What generic booking software leaves out

The idea is the appointment: a person, a time, a duration, possibly a resource. Book the eleven o'clock, block ninety minutes, done. It is a good model, it covers an enormous amount of the economy, and catering is not in it.

The unit is wrong

What a caterer sells is not a slot. It is a date, a headcount and a composition — which dishes, in what quantities, with what swaps. The date is the least interesting part of it and is the only part the appointment model knows about.

You can see the mismatch immediately: two events on the same Saturday are not a conflict if one is a drop-off at noon and the other is a dinner at seven. Two appointments at the same time are always a conflict. The software has no way to express the thing that actually limits you, which is kitchen capacity across a day.

The price is not a number

An appointment has a price. A catering order has a calculation: a package rate times a headcount, plus upcharges on the choices that cost more, plus extras, minus a discount, plus a delivery charge that depends on the address, checked against a minimum, plus a service charge, plus tax on some of those lines and not others.

Generic tools let you attach a price to a service. They do not let you attach an arithmetic to one, so the price ends up being agreed by email and the software becomes a diary.

There is nowhere to put the food

This is the one that ends the discussion. There is no menu. No dishes, no packages, no "choose two of these five", no sizes, no allergens. The customer cannot build anything, so they cannot see a price, so they have to ask — and the entire delay this software was supposed to remove is still there.

The headcount never moves

An appointment is for one person, or occasionally for a fixed party size set at booking. Catering Deck headcounts move twice: once when the customer firms up, once at the guarantee. Billing the greater of guaranteed and served is not something an appointment system has a place for.

Where generic tools are genuinely the right answer

Tastings. Consultations. A walk round the kitchen. Anything that really is one person at one time for a fixed duration — book those in the cheap, mature tool that does exactly that, and do not build it yourself.

The mistake is not using an appointment tool. It is expecting it to carry the order, because the order is where all the difficulty in this trade lives.