In the article “Importance of Business Lunch: Key Aspects to Consider while Planning for your next Lunch Event”, we talked about the common challenges faced by event planners and HR admins while planning lunch (or any meal, for that matter) as part of their firm’s upcoming business meeting or event. Here, we will only be focusing on one aspect of the article: budgetary control.
We all know that budgeting is the least glamorous part of planning any event or activity; it is, however, arguably the most important. From a snack-and-beverage gathering to a larger sit-down meal, any catered event held at the office will be more successful if you have a solid catering budget to help you put resources where they work their hardest - this process is vital if you definitely want to avoid overspending and paying for a coma-inducing bill. Designing budgetary controls helps in prioritising expenses beforehand, to avoid last-minute trimming down of expenditures that may lead to awkward and, often complicated, situations; by doing this, you are demonstrating that you’re handling the company’s finances seriously and responsibly.
Let us give an example of what happens when you don’t plan your budget and look to finalise all the other aspects of the event planning first. A customer reaches out to us with a requirement to feed around 50 people for an event. They share an initial menu of items with us and request us for a per-person quote for the given items. They then keep augmenting the menu with options for the next few hours and, finally, share the final menu and request for a quote. When we reach out to them to confirm the menu, we find that there are a couple of additional items for which costs are to be provided to them. We quickly contact one of our partners, get a quote for the items provided in the menu and share it with the customer. At this point, which is a few days before the actual event, the customer reveals the fact that the menu is expensive and that they are looking for something more economical, and then disclose the budget to our team. Now, it turns into a race against time for us, to design a menu for the customer that stays within their budgetary controls, which takes up a lot of time and effort.
If the customer could share their budgetary expectations at the time when they reached out to us, the planning for the event could have been streamlined and simple. That is why it cannot be stressed enough that planning and pre-setting the budget before getting into other aspects of the event is key. If you’re unsure of your budget, please consult with our operations team to let us understand your event and the number of guests for the event; this will help us in arriving at an approximate budgetary control, and you can let us know whether it would be feasible for you to go ahead with the event or not. But please let us know about all relevant information regarding your event or occasion; it will help us help you better, so that you can organize a well-rounded event or occasion.
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