A letter from the butcher in March
Your meat supplier writes to say beef and lamb prices are going up from next month. It is the third increase in a year. You have forty weddings booked for the summer, most of them quoted last autumn, and many have a beef or lamb main.
The honest question is simple: which of those events are now priced below where you want them, and by how much? Answering it means opening each quote, checking the menu, looking up the recipe, recalculating the cost at the new price and comparing it with what the client is paying. Nobody has time to do that for forty events in peak season, so the answer is a shrug and a hope that it evens out.
Quotes are frozen, costs are not
A quote is a snapshot. It captures your costs on the day you wrote it. The events it describes may be a year away, and every ingredient in them keeps moving.
- Quotes are stored as documents, so their menus cannot be searched by ingredient.
- Recipe costs are updated occasionally, not every time a supplier invoice changes.
- Supplier price changes arrive as letters, emails or simply a higher invoice.
- Your terms may allow for price reviews on events far ahead, but only if you know which ones to review.
- Menus change between quote and event, so the menu being cooked is not always the one that was costed.
So the information to answer the question exists, spread across supplier invoices, recipes and quotes. It just is not joined up.
Margin you lose without deciding to
When costs rise and prices do not, margin falls quietly across the whole season. You may decide to absorb that. Many caterers do, for good reasons, especially with wedding couples. But absorbing it knowingly is different from finding out in the autumn that the summer was thinner than it looked.
The cost also shows up in future quotes. If recipe costs lag behind supplier invoices, the quotes you are sending today for next year are already built on old prices, and the gap carries forward.
Booked menus linked to live ingredient costs
- Each booked event's menu is stored as structured dishes, not just a document, with the guest count and the price per head the client is paying.
- Each dish links to its recipe and each ingredient to the supplier product you buy.
- Supplier prices update from invoices as they are posted in Xero or your purchasing system, or from price lists when suppliers send them.
- When a price changes, the system recalculates the food cost of every future event that uses it, and shows the change in margin for each.
- A report lists affected events by date, with the old and new cost per head, so you can see the ones that matter most.
- Where your terms allow a review, the report shows which events fall in that window. The decision is yours; the system just shows the list.
| Event | Dish affected | Food cost per head | What you might do |
|---|---|---|---|
| June wedding, 140 guests | Lamb main | Up since quote | Absorb, or offer a menu swap |
| July corporate dinner | Beef fillet | Up since quote | Review under your terms |
| August wedding, 90 guests | Chicken main | Unchanged | Nothing |
| September awards | Lamb canape | Up slightly | Absorb |
The same link keeps new quotes honest, because they are always built on the latest cost of each ingredient.
Deciding early instead of finding out late
When the butcher's letter arrives, the change is entered once, or picked up from the next invoice. The same afternoon you can see which summer events it touches and what it does to each one. Maybe it is small and you absorb it. Maybe a handful of large events are hit hard and you offer those clients an alternative dish at the same price, months before menus are finalised.
Either way, the decision is made in March rather than discovered in October. And the chef has a reason to suggest a menu change that protects the margin, with the numbers to back it up.
Over a season, you also build a clear picture of which dishes are most exposed to price movement, which is useful when designing next year's menus and deciding what to put on the wedding brochure.
Is this happening to you?
- You quote events many months before they happen.
- Supplier price rises are not reflected in your recipe costs for weeks.
- You cannot quickly list which booked events use a particular ingredient.
- You found out after the season that margins were lower than expected.