Coffee for twelve in the boardroom, apparently
The site manager at your office campus contract gets forty or fifty hospitality requests a week. A PA emails for a working lunch tomorrow. Someone from HR rings about coffee and pastries for an interview panel. A director mentions in passing that the board meeting has moved to Thursday and they will need lunch for fourteen.
The site manager writes them in a diary on the counter. One email arrives in the general inbox and is not seen until after the meeting. The board lunch goes to the wrong floor because the room changed. At month end, the client's finance team wants every order with a cost code, and a third of them do not have one.
Orders arrive through every door
Hospitality is a service to the client's staff, who are busy and will use whatever is easiest. Your site team is also cooking lunch for several hundred people at the same time.
- Requests come by email, phone, in person and through reception.
- Room bookings live in the client's system, which you cannot see.
- Cost codes and approvers are required by the client but not collected at the time.
- Late changes to numbers and rooms are made by message and missed.
- Your site team has no single list of what is due where and when.
Missed coffee and unbilled lunches
A missed order is visible to exactly the people who decide whether your contract is renewed. Hospitality is a small part of revenue and a large part of reputation at a client site.
On the money side, orders without cost codes either go unbilled or become a monthly chase with the client's finance team. If hospitality is part of how your contract is priced, the unbilled orders matter more than they look.
There is a planning cost as well. The kitchen is producing lunch service for the restaurant and hospitality platters for meeting rooms from the same space, with the same people, in the same two hours. When the hospitality list is a diary on the counter, the chef does not know until mid-morning that three large working lunches land at 12.30, which is exactly when the restaurant queue peaks.
And the client's view of your service is shaped by the people who order hospitality: PAs, office managers and directors. They are the ones who notice a missed coffee and mention it in the contract review.
An order page for the client's staff
- Client staff order from a simple page on their intranet or a link: menu, number of people, room, date and time, cost code and approver.
- If the client uses Microsoft 365 room booking, the order page can show their meetings and pre-fill the room and time, subject to the client's IT agreeing access.
- Cut-off times are enforced per item, and late requests go to the site manager to accept or decline.
- Orders feed a daily hospitality list for the kitchen and the delivery rota for the team, by time and room.
- Changes are made through the same order, and the kitchen sees what moved.
- At month end, a recharge report groups orders by cost code and department in the client's required format, ready for your finance team to invoice.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Orders by email, phone, corridor | One order page |
| Cost codes chased at month end | Collected on the order |
| Diary on the counter | Daily list for kitchen and runners |
| Room changes by message | Updated on the order |
Phone and in-person requests still happen. The site team enters them on the same page, so the list is always complete.
A hospitality service that runs itself day to day
The site manager starts each day with a list of every order, in time order, with rooms and numbers. The runner knows where to go. Late changes are seen. The client's staff get a confirmation and know their order is in.
At month end, the recharge report is already built, with cost codes on every line. That conversation with the client's finance team becomes a formality.
Could this be your site?
- Hospitality orders arrive through several channels.
- Orders have been missed or delivered to the wrong room.
- Cost codes are chased at month end.
- The site team keeps a paper diary of orders.
- Some hospitality goes unbilled.