Thoughts and Experience with Toast Catering?

[rodeak]

We are primarily a dine in restaurant but do a good amount of catering and we are considering using Toast Catering. Has anyone made the change from doing all catering communication through email/phone or contact form, to using Toast Catering and if so, what do you think?

I would love to do less talking on the phone and less emailing. I'm a little concerned about not being able to properly field each order, to make sure it's a time and volume our kitchen can handle. I understand that you can set parameters but still..

Whether or not we can delivery to a particular neighborhood is also tricky depending on the day and time for us, so I do like to be able to personally deal with the communication surrounding delivery. Those are my main concerns. Any experiences restaurant people have had making the change would be helpful. Thanks in advance!

[nbunda]

It's a bit of a learning curve, but we absolutely LOVE the switch, once we finally learned all the ins and outs of the system.

What we love:

• The guest can pay their invoice right online with a link they receive, or pay at the POS where the order will already be stored as an open check. No more errors entering orders into the POS, or manually keying in credit cards.
• All communication regarding the order is kept in one place, right in line with the order details and invoice.
• Requests can come in from a custom Lead Form you set up for your website, which the guest submits. Typically, the lead form won't include menu items, but rather gather information about the event so the administrator can help with what items to order. Your administrator would check on the lead to make sure there are no conflicts before accepting the order. They can then convert it into an order or disqualify the lead. Then, set up an order estimate for the guest to approve, or go straight to creating an invoice.
• If the guest calls and already knows what they want, they don't *need* to submit a lead form. An order can be created on its own in the back end without a lead.
• Online ordering is a bit trickier, because you're not there to determine whether you can handle the volume, but a separate online ordering link can be set up with completely different hours, min/max lead times, volume limits, delivery rules/radius, minimums, maximums, special menus, etc. Online orders will create the order automatically and mark it as confirmed without requiring approval. I would love for Toast to add this feature. We haven't made the switch for online catering orders yet, but plan to do this in October. Rules are pretty comprehensive from what I can see.
• Regardless of whether the order came from online catering ordering, a lead form that was converted, or manually set up on the back end, all orders created with the Catering & Events module can appear in one calendar in Toast Web, which is very easily navigable and has lots of filters you can apply. The calendar can also sync with your Google Calendar.
• You can set up contract terms for your orders, as well as collect deposits.

Hope this helps! If you have any other questions you can reply here or shoot me a DM!

[rodeak]

Thanks so much, this is really helpful. We currently use the toast invoicing version that we are allowed to use without paying and find it really helpful. Good to know you don't have to enable online ordering right away and we can ease into it if we want to. I agree, it makes sense that you should be able to confirm orders and not have them auto approved. Maybe there's a setting on the back end?