How to Automate Catering Quotes Without Adding Staff

Catering is good business for a food shop, right up until the paperwork catches up with it. Every order a customer submits online has to become an estimate in the accounting software, with the right store and the right pickup or delivery details. Most owners handle that the obvious way: someone reads the order and types it in.

That works at a few orders a week. It stops working when catering takes off. Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company, a six-store bagel franchise in New York, reached the point where building estimates was close to a full-time job in peak season. This is how the orders now turn into estimates without anyone retyping them, and the questions to ask before you try the same thing.

Every order was typed twice

The franchise does significant catering volume across its six stores. Customers placed orders through an online form, and then one employee retyped each one into the accounting software as an estimate. Every order followed one of 8 ordering scenarios: pickup or delivery, across the stores. The steps were the same every time, and every one of them was done by hand.

That employee spent 20 to 25 hours a week on it. In peak season it was close to a full-time job.

The real problem was capacity

It is easy to look at this and see a typing problem. It was a capacity problem. Nothing connected the order form customers filled in to the back office, so the information had to be carried across by a person, one order at a time.

The question is not whether you can afford to automate a step like this. It is whether you can afford to keep doing it by hand when your busiest season hits. And if one person going on vacation could break the process, it was already broken.

Step one: map every way an order comes in

Before anything was automated, we mapped every way a catering order can arrive. For Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company that came to 4 main paths, each with a pickup and a delivery version: 8 scenarios in all.

This is the step most businesses skip, and it is where most automation goes wrong. An automation is only as good as the list of situations it was designed for. Miss one scenario and the orders that fall into it either break or quietly come out wrong. With all 8 on paper, every order had a known route before a single step was built.

How the orders become estimates now

With the scenarios mapped, we built a 60+ step automation to carry each order from the form to the books. In plain terms, it does four things:

1. Catches the orderThe moment a customer submits a catering order, the automation picks it up. Nobody has to notice it or copy it.
2. Routes itIt sends the order down the right path for the right store and the right scenario, pickup or delivery.
3. Creates the estimateIt builds the estimate in the accounting software on its own, and the customer gets a full confirmation of their order without anyone on the team writing it by hand.
4. Hands it to a personStaff review each estimate before it goes to the customer.

That last step matters. The goal was never to take people out of catering. It was to take them out of the retyping. The employee who used to build every estimate now reviews them instead, which is a far better use of someone who knows the menu and the customers.

Why one store went first

The automation did not launch everywhere on day one. It went live at one store first, and we watched it for two weeks. After those two weeks, it rolled out to the other five stores at once.

A staged launch costs very little time and protects the business. If something in the routing needs adjusting, you find out on one store’s orders rather than six. All six stores were live within 2 months.

What changed

The 20 to 25 hours a week that went into typing estimates came back to the business. Every one of the 8 catering scenarios now runs automatically, across all six stores. And catering is no longer capped by how fast one person can type: more orders no longer means more data entry.

Is your quoting process ready to automate?

You do not need six stores for this to apply. If your business turns customer requests into quotes, estimates or orders by hand, these four questions tell you whether it is worth a closer look:

1. Is it the same steps every time?Repetitive, rule-based work is what automation handles best. If every quote is a judgment call, start somewhere else.
2. Can you list every scenario?If you can write down every way a request comes in, the way 4 paths and 8 scenarios covered every catering order here, the process can be mapped.
3. Where does a person add value?Decide which step needs human eyes, such as a final review, and keep it. Automate the carrying, not the judgment.
4. What breaks if one person is out?If the answer is “quotes stop going out”, that step is your ceiling and your first candidate.

If the answers point to automation, the order matters: map the scenarios, design the routes, then build. Our Projects team handles builds like this one; the mapping comes first either way. For where this kind of work sits next to AI, see the four levels of AI in your business.

The hours were never the whole story

Saving 20 to 25 hours a week is the number people notice. The bigger change is that catering can now grow without someone having to retype every new order. When a repeatable process depends on one person’s time, it caps the business. Take the retyping out, keep people where their judgment counts, and the ceiling lifts.