Banquet event orders for independent caterers

B2B1 monthWeb

StackNext.jsPostgresPDF generationStripe

Search demandHighLots of people are actively searching.
CompetitionMediumThere are competitors, with room to differentiate.
Customer valueHighA single customer can be worth a lot.
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The idea

An independent caterer holds every event in three parallel documents: the quote the client saw, the production sheet the kitchen cooks from, and the packing list the van loads from. Edits reach some of them. A guest count that moved from 80 to 110 in an email, or an allergy noted on the quote but not the kitchen sheet, ruins an event and the client relationship with it. Total Party Planner and Curate solve this at 150 to 350 dollars a month, priced for operations bigger than most independents.

The wedge is one event record that renders all three documents, plus a changelog that starts the moment the client signs. Modified-after-signing is the exact failure mode caterers fear, and no document leaves the system without its revision number.

Who pays

The caterer-owner pays 79 dollars a month, positioned at half the incumbents’ floor for the 2-to-10-events-a-week operator who currently runs on Docs and Sheets. One prevented guest-count error pays for a year. Distribution through catering Facebook groups, the ICA community, r/Catering, and rental companies whose delivery staff see every caterer’s paperwork chaos first-hand.

MVP scope

  • Event record covering menu, headcount, timeline, staffing, and allergies
  • Client-facing BEO PDF with e-signature and Stripe deposit link
  • Kitchen production sheet with quantities scaled from per-guest components
  • Van packing list aggregated from equipment needs
  • Post-signing changelog with revision numbers on regenerated documents
  • Skip for v1: proposal/lead pipeline, staff scheduling and payroll, inventory purchasing, venue portals
// Build prompt — paste into Cursor / Claude Code / Lovable / Bolt
Build BEOBase, banquet event order software for independent caterers. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Postgres via Prisma, server-side PDF generation (Puppeteer rendering HTML templates), Stripe for deposits and subscriptions.

Core flow: the caterer builds a menu item library where each item stores per-guest quantities of its components (e.g. chicken marbella: 0.4 lb chicken, 2 oz sauce per guest) and its equipment needs (chafer, serving spoons). An event record is the single source of truth: client details, date, venue, guest count, selected menu items with per-item counts, timeline (load-in, service, breakdown), staffing, dietary flags and allergies as a prominent field, and pricing. From that one record, three documents render: a client-facing BEO PDF with pricing for e-signature (typed name plus timestamp is fine), a kitchen production sheet with component quantities scaled to guest count, and a van packing list aggregated from equipment needs plus a custom-items section.

The critical feature: once a BEO is signed, every subsequent edit writes to a changelog (who, what field, old value, new value, when), the event flags as modified-after-signing, and regenerated documents carry a revision number and a changes-since-signing box on page one.

Pages: /events (calendar and list), /events/[id] (tabbed editor: details, menu, timeline, staffing, documents, changelog), /library (menu items and equipment), /clients, /settings (branding, terms). Stripe deposit links attachable to the BEO.

Pricing: 79 dollars/month for caterers doing 2 to 10 events a week. 30-day trial.

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