Catering software for restaurants that take large orders days ahead

A dinner order is cooked in twenty minutes. A catering order is decided on Monday for Thursday at 11:30, for forty people, at a loading dock across town.

That gap is where things go wrong. The order lives in an email thread, the delivery lives in someone's head, and the kitchen finds out on Wednesday night.

Online: guests open your site, pick a day and a time, and pay by card. A tray that serves ten can be a menu item with sizes, so a guest picks two of them.

By phone: staff enter the order themselves, with the pickup time, or with the delivery address and a slot. Orders you enter yourself are not blocked by the order cutoff.

Repeat: Fatima A. orders four trays for the office every Thursday. Her name, phone and past orders are on your customer list, so the next call takes two minutes.

Each order becomes a ticket on the kitchen screen. The pickup or delivery time is large at the top. Items show with their options. A highlighted Notes box holds “nut-free tray, label it”.

Tickets turn amber when due within 30 minutes and red when late. The cook taps Preparing, then Completed. The screen runs in a browser, so a laptop on the pass is enough.

Set how many orders one slot holds. For catering days, that may be one or two, so a forty-person lunch does not share a slot with six walk-ins.

Add a cutoff, such as 8 p.m. the night before, so no late order lands on a loaded kitchen. Mark a date closed when you have an event and cannot take more.

Add the stop with the address and a note: “Loading dock, ask for Marcus”. The driver sees the name, the phone number with a call button, the address and the note under At the door.

Send the route the night before, and the driver can start then. At the venue the driver takes a photo, and one photo can cover several trays at the same door. You see it on the live board.

A caterer with its own vans can use the driver app alone. Stops from your pickup.kitchen orders cost nothing extra. Stops you add by hand are pay as you use (100 stops free, then CA$0.10 a stop).

Monday: Fatima A. orders four trays for Thursday at 11:30, with delivery. The ticket sits in Open with Thursday's time on it.

Wednesday afternoon: you open Deliveries for tomorrow, check the stop and send the route. The driver's phone buzzes. Thursday: the cook starts the trays, the driver delivers, and the photo is on the board before you ask.

Offices order the same way every week. Each client on your customer list can have several addresses. Each has a label, a unit and a door note such as “loading dock, ask for Marcus”. One is the default, and the driver sees its note on the day it is used.

Guests who order on your site are saved automatically, and you can add a client by hand at any time. When next week's menu is ready, send one email to the clients who have ordered, with one link to your site.

Guests who order on your site pay by card at checkout, through your own Stripe account. For orders you enter by phone, you can mark them paid when cash or an e-transfer arrives.

pickup.kitchen is an ordering and delivery system, not a quoting or invoicing tool. Keep sending quotes and invoices the way you do now. It handles the order once the date, time and menu are agreed.

The route planner does not handle delivery time windows per stop, or vehicle capacity such as a van that holds twelve trays. It plans one open route per driver. When a stop needs a set time, put it in the stop's note.

It does not run event staffing, floor plans or equipment rentals. It does not import orders from other ordering sites.

Caterers use the delivery tools first and the ordering site second.

• Delivery software and the driver app: stops, Send to driver, a photo at the door.
• Online ordering: your site, slots, cutoffs and closed dates for event days.
• Counter (POS): phone orders entered with a time or a delivery slot.
• Restaurant CRM: every client saved with their orders and addresses.
• Kitchen display system: the day's tickets with their times.