How to write a catering quote from a price list and a guest count
Turn a party-service inquiry into a quote you can send: guest count, your own price list, service, and setup — without digging up an old Word file.
An inquiry for eighty guests lands at 4 pm. The quote goes out at 11 pm, because an old Word file is somewhere in a folder, the prices are two years old, and the service team was left off. That evening is normal in a lot of party services. The food is not hard to price. The quote is hard because it is copying, searching, and checking the same lines three times.
A catering quote that you can actually send needs three things you already have: the guest count, your own price list, and the hours for setup, service, and teardown. The rest is layout.
What belongs on the quote
The customer wants to know what is on the table, who sets it up, and what it costs. Write the lines the way you would deliver them, not the way an old template named them.
Food and drinks, scaled to the guest count. Service staff for the hours someone is actually on site. Equipment, crockery, transport. Setup and teardown as their own time, not a footnote under “service”. Allergens, and what is not included — cake, venue, the venue’s own staff — belong in the same document, or the question arrives an hour before the event.
From guest count to line items
Do not reprice every bowl from memory. Store what a portion or a platter means for a fixed guest count, and scale from there. Eighty guests are then the same components, recalculated, not “roughly the wedding from last June”.
What does not scale in a straight line stays a fixed line: a setup crew, a minimum travel charge, crockery you bill per event rather than per guest. That is where Word files go wrong, because the old file was a different distance and a different venue.
Do not hide the service inside the food
Quotes look cheap when the staff disappears into the food line. The customer sees a low price per person and only meets the missing setup, teardown, and sixth person on the invoice. A separate line is clearer: how many people, which hours, which rate.
You need the same numbers later for the shift plan. If the quote already says who is on site, and from when until when, you do not have to pull the times back out of the email thread.
Send the PDF, then invoice from the same data
The quote is done when it leaves as a PDF and the customer understands it without a phone call. A clear total, a validity date, how you get paid. After that, do not type it again: the accepted quote becomes the invoice, with the same lines.
That is how Kolsche works. Guest count in, items from your own price list, PDF out. Operations is €49 a month. Operations with the AI assistant is €89 a month, cancel anytime. The first seven days are free, and the first month is €1. The price comparison is on the site.