once catering is on and at least one item is marked for it, your page on Mosey shows that you offer catering.

For big parties eaten at your own tables rather than delivered, see private hire and large group bookings.

Claim your business free and switch catering on, or See pricing.