Guides › Liability
Deposits, cancellations, and the food you have already bought
Every caterer has been cancelled on. The policy that governs what happens next is usually one sentence long and was written on the assumption that cancellations happen early. Most of the expensive ones do not. This is not legal advice — have your attorney read whatever you end up using.
The standard arrangement is a deposit, non-refundable, taken at booking. It works and there is nothing wrong with it. What it does not do is distinguish between the two cancellations that cost you completely different amounts.
Two months out. Nothing has been bought, nobody has been scheduled, and the date is still sellable. Your loss is the time you spent quoting, which is real but small.
Two days out. The food is in the building, the staff are booked, the rentals are confirmed and the date cannot be resold. Your loss is close to the full cost of the job.
A flat deposit is either too harsh for the first or nowhere near enough for the second. Usually both at once.
What a sliding scale looks like
The common structure, and the one customers find easy to accept, is a set of windows: full refund of anything beyond the deposit up to some distance out, then a percentage, then a larger percentage, then nothing. The exact numbers depend on how far ahead you buy and how quickly you could resell the date, which is a question about your business rather than about catering in general.
Two details make it work:
Tie the tightest window to your buying. The point at which you stop refunding should be the point at which you start spending, not a round number of days that sounded fair.
Say what happens to costs already committed. The rented marquee that cannot be cancelled, the specialist ingredient ordered in. A sentence covering costs already committed on the customer's behalf saves an argument, and it is fairer than a percentage that happens to be too low.
Postponement is not cancellation, and should not be treated as one
A great many cancellations are really attempts to move a date. Having a stated position on that — a deposit that transfers once, within some window, subject to availability — turns a lost job into a rescheduled one, and it costs you nothing to offer.
Where this belongs
On the quote. Not in a terms page, not in the second paragraph of an email in March. The document the customer keeps is the quote, and a condition that exists only in a message they deleted is a condition you will be negotiating on the day.
The same goes for the guarantee date, which is the other thing people discover late. Both are short sentences, both belong on the same page as the price.
What this means for your website
The cancellation sentence and the guarantee date are printed on the quote PDF itself, not filed in a terms page. The customer keeps the quote; that is where a condition has to be if it is going to survive.
The deposit is taken on your own Stripe account, and the quote shows what was paid and what is still due.