How to take catering deposits online (without chasing checks)

Why a deposit protects you

A deposit does three concrete things a verbal "yes, I'll cater your party" doesn't do:

• It locks in the date. Once money has changed hands, a customer is far less likely to ghost you or book a second caterer as a backup.
• It covers what you spend before the event. You're buying ingredients, sometimes renting equipment, and blocking off your calendar days or weeks in advance. A deposit means that spend isn't entirely on you if the order falls through.
• It filters serious inquiries from casual ones. Anyone unwilling to put money down for a real event usually wasn't a real booking to begin with — the deposit does that screening for you before you've spent hours on a custom menu.

How much to actually ask for

There's no single legal or universal number here — despite how confidently some catering blogs state one — but there is a real pattern across the industry, and it's worth knowing before you pick a figure out of the air:

• 25–50% is the common range for a catering deposit, and where you land in it usually tracks how much you're exposed to if the event cancels.
• Full-service catering for larger events — where you're buying significant ingredients and potentially staffing — tends to sit toward the higher end, sometimes as much as 50% up front.
• Smaller or more standardized orders — a set menu, a modest headcount, less custom sourcing — often work fine with a lighter 25–30% deposit.
• Some operators use a tiered structure: a smaller non-refundable booking fee (around 10%) to hold the date, then a larger deposit (30–40%) closer to the event once the menu and headcount are finalized.

What a deposit-then-balance flow actually looks like

In practice, most caterers who do this well run the same basic sequence:

1. Customer submits the inquiry — date, headcount, event type, any menu preferences.
2. You confirm the details and the price — final headcount, menu, and any delivery/setup fees, turned into one total.
3. The deposit is charged — a percentage of that estimated total, collected before the date is locked on your calendar.
4. The balance is charged closer to the event — commonly 3–7 days out, once the final headcount and any last-minute menu changes are locked. This is also your last real checkpoint to catch a shrinking guest count before you've bought the food for the original number.
5. You settle any difference after the event if your pricing depends on same-day counts (some caterers bill a small true-up after; many just hold firm to the pre-event number to keep it simple).

Cancellation-window thinking

A deposit only protects you if your cancellation policy is written down and the customer saw it before they paid. You don't need a lawyer to write a reasonable one — you need a clear, tiered structure that matches when you actually stop being able to recover the cost:

• Far out (commonly 2+ weeks before the event): full or near-full refund — you haven't bought anything yet, so there's little to lose.
• Middle window (roughly 1–2 weeks out): partial refund — you may have started sourcing or committing staff time.
• Close to the event (commonly under a week): non-refundable — by this point you've usually already bought the ingredients and turned away other bookings for that date.

These specific day-counts are a common framework, not a legal requirement — set them to match how far ahead you actually need to buy and staff for your kind of catering, and put the policy in writing wherever the customer pays.

How to do this with a payment link

You don't need dedicated catering software to start collecting deposits tomorrow. The simplest version of this is a payment link from whatever processor you already use (Stripe Payment Links and Square Invoices both support this):

1. Create a payment link for the deposit amount — a fixed dollar figure once you've quoted the job.
2. Send it to the customer by text, email, or WhatsApp — wherever you already talk to them.
3. Once it's paid, note the date and balance owed somewhere you'll actually check (a shared calendar, a spreadsheet, whatever survives contact with a busy week).
4. Send a second link for the balance a set number of days before the event.

The honest downside of doing it this way by hand: you're the one remembering which deposits are paid, which balances are due, and when to send the second link. That's fine at low volume. It gets error-prone once you're running several events a month — which is the actual problem a tool like Onja's built-in catering deposit flow (deposit collected at booking, balance auto-scheduled, both tracked against the order automatically) is solving, not a requirement to get started today.