How to Automate Total Party Planner

Total Party Planner runs the event from enquiry to load-out

Total Party Planner is catering and event management software, used by off-premise caterers, banquet facilities and venues, restaurants running a catering arm, and the university and stadium operations doing the same thing at scale.

Off-premise catering is a strange business to run. A restaurant has a kitchen, a dining room and a fairly stable idea of what tomorrow looks like. A caterer has a date, a guest count that keeps changing, a menu priced two months ago, a venue nobody has cooked in, and a truck that has to leave with every single thing on it, because there is no walk-in at the golf course and no second trip.

So the software holds the event, the proposal, the menu and its recipes, the costs, the staffing, the packing list and the invoice, and keeps them agreeing with each other while the headcount moves from 140 to 118 to 126 over six weeks.

The margin is decided by prices somebody typed in last spring

The kitchen work is the part everyone pictures. The part that decides whether an event made money happens weeks earlier, at a desk.

A quote goes out at a per-head price built from recipe costs. Those recipe costs come from ingredient prices, and ingredient prices come from a broadline distributor's order guide that sits behind a login and moves every week. Somebody is supposed to keep them current. In practice they get updated when a margin looks wrong.

Around that, in the same week: the rental house has to confirm the tent, the china and the linen, and their availability is on their own site. The venue wants a certificate of insurance and has loading dock hours nobody has read. The corporate client will pay only through their accounts payable portal, and the invoice you emailed is not in it. The staffing agency has not confirmed the four servers for Saturday.

Every one of those lives on somebody else's website.

Total Party Planner

Recipe costs kept current This week's case prices read off the distributor's order guide, so the menus whose cost moved get flagged before the next proposal.

Rentals confirmed before promising Tent, china and linen availability checked on the rental house's own site, rather than assumed and then apologised for.

Invoices that do not stall Each corporate client's payables portal checked, so a bill sitting unapproved is found in week two instead of at ninety days.

Menu costing already tells you what an event should make

Total Party Planner covers the event file thoroughly, and the costing side is the part worth setting up properly.

Instant Menu Costing and Profit Analysis price a menu from your recipes and show what an event should make, which is the number most caterers cannot get at until it is over. Menu items can be added to proposals automatically. Electronic signature closes the contract, and online catering orders and online payments take the money without a phone call. Task and team management assigns the work, and the back-of-house side produces the paperwork that gets an event out of the door, including the packing and logistics lists that decide whether the chafing dishes are on the truck.

That is a real operating system for a catering company, and all of it works off what is already in the file.

Which is exactly where the costing question sits. Instant Menu Costing is only as honest as the ingredient prices behind it, and Total Party Planner has no way to open the distributor's order guide and read this week's case price. It cannot check the rental house either, or whether the client's payables portal has approved anything.

The order guide can update the menu cost itself

Prices move every week, and the costing can move with them.

This week's case prices lifted off the distributor's order guide and written against the ingredients they belong to, so the menus whose cost moved get flagged before the next proposal goes out at last spring's margin. Two distributors compared on the same twenty items, which is where the saving actually is.

Rental availability checked before a tent or a hundred gold chargers is promised to a client. Load-in windows and dock rules read off the venue's own vendor page, so the driver is not sitting outside a service entrance at six in the morning. Invoices followed into each corporate client's payables portal, so the ones stuck unapproved are found in week two rather than at ninety days.

The staffing agency's confirmed roster compared against what each event needs, so a short Saturday is a Wednesday conversation.

Keep the client side supervised. Anything about a final headcount, a balance or a change order should be written up and read by a person. In catering the client is usually somebody's mother or somebody's boss, and a wrong number sent confidently is the version they remember.

This week's prices decide next month's margin

Deciding what to charge is a chef and an owner looking at a menu. Opening a distributor's order guide to find out what a case of chicken costs this week is not, and it is the step that quietly stops happening.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the distributor, the rental house or the client's payables portal, reads the prices and the statuses, and puts them back against the recipes and events in Total Party Planner.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything going to a client is drafted and waits for you.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.