Catering Software That Tracks Orders, Menus & Payments.

An order passes through eight steps: enquiry, tasting, quote, token, final menu and guest count, purchase list, cooking and dispatch, settlement. Software earns its price by stopping the usual leaks between steps. A menu changes after the quote and nobody reprices it. The guest count moves from 300 to 340 on the night before. An advance lands in a family member's personal UPI and never reaches the books. The dispatch list lives in the head of the person who is off sick. The workbook on this page starts with an enquiry log. Its sample has ten enquiries, three of them at token or confirmed, a 30% win rate and ₹15,58,500 of open pipeline, plus a column that tells you who to call today.

Take a 350-guest engagement dinner in Pune at ₹1,150 a plate, which is ₹4,02,500. Two live counters at ₹22,000 each add ₹44,000, service staff add ₹28,000 and transport and setup add ₹9,000. The subtotal is ₹4,83,500, GST at 5% is ₹24,175, and the invoice is ₹5,07,675. Put a minimum guarantee of 300 plates in the quote, so the family pays for at least that many even if fewer arrive. Collect the money in three parts: ₹1,26,919 as the token, ₹2,53,838 after the final menu and ₹1,26,918 two days before the event. When the host adds 40 guests, the quote should reprice in seconds and show the new balance, not wait for a phone call.

Quote against your cost, not against the neighbour's price. In the workbook's sizer, the core cooking items for the same 350 guests come to ₹73 a plate. Starters, sweets, ice cream, beverages and counter items add about ₹300, so raw material is ₹373, or 32.4% of the ₹1,150 plate rate. That leaves ₹777 a plate to cover cooks, stewards, gas, transport, crockery, overheads and profit. If a client asks for ₹1,000 a plate, you can see at once that ₹627 remains and decide whether the event still pays. A system that only prints proposals cannot do this. One that holds your recipe costs can show the margin while you are still on the phone.

Grocery sizing is the part caterers do from memory and the part that loses money quietly. For 350 guests with an 8% buffer, the sample norms give 34 kg of basmati rice at 90 g raw per guest, 11.3 kg of toor dal, 17 kg of paneer, 60.5 kg of mixed vegetables and 9.5 litres of oil, about ₹25,708 of core items. These norms are starting points. Cooking expansion, the number of dishes and regional taste all move them, so weigh your own last three events and overwrite the grams. The stakes are easy to state. A habitual 10% over-buy on ₹25,708 wastes about ₹2,571 an event, and at eight events a month that is about ₹20,000.

The kitchen and the truck need lists too. Station tickets stop the tandoor cook and the sweet maker working from one crumpled sheet, and a separate Jain ticket keeps strict preparation from crossing over. Dispatch is a counting exercise: for 350 guests and twelve dishes the sample sheet asks for 24 chafing dishes, 403 plates, 13 stewards, 2 captains and 14 water cans, each marked packed, loaded and returned, so shortages are caught the same night. On tax, outdoor catering at ordinary premises is 5% without input credit, and rulings from advance authorities say a caterer cannot choose 18% to claim credit. At specified premises the rate is 18% with credit. Issue a receipt voucher for each instalment, and ask your CA when GST on an advance falls due.

Compare software on what it does with your worst week. Ask about guest-count changes after the quote, edits to a confirmed menu, the purchase list for two events on one day, and what leaves the kitchen in the truck. Indian catering tools exist besides Kaliquid; BuildMenu, for one, lists quotations, leads, GST invoicing and recipe costing from ₹999 a month on its own site, so look at more than one. Kaliquid's Pro plan is ₹999 a month per hall, or ₹750 a month if billed yearly, with custom Enterprise pricing; if you run a catering business with no hall, ask how the plan applies. Check licences too. FSSAI raised its turnover limits on 1 April 2026, with basic registration up to ₹1.5 crore, but sources say caterers may still need a state licence, so confirm the category rules.