Compose a buffet or menu in a quote

Build a buffet from your own products instead of typing it: pick dishes, assign courses, set a price per guest. It appears on the document as a single item with the course structure, without per-dish prices.

To your customer a buffet or a menu is one offer at a price per guest — not a parts list. In Univents you compose it from your own products, assign the dishes to courses and set the price per guest. On the document the block appears as a single line item, laid out like a menu card.

Creating a buffet

Open the quote (or invoice) in the item editor. The document must still be a draft.
Below the items, click "Buffet or menu".
Enter a title, for example "Summer buffet". It appears in bold above the block.
Search for your dishes in the field below. Every selected dish becomes a row with two fields next to it:
- Quantity per guest — how much one guest gets of this dish. The default is 1.
- Course — Starter, Salad, Main course, Side and Dessert are suggested, but you can type any course name you like. The field may also stay empty.
Enter the number of guests. If the event has a guest count on file, it is already filled in.
Check the price per guest. As soon as dishes are selected, Univents suggests the sum of their individual prices. You are free to overwrite it.
The tax rate defaults to 7 percent because a buffet is food. Change it if that differs for you.
At the bottom you see a preview of how the block will read on the document. Save.

How the block looks on the document

The customer sees one item: the title, the dishes below it grouped by course, with a separator line between courses. Course headings are in capitals, every dish starts with a dash.

Summer buffet                       25 guests          32.50 €      812.50 €

STARTER
– Vitello Tonnato
– Bruschetta
***
MAIN COURSE
– Roast beef with red wine jus
– Potato gratin

The quantity column holds the number of guests, the unit price is the price per guest, and the total is the two multiplied. Per-dish prices and quantities are deliberately not shown — that is exactly what separates a buffet from an itemised order.

If you assigned no course at all, headings and separators are omitted and the block is a plain list.

Changing a buffet later

Open the three-dot menu at the right end of the row and choose "Edit buffet". The dialog reopens with your composition: add or remove dishes, change quantities and courses, adjust guests or price. After saving, the description, the total and the cost of goods are all up to date again.

This also works on the invoice you created from the quote — the composition travels with it.

Why can't I type the description directly? The description of a buffet block is generated from its composition and rebuilt on every save. Text typed in by hand would be gone the next time you edit the buffet. That is why the field is locked and points to "Edit buffet".

Splitting into individual items

If the customer does want the breakdown after all, choose "Split into individual items" in the same menu. Every dish becomes its own item in the buffet's place, with its current price, category and purchase price from the catalogue. The quantity per guest stays the quantity and the guest count stays the second factor, so the maths remains correct.

The buffet block disappears in the process and the document total changes: instead of your negotiated price per guest, catalogue prices now apply. Univents therefore asks first. This cannot be undone — you would have to compose the buffet again.

If a product has since been deleted from your catalogue, it becomes a free-text item with the stored name and no price. Splitting never fails because of that.

Cost of goods and margin

The purchase cost of the block is derived from the purchase prices of the selected dishes, each multiplied by its quantity per guest. It appears in the financial reports and in the event controlling like any other item — there is nothing to enter afterwards.

Differing tax rates

If the selected dishes carry different tax rates — typically because a drink is among them — the dialog says so. The rate you set above then applies to the entire block. Our recommendation: put drinks on the document as their own item, so the tax is right on both lines.

The dishes in the kitchen and in purchasing

As soon as the document has been carried over into the event's bookings, every dish appears there as its own row underneath the buffet, with the quantity you actually need: quantity per guest times the number of guests. So "0.2 kg of potato salad per guest" for 25 guests becomes 5 kg.

From there everything works as it does for any other product:

Production list and function sheet list the individual dishes, not just the buffet title.
Material planning includes the dishes in its requirements.
Supplier orders order them from the supplier on file.

Those dish rows carry no price of their own — the customer pays the price per guest for the whole buffet, and charging every dish again would be wrong. The purchase price does travel with them, so margin and material planning stay correct.

If you edit the buffet later, the kitchen rows follow automatically. If you split it into individual items, they disappear and the new items bring their own.

A dish is missing in the kitchen? Then its product has since been deleted from your catalogue. It still appears on the document under the name it had at the time, but the kitchen cannot plan a deleted product. Create it again and re-add the dish in the dialog.

What this version cannot do yet

The buffet is one item on the document. Revenue reports count it as a single item, not as the individual dishes inside it — so there is no "revenue per dish" for buffets.
Existing items cannot be grouped into a buffet afterwards. Compose the block anew and delete the individual items.
A buffet cannot yet be saved as a reusable product. For recurring fixed buffets, keep creating a product.