Catering Command Centre — Excel Costing, Allergen & Purchasing Workbook for UK Caterers

Catering Command Centre — Excel Costing, Allergen & Purchasing Workbook for UK Caterers

Stop costing weddings on the back of an envelope.

If you cater events, you already know the pain: a confirmed booking comes in, and you're working out on paper how much chicken 200 guests actually eats, checking what you've already got in the walk-in, and hoping you haven't under-ordered.

Catering Command Centre is an Excel workbook that does that arithmetic for you.

Enter your recipes once. Each dish becomes a list of ingredients with a quantity per portion. The workbook costs it for you — per portion and per dish.

Enter a confirmed booking. Add the guest count and the dishes you're serving. The workbook works out how much of every ingredient that job consumes. Draft bookings, quotes you haven't won, and cancellations are all left out automatically — only confirmed events count.

Get your order, rounded to real packs. It takes the demand, deducts the stock you're holding and the stock already committed to other jobs, and gives you the net requirement. Then it rounds that up to whole supplier packs, because no supplier sells you 71 kilos of chicken. You get the packs to order and the cost.

And an allergen matrix for every dish. Which of the 14 regulated allergens each dish contains or may contain, built from your ingredient declarations.

Built to refuse. Purchasing is blocked by default and stays blocked until allergen declarations are verified, VAT treatment is reviewed, and a named person has approved the order. Each gate can be switched off — with the date recorded — if you handle that work elsewhere.

Scales with you. Space for 1,000 ingredients, 1,000 recipe lines, 200 events and 400 menu lines. Every lookup works by ingredient or event ID, so nothing breaks when you re-sort your lists.

What's included

• An 18-sheet Excel workbook with worked demo data you can replace
• Setup instructions, including the four steps for taking a new booking
• A sample customer quote and a sample purchase order, so you can see the documents
• A test report showing exactly what has been verified and what has not

Requirements

Microsoft Excel 2016 or later, or LibreOffice, or Google Sheets. No macros, so no security prompts. Only functions that exist in Excel 2007 and later. Excel calculates everything when you open it.

Important — please read before buying

Be clear about what this does not do, because it matters:

• It does not verify your allergen information. That is your legal responsibility as a food business and it can only be done with real supplier labels, read by a named person. The workbook gives you the register, the matrix and the gate. It cannot give you the verification, and the demo data that ships with it is marked as demo data.
• It does not decide your VAT treatment. Whether your supplies are zero-rated or standard-rated depends on your business. The workbook holds a labelled assumption and refuses to issue a quote until you've had it reviewed.
• It does not send orders to suppliers. It produces the purchase order; sending it is yours.
• It is not HACCP software, allergen training, or tax advice. It is a spreadsheet.

If you want software that claims to handle allergen compliance for you, this is not it — and be cautious about anything that says it does.

Licence and refunds

Purchase grants one business a perpetual licence to use Catering Command Centre within its own catering operations, on any number of computers used by that business. You may not resell, sublicense, redistribute or publish the workbook or its contents, and you may not sell it as part of another product.

The workbook is delivered immediately as a download after payment. Nothing is shipped.

As this is digital content delivered immediately, you are asked at checkout to consent to immediate delivery and to acknowledge that you lose your statutory 14-day right to cancel.

If the workbook is corrupt, does not open, or does not perform as described, contact us within 30 days and we will replace it or refund you in full. This is in addition to your statutory rights.

The workbook performs arithmetic and produces documents. It is not a compliance system and does not verify allergen information or determine tax treatment. You remain responsible for your own allergen declarations, your VAT treatment, and any order you place with a supplier. We are not liable for business losses arising from decisions you make using the workbook.

This is a self-service product. Setup instructions are included. There is no telephone or account management support.