The Catering Order, Tab by Tab

The catering order is where one event's food lives. It hangs off a wedding or an EventSync inquiry, and it is organized as four tabs: Menu, Prep, Day-of and Admin.

Opening one

KitchenSync → Catering Orders lists every order by event date. Click one to open it. The header carries the event name, the date and the guest count — or Guest count TBD when the number has not been set yet, which matters because prep quantities scale off it.

Menu

Two sections.

Menu selection links the order to a menu and records what the client chose. You can send the client a selection link from here; what they submit comes back into this section, and their per-dish quantities are what the prep list scales from.

Dietary accommodations lists the guests needing something different, with their menu item and any notes. Allergies are shown first and marked apart from preferences — a nut allergy and a vegetarian preference are not the same kind of problem, and this section does not treat them as one. If a guest here has no menu item assigned, that is the gap to close before service.

Prep

The prep list for this order, grouped by station. Generate it from the menu and it scales each recipe to the guest count; tasks you add or edit by hand are kept when you regenerate, so a regeneration after a guest-count change does not throw away your own work. Tick tasks off here or on the Display Board — it is the same list either way.

Day-of

Course timing is the service schedule: each course, when it is meant to go out, and its status. This is what the Display Board shows across the top during service, and marking a course served records the time it actually went.

Meal cards generates printable place cards showing each guest's entrée and dietary flags, for plated service where the runner needs to know what goes in front of whom.

Admin

Staffing needs records how many of each role the kitchen needs for this event, and can raise the request into StaffSync rather than being retyped there.

Budget tracks what the food is costing against what was quoted.

External vendor appears only when the order's service style is set to an external vendor — the details of the caterer handling it instead of your kitchen.

If the order will not load

An order that fails to load says so and offers to retry. It does not say "no catering order yet" — that message means this event genuinely has none, and is the one place you should create one. If you see the error instead, do not create a second order; the first one is probably fine and simply was not read.