Some parts of a menu cost you the same whatever the customer takes from them. A grill needs a chef on site whether they order one skewer or six. A coffee station needs someone to run the urn for one guest or forty.
Folding that cost into the price of every item is the usual workaround, and it gets the maths wrong in both directions: the customer who orders a lot pays for the chef several times over, and the one who orders a little barely pays for them at all. A service fee on the category charges it once, where it belongs.
Set one up
- Log in to CaterWay.
- Open Products from the menu on the left, then the Categories tab.
- Open the category to edit it.
- Under Service fee, type an Amount.
- Choose Once per order or Per guest.
- Pick the VAT rate for the fee.
- Save.
Once per order, or per guest
Once per order is the flat case: the chef costs what the chef costs. Per guest multiplies your amount by the party size, for the section whose cost really does scale, like a coffee station charged per head.Whichever you choose, volume discounts never touch it. Guest-count tiers price the food; the labour that comes with it costs the same at 30 guests as at 25.
The VAT rate is yours to pick
The fee will not save without one, and CaterWay never fills it in for you. A service and food are usually taxed differently, so copying the rate off your food would print a wrong rate on the customer's quote rather than a missing one, and a wrong rate is much harder to notice.
CaterWay has no separate VAT settings page: the picker offers the rates your workspace has already created. If there is no services rate among them yet, it offers to create one without leaving the category.
Name it in your customer's words
Leave Name the customer sees blank and CaterWay names the fee itself, in whatever language the customer is ordering in: "Service fee (Grill)", "Palvelumaksu (Grilli)", "Serviceavgift (Grill)".
Fill it in and your wording wins for that language, which is worth doing when the fee has a name of its own. "Grill chef" says more than "service fee" does. What you write in one language only applies to that language, and every other one falls back to CaterWay's own wording rather than showing a customer words they cannot read.
What the customer sees
The fee is stated before they choose, not sprung on them at the total.
- On the section itself, under its heading: "Ordering from this section adds a 150,00 € service fee." Once they pick something, that line becomes "Service fee 150,00 € added."
- In the summary, in a Fees list above the total, alongside delivery and the room if those apply.
- On the confirmation email, the quote and the PDF, as its own line under the items.
Several sections, several fees
Each category charges once, and three fee-bearing categories produce three separate lines. They are deliberately not merged: a customer who wants to know what a charge is for has to be able to read which section it came from.
Quotes you build by hand
Quick Quote and the quote editor offer the fee rather than adding it. Put a product from a fee-bearing category into the quote and a Service fees card appears with the amount on it and an Add button. You decide; the card just makes sure you are not deciding by forgetting.
A fee that arrived from the calculator shows as already added, so you can never end up charging it twice.
Good to know
- An info-only category cannot carry a fee. Nothing there can be ordered, so nothing there can trigger a charge.
- A suggested add-on does not trigger its category's fee. The customer only met that item because something else pulled it in, and they may never have seen the section it belongs to.
- The fee is an ordinary line once it reaches a quote, so you can edit or delete it like any other.
- Duplicating a category copies its fee across.
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