How to choose catering software: orders, events, kitchen and staff

What catering software does

• Inquiries and leads: capture event details from web forms, email and phone.
• Proposals and contracts: menus, pricing, terms and e-signatures.
• Deposits and invoices: payment schedules and online payments.
• Menu and recipe management: costing, scaling recipes by guest count and allergen information.
• Kitchen production: prep lists combined across events by day.
• Logistics: packing lists, rentals, delivery routes and timelines.
• Staffing: servers, bartenders, chefs and drivers per event.
• Reports: revenue, food cost and labor cost per event.

Drop-off vs. full-service

If you also run a restaurant, see our restaurant POS guide and check how catering orders reach the kitchen.

To record clock-ins, breaks and overtime automatically, see EZTime time and attendance software.

Food safety and allergens

Catering adds food safety risks: food held for longer, transported and served off-site. Your software should record allergens per dish, print them on labels and event sheets and flag conflicts with guest dietary notes. It cannot replace your food safety plan, temperature logs and local health department requirements, which vary by jurisdiction and often require specific permits for off-site service. Check with your local health department.

Staffing events

Event staffing is where catering gets complicated. Each event needs a different mix of servers, bartenders, chefs and drivers, often on short notice, at different locations and with long, irregular days. Look for tools that let you build staffing templates by event type, offer shifts to qualified staff, confirm who accepted, send event details and call times to phones and record actual start and end times on site. Our event staffing page covers this in more detail, and the catering event checklist helps with day-of planning.

Pay rules for catering staff

• All hours count: for non-exempt staff, setup, breakdown, required travel between the kitchen and venue during the workday and waiting time on site are generally working time.
• Overtime: long event days and busy weekends can push staff past 40 hours in a workweek, and some states have daily overtime.
• Service charges vs. tips: under federal rules, a compulsory service charge added to a client’s bill is generally not a tip and belongs to the employer, while voluntary gratuities belong to employees. Some states require disclosure or distribution of service charges. Be clear with clients and staff about which is which.
• Tip pooling: managers and supervisors may not keep employees’ tips; see our tip pooling rules guide.
• Classification: treating event staff as contractors is risky if you control their schedules, uniforms and duties.

Check official DOL guidance and your state’s rules.

Labor cost per event

Catering margins depend heavily on labor. For each event, compare planned staff hours with actual hours, including setup, travel and breakdown, and calculate labor cost as a share of event revenue. Patterns appear quickly: certain venues always run long, certain event types need an extra server, some clients consistently add guests late. Feed those lessons back into your staffing templates and your pricing. Software that tags hours to each event makes this analysis possible without spreadsheets; see our labor cost percentage guide for the basic calculation.

Communicating with event staff

• Send event details, address, parking, dress code and call time with every shift.
• Share the event timeline and any allergen notes before staff arrive.
• Confirm changes in writing, not just by phone.
• Name an on-site lead for each event.
• After the event, ask the lead for a two-line debrief: what went well and what to change next time.

Questions to ask vendors

1. How long does it take to go from inquiry to a signed proposal with deposit?
2. Can recipes scale by guest count and roll up into daily prep lists?
3. How are allergens recorded and printed?
4. How does staff scheduling work, and can staff confirm shifts on their phones?
5. Does the system record actual hours worked at events?
6. How are service charges and gratuities handled on invoices and in payroll reports?
7. Which accounting and payment tools does it integrate with?

How to compare options

1. Take three recent events of different sizes and recreate them in each system.
2. Compare proposal quality, prep lists and packing lists against what you actually used.
3. Have your event manager schedule staff for a busy weekend with overlapping events at different venues, then change one guest count at the last minute.
4. Run a mock payroll report and check hours, overtime and gratuities.
5. Total the cost, including payment processing and add-ons.

Common mistakes

• Choosing beautiful proposals over kitchen and logistics features.
• Scheduling staff by text message and losing track of who confirmed.
• Paying event staff a flat rate without checking hours and overtime.
• Calling a service charge a gratuity, or the reverse.
• Ignoring travel and setup time when quoting labor, so busy events quietly lose money.
• Keeping allergen information only in the chef’s head instead of on every event sheet and label.

A short example (fictional)

A caterer doing 15 events a week uses email for proposals, a whiteboard for prep and group texts for staff. Weekend events regularly run short of servers. The company moves proposals and prep into catering software and uses a workforce app to publish event shifts, let staff claim them and clock in at the venue. Staffing gaps fall, and overtime is spotted before the weekend rather than at payroll.

Where EZTime fits

EZTime is not a catering order or proposal system. It covers event staff: schedules and shift swaps, open shifts staff can claim, mobile clock-in with GPS stamps and geofencing at venues, break tracking, job and client tagging by event, EzTip tip pooling and real-time labor costing.

Frequently asked questions

Where to go next