Restaurant catering ordering software Zayos, built for the order that cannot be late
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
Restaurant catering ordering software takes a large order online with the rules a catering order needs: a lead time, a headcount, a deposit, a delivery window and a kitchen that can refuse the slot. Its job is to keep $1,500 orders out of a text thread.
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How is a catering order different from a $28 dinner order?
Everything except the food. This is why a normal online ordering flow, pointed at a tray menu, is not catering software. It is a checkout with bigger numbers in it.
| What changes | Normal order | Catering order |
|---|---|---|
| Ticket size | $25 to $60 | $300 to $5,000 |
| Notice | Now, or in 30 minutes | 24 hours to 3 weeks |
| Who is buying | The person eating | An office manager buying for 40 people who did not choose the menu |
| How it is priced | Per item | Per person, per pan, per package, with minimums |
| Timing | As soon as possible | Arrives at 11:45 for a noon meeting, or it failed |
| Kitchen impact | One more ticket | A prep day, a walk-in full of pans, and staff scheduled around it |
| If you get it wrong | A refund and an apology | Forty people with no lunch and a buyer who never calls again |
| Payment | Card at checkout | Deposit, balance, sometimes an invoice and a purchase order |
The bottom row is the one that decides whether you build this properly. A late dinner order costs you a refund. A late catering order costs you the account, the referral the office manager would have made, and every Monday for the next two years.
What goes wrong when catering runs on text messages?
Here is the chain, and every operator reading this has lived at least three links of it.
A buyer texts the manager on Friday afternoon during a rush: forty people, Monday, noon. The manager says yes, because the answer is always yes. The details are agreed across nine messages over the weekend, three of which arrive while the manager is off. No deposit is taken, because asking for one over text feels awkward. On Sunday the buyer adds a vegetarian tray and changes the drop time to 11:30. That message lands in a thread nobody else can see.
Monday at 6am the prep cook learns about the order from a sticky note. The pan count on the note does not include the vegetarian tray. At 11:15 the driver leaves without the utensil sets, because utensils were never on a list, they were in the conversation. The order arrives at 11:50 for a noon meeting, one tray short, and the office manager, who spent political capital choosing you, has to explain it to her boss.
Nothing in that chain was a food failure. It was a memory failure, and the fix is not a better manager, it is a system that will not let an order exist without the fields that make it deliverable. The most useful thing catering software does is refuse things: refuse an order past the cutoff, refuse a fifth booking in a slot that holds four, refuse a delivery with no on-site contact.
There is a second failure mode worth naming, quieter and more expensive. Catering that lives in one person’s phone leaves with that person. When the manager moves on, the book of corporate buyers goes with them, and the restaurant discovers it never had the relationship, an employee did.
What rules does catering ordering software have to enforce?
Use this as a demo script. Ask any vendor to show you each one in their admin, live, not on a slide. Whichever platform you pick, these eight are what separate catering software from a big cart.
- 01
Lead time that scales with size
A ten-person box of sandwiches is not a hundred-person buffet. Good software sets the notice requirement per item or per package, so the sandwich box can be ordered four hours out while the hundred-person spread requires two days. One global lead time either blocks easy money or lets in an order the kitchen cannot cook.
- 02
A cutoff clock tied to the event, not the calendar
The rule is "48 hours before the delivery time", not "two days before". Systems that count calendar days let a buyer place a Monday 11am order at 11:58pm Saturday and call it two days notice. Your prep cook will find out at 6am.
- 03
Kitchen capacity per slot
The most commonly missing feature in the category. You need a cap on how many catering orders, or how many covers, can land in the same window, and a way to close a slot entirely. Without it, three separate buyers will all book Friday at noon and nobody will know until it is too late to cook.
- 04
Blackout dates you control
Mother’s Day, the Sunday of a holiday weekend, the week your chef is away. A catering calendar without a blackout switch is a promise you did not mean to make.
- 05
Headcount pricing and pan math
Buyers think in people, kitchens think in pans. The order builder has to translate: forty people becomes a specific count of full and half pans across entree, side and salad, with utensils and serving pieces attached. If the buyer has to do that arithmetic, they will get it wrong, and the complaint will be about your food.
- 06
Minimums by fulfillment type
Delivery and full setup cost you a driver, a van and a labor hour. They should carry a higher minimum than pickup. This should be a setting, not a conversation you have on the phone with every buyer.
- 07
A deposit that actually holds the slot
A catering order with no money attached is a reservation on a napkin. Take a deposit or an authorization at booking, charge the balance at a defined point before the event, and write the change and cancellation windows into the confirmation so nobody argues about them later.
- 08
Delivery, setup and the return trip
The address needs a suite number, a dock note and an on-site contact who will answer their phone. Setup orders need an arrival time separate from the serve time, a checklist of chafers, sterno and utensils, and a plan for who collects the equipment. Half of catering complaints are logistics, not food.
How should the money side work?
Deposits, balances and the cancellation window
Decide three numbers once and put them in writing on every confirmation: what percentage is due at booking, when the balance is charged, and how late a buyer can cancel or shrink the order without losing the deposit. The exact numbers matter less than having them printed. Most disputes in catering are not about money, they are about two people remembering a phone call differently.
Corporate buyers and their accounting departments
An office manager is not spending their own money, which changes what they need from you. The receipt has to carry the company name, a purchase order or cost centre reference, and a billing email that reaches accounts payable rather than the buyer’s personal inbox. Schools, hospitals and nonprofits may need a tax exemption certificate on file. Capture those fields in the order flow and you stop being the vendor who is always emailing about paperwork.
Where the commission goes
Catering marketplaces charge a percentage for routing a buyer to you. On a large ticket that percentage is a real number, and it repeats every time the same office orders again. The sensible split most operators land on: keep a marketplace listing for buyers who have never heard of you, and give every account you have already earned a direct link that costs you nothing per order. The full comparison of marketplace economics is on our commission statistics page.
How does catering ordering work on Zayos?
Zayos is commission-free direct ordering for independent restaurants, and catering is a first-class order type inside it rather than a bigger version of the dinner menu. The builder works in headcount and converts it to pan counts, so a buyer types forty people instead of guessing at trays. Lead time is gated by order size, small boxed orders can come in hours ahead while pan-scale orders require the notice you set. Above a threshold you choose, the order routes to a quote-first flow so a person confirms the kitchen can do it before any money moves.
Fulfillment is three tiers with their own pricing and lead-time rules: pickup, delivery, and full setup where you arrive with chafing dishes and leave a working buffet. Corporate accounts store billing details, purchase order and accounting email fields, so a repeat Monday order takes a buyer under two minutes. Every catering order also writes to the same customer book as the rest of your direct orders, which means the account belongs to the restaurant and not to whoever answered the phone. The deeper feature detail lives on the catering page.
Pricing is flat and public: Operator $499 a month, Operator plus Marketplace $599, Concierge $699, each per location, month to month, no setup fee. Catering is included, not a separate module. The only per-order cost is a service fee the diner pays at checkout, and on catering that is 10%. For reference, the other rates are $0.99 on pickup, $2.99 on delivery and nothing on dine-in. The restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips, on catering the same as on everything else. See pricing and the fee breakdown.
We are a Fort Lauderdale company. Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach is live and taking direct orders on Zayos today and keeps $48k+ a year that used to go to commissions. Storefronts with catering built in are ready for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke across 13 locations, Yalla Market and Tap That Ash, with ordering opening at each launch. Onboarding runs under two weeks, and the first direct order usually lands inside the first week. See how it works.
Catering, answered straight.
What is the difference between catering software and regular online ordering?
Do I really need software, or can I keep taking catering by phone and text?
How far in advance should online catering orders be locked?
Should I take a deposit on catering orders?
How do corporate catering customers want to pay?
What does a catering order cost me on a marketplace?
Your biggest tickets deserve the smallest fee.
The free AI report reads your public ordering channels and shows what routing large orders through a marketplace is costing you. About 60 seconds, no card, no call.
Run the numbers yourself with the commission calculator.