Why catering belongs in your ordering platform
Most restaurants treat catering as an afterthought — phone calls, email chains, paper invoices. That works until it doesn't, usually right around the moment a 50-guest deposit goes uncollected and you eat the food cost.
The Bill model already does most of the work
Ordering.Tools' Bill state machine handles deposits, partial payments, audit logs, and Stripe capture. Catering reuses all of it — we just added a quote-pending phase and event-date scheduling.
Lead time is non-negotiable
A regular order goes to the kitchen in 15 minutes. A catering order needs prep, plating, transport. Server-side lead-time enforcement means a customer can't accidentally book lunch tomorrow for 80 people.
Recurring is where the margin is
One-off catering events are nice. Office lunch contracts are revenue you can forecast. The recurring engine is the difference between catering as a side hustle and catering as a real revenue line.
Pricing flexibility matters
Pack-size multipliers, per-product minimum quantities, custom non-menu line items, deposit percent overrides — all the levers a real caterer pulls when shaping a quote.