What goes on a catering work order
The kitchen and the service team work from the sheet, and it carries things no invoice ever would: who has a nut allergy, what time the speeches are, and whether there is a working oven at the venue. Any one of those missing turns a good event into a bad one.
- The event: date, venue, guest count, and service times
- The menu, course by course, with quantities
- Dietary requirements and allergies, by guest where known
- The venue’s facilities: kitchen, power, water, refrigeration, access
- The timeline: arrival, setup, service, speeches, clearing
- Staff, with arrival times and who is running the floor
- What is being brought, and what is being collected afterwards
The sample line items and example prices this sheet opens with are on the catering invoice template — the same table, which is about the trade rather than about this paper, so it lives in one place rather than on all six.
What you get
A PDF, and a link your customer can open in any browser. Word and Excel versions are not available yet — if a spreadsheet is what you need, this is not yet the tool for it, and saying so is cheaper for both of us than you finding out after typing everything in.
Pick how it looks
Six looks, from a plain classic sheet through a bold top band to a shop ticket, and your initials go on automatically until you upload a logo. See all six.
How to send it
Most customers want the paper on their phone, so the work order goes out by WhatsApp, text or email, or as a link that needs no app and no account on their side. Or download the PDF to print it or keep it for your own records.
Questions
How should allergies be recorded?
By guest, by seat where there is a plan, and separately from the general dietary list. A vegetarian who gets the wrong plate is disappointed; a guest with a nut allergy who does is an emergency, and the two should not sit on the same line of the same sheet.
Why record the venue’s facilities?
Because a menu that needs an oven is not deliverable at a venue with a sink and a table. Checking is part of the job; writing it on the sheet is what stops the kitchen planning around equipment that will not be there.