The wedding catering & bar starter

Two facts shape a catering business and no generic workflow has anywhere to put either of them: the tasting sits between the quote and the booking, and the guaranteed head count is a deadline with money attached. This starter is built around both.

Who it is for

Wedding caterers, private chefs, bar services, and dessert or cake studios — anyone pricing per person and ordering food against a number.

The workflow it installs

Ten phases:

New inquiry → Menu consultation → Tasting scheduled → Tasting complete → Proposal sent → Booked → Final count confirmed → Ordering & prep → Event day → Wrapped up

The tasting gets two phases, not one, because the work after a tasting — writing down every change they asked for and re-quoting — is where menus quietly drift away from their price.

Final count confirmed is the phase that protects your margin. Its checklist records the guaranteed head count, confirms the count of each special plate, and issues the balance invoice. The New inquiry checklist asks you to check the venue's kitchen access and outside-catering rules before you spend an afternoon designing a menu you cannot cook there.

Fields installed: service style, estimated guest count, guaranteed head count, final count due date, bar service arrangement, kitchen and power access, service staff booked, who supplies rentals, and the load-in window.

What it asks your clients

Three forms:

• Catering inquiry — a public form asking the date, the venue's kitchen, a guest estimate, the service style, the bar arrangement, and any dietary needs they already know about.
• Menu and dietary details — menu direction, dishes to include and avoid, course count, then a structured multi-select of dietary types (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, nut and shellfish and egg allergies, kosher, halal, pescatarian, medical diets) and a separate free-text section for life-threatening allergies naming the guest and the allergen. Then timing, venue contact, and who supplies the rentals.
• Final guest count — the guaranteed adult count, children's and vendor meals, and the count of each special plate, with allergy plates listed one line per guest with name and table.

Severe allergies are deliberately captured separately from preferences, because they are handled differently: separate prep, separate labelling, handed to the guest by name.

The agreement it installs

A catering and bar agreement covering the things a generic services contract never mentions: the guaranteed-count deadline and that the invoice is calculated on the guaranteed count or the number served, whichever is greater; late additions; allergy handling and an honest trace-allergen disclaimer; ingredient price movement handled by proposal rather than silently; venue access, kitchen, power, water, and waste; service overtime; alcohol licensing whether you supply it or pour theirs; rental responsibility; and why leftover food held at service temperature is not released.

Cancellation after the guaranteed-count deadline makes the balance payable, because the food, rentals, and staff are already committed.

The agreement says plainly that it is a starting point and not legal advice. Food service and alcohol rules vary enormously by jurisdiction — have qualified counsel adapt it.

The reminders it drafts

Five recipes, installed as drafts for you to review before activating:

• A new inquiry gets a same-day acknowledgement and a task to price a menu direction.
• A signed agreement moves the event to Booked and diaries the final-count deadline immediately.
• Three weeks out, the final-count form and a portal request go to the client.
• Two weeks out, you are alerted if the count is still missing, the event moves to Ordering & prep, and an urgent food-order task appears.
• Three days out, a task to confirm load-in and kitchen access with the venue directly.

Date-relative recipes read the project's Event date field. The inquiry form's event date question sets it automatically as soon as a lead comes in, so these are ready out of the box. A project started another way still needs the date set on the record by hand.

What it does not do

• Automations cannot branch on the head count. Conditions can check the stage, the event date, and invoice status, but not a custom field, so "alert me if the guaranteed count dropped by more than ten" is not something a recipe can decide. The recipes alert you to check instead.
• Dietary counts are not per-guest records. They are questionnaire answers and project fields, not a seating-chart data model.
• It does not price anything. The service page ships per-person tiers with example numbers.

Make it yours

Everything installed is a normal editable record owned by your workspace. Change the phases, rewrite the dietary list, adjust the agreement, and edit any automation before you activate it. Reset restores untouched defaults; Uninstall removes only untouched, unused ones.