Thirty small orders before noon
Your corporate delivery trade is steady: working lunches for law firms, platters for training days, breakfast for board meetings. Orders arrive by email, phone, and sometimes a message to a driver. Many are for tomorrow, some are for today, and a few are changes to orders already in.
Someone in the office types each one into the kitchen sheet and the delivery list. They check whether the company has an account or needs to pay by card. At month end, they build invoices by going back through emails. On busy days, an order sent at 4pm for 8am tomorrow is missed because it arrived in the wrong inbox.
An event system used for daily orders
Most caterers' systems are built for events: a few large jobs a week, each with a quote. Delivery orders are the opposite: many small jobs a day, each simple. Running them through email and an event diary makes every order feel like an event.
- Orders are retyped from emails into kitchen and delivery lists.
- Cut-off times exist but are not enforced, so late orders are squeezed in.
- Company accounts, cost codes and PO numbers are asked for each time.
- Delivery addresses and access notes live in drivers' memories.
- Invoicing is built at month end from a pile of emails.
Corporate orderers change too. The office manager who ordered every Tuesday moves on, and the new person emails a different address, asks for different things and has never heard of your cut-off. Each client relationship lives in one person's inbox on your side and one person's head on theirs.
Changes are the other headache. 'Can we make that twelve instead of ten, and add a fruit platter?' arrives at 7.30am as a reply to yesterday's confirmation. Whether it reaches the kitchen before the platters are made depends on who happens to read that thread first.
The cost of doing it by hand
The office spends much of the morning retyping orders. Errors creep in: wrong day, wrong address, a platter missing from the kitchen sheet. Missed orders mean a client's meeting has no lunch, which is a quick way to lose a regular account.
Month-end invoicing is slow, and corporate clients who need PO numbers or cost codes on invoices send them back. Growth in this trade makes the admin grow at the same rate, which caps it.
Online ordering for business accounts
- Each corporate client gets an account with their delivery addresses, access notes, approved orderers, and any PO or cost code rules.
- Staff order from your delivery menu online, with your cut-off times enforced and lead times per item.
- Orders feed a daily production sheet for the kitchen, totalled by item and split by delivery time.
- Delivery runs are grouped by time and area, with addresses and notes, on the driver's phone.
- Account clients are invoiced monthly in Xero or QuickBooks with each order listed, and others pay by card at checkout through Stripe.
- Changes and cancellations are made through the order before your cut-off, and after it, go to your office to decide.
| Part | Replaces | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Client ordering page | Emails and calls | Office staff at client companies |
| Production sheet | Retyped kitchen list | Kitchen |
| Delivery runs | Driver memory | Drivers |
| Monthly invoice | Month-end email search | Accounts |
Phone orders still happen, and your team enters them in the same system so everything ends up in one list.
How the mornings change
When the office arrives, overnight orders are already on the production sheet. The kitchen starts on the right quantities. Drivers get their runs with addresses and notes. The office handles the few exceptions, like a same-day request or an access problem, rather than typing every order.
At month end, invoices are ready with PO numbers and cost codes on them. Adding a new corporate client means creating an account, not learning another person's email habits.
You also get a view of the trade you did not have before: which accounts order most often, which have gone quiet, and which items sell on which days. That makes it easier to plan kitchen staffing for delivery mornings and to notice when a regular client has stopped ordering.
Is your delivery trade here?
- Delivery orders are retyped from emails.
- Late orders are squeezed in because cut-offs are not enforced.
- Drivers rely on memory for addresses and access.
- Month-end invoicing means searching back through emails.
- Orders have been missed because they went to the wrong inbox.