Castellan Systems

A “Caterer” is a person or company providing food and drink at a social event or other gathering. A “Caterer” provides these services at a remote site or a site such as a hotel, hospital, pub, aircraft, cruise ship, park, filming site or studio, entertainment site, event venue or private home. Unlike a restaurant, a caterer prepares food prior to the event, based on a fixed order, and delivers it to the event.

Caterer is a Supply Chain Management application for businesses or individuals providing food and drink to their clients’ events. Supply chain management systems span the activities of procurement, product lifecycle management, supply chain planning (including inventory planning and the maintenance of enterprise assets and production lines), logistics (including transportation and fleet management), and order management.

Caterer can partner with our Employee Management Systems (EMS), Chancellor. It's been developed to work along side Version 4.0 of Chancellor and together form a strong solution for any business.

So what does Caterer do?

Caterer manages your customer records and their purchases. It provides a full set of Accounting facilities. It provides Production Management facilities including purchasing, manufacturing, stock and inventory management, and Sales. It records your payroll expenses. It manages vehicle usage and expenses. It manages the organisation’s employee details records. It assists the preparation of shift staff allocation by defining shift and providing facility to allocate staff to the various roles in a shift. It provides capacity planning facilities to assist with shift planning in order to meet the production needs. It provides support for the management of staff expenses.

Caterer maintains units of measurement (UOM), types of leave and public holidays that are used by the rest of the application.

Caterer maintains your employee’s details including their personal details, manager, next of kin, a photo, email address and network user id, employment details, remuneration details. It stores any documents, like resumes as attachments.

It can record the different positions the employee has held with the organisation; any payroll additional allowances or any deductions applicable to the employee; the banking details to use by payroll for the employee; the superannuation, if applicable, account(s) details to use by payroll for the employee; and general notes.

You can save a photo of the employee and generate a unique id for that employee.

The barcode generated used the common Code 39 barcode type used for various labels such as name badges, inventory and industrial applications. The symbology of the Code 39 character set consists of barcode symbols representing numbers 0-9, upper-case letters A-Z, the space character and the following symbols: – . $ / + %. Lower-case characters may also be used.

The photo and barcode will appear on the employee’s ID card when produced.

It can generate an employees address book and phone list.

Caterer maintains your customer’s details including their personal details, a photo or company logo, email address and mailing address. It stores any documents.

Caterer can also store any documents relating to the customer that you require to keep for future reference.

Caterer provides accounting/financial report to support the financial administration of the organisation. Most of these reports can be viewed on an enquiry screen, generated as a PDF or printed out.

These reports include:

• Balance Sheet.
• General Ledger.
• Income Statement.
• Cash Flow Statement.
• Tax Report.
• Invoices Due.
• Payments Due.

Obviously, these reports are generated using the expenses and income data recorded throughout the application, which is recorded using classes and categories to support the financial reporting.

Caterer can define recipes for the preparation of the meals or products you have available. It can record the ingredients and their quantity required. It can define multiple options, if required for a meal like small, normal or large. It can record the staff required to prepare the meal and the amount of time they require; this assists with capacity planning.

To support takeaway or delivered orders, Caterer can also record the packaging requirements for each meal. This information is then used to maintain the stock inventory and calculate pricing.

Caterer support the product inventory process by defining inventory items. These inventory items could be products would be raw materials purchased from suppliers or products manufactured using these purchased items from suppliers.

Caterer can assist in analysis inventory consumption.

Caterer can also store any documents relating to the customer that you require to keep for future reference.

Caterer supports the purchasing process for raw materials, and warehousing, to support the manufacturing process. It can maintain a store of available items and manage its re-stocking.

It maintains a list of suppliers and the items they supply. It can issue purchasing orders and maintains an inventory of these.

As items are either sold or used to in the manufacturing process, it updates the inventory so that the current available stock of any item is known.

You can view at any time the purchase transactions and inventory transactions.

Caterer can print a report which items require re-ordering to maintain the stock levels preferred. It can produce many reports that assist in analysing the inventory. It can also print a Suppliers Directory listing every supplier and the items they provide; this can be used as an easy reference when ordering new stock.

Caterer supports the meal preparation/manufacturing process by maintaining an order queue and recording details of production batches in order to meet these orders. It records how many items were manufactured, calculates the raw materials consumed and updates the inventory accordingly; both for the consumed items and manufactured items.

Caterer accordingly maintains an inventory of manufactured items so that the organisation always knows how much stock it has available for sale and to determine when and how much it need to manufacture to meet its orders.

Caterer support the organisation's sales activities by recording customer orders and then following through to an actual sale and payment.

Caterer can produce customer fully itemised invoices.

In order to support the whole purchasing -> manufacturing -> sales process, Caterer produces various reports reporting on various aspects of the stocking process.

Caterer support the generation of shift resourcing plans. Shifts and the different roles/jobs within these shifts can be defined. Plans can be put together in a graphical calendar representation which can also be printed and distributed to staff.

Caterer reviews each resourcing selection to ensure that a staff member has no overlapping shift. It also ensures that a staff member is not allocated to shifts without a normal shift gap in between, i.e. no 2 shifts in a row, in order to manage staff fatigue.

Caterer facilitate the balancing of production and staff resources in order to meet the production demand. It compares the available staff, based on the shift plan, against the production demand due to the batches generated out of the customer orders. It helps identify gaps which can either be resolved by shifting production to other days or increasing the staff on shift.

It provides a report of the capacity plan.

Caterer allows staff to make claims for refunds of working expenses. These claims can take one of two forms: mileage claims for travel or cash expenses; for cash expenses the staff member can attach supporting documentation, including receipts and invoices. Caterer supports the scanning of these attachment through a TWAIN compliant scanner. The staff member submits the claim and it's then sent to their manager for review and approval.

It provides multiple reports to support monitoring and managing of these claims.

Caterer provides facilities to develop menus or product lists using the define meal or recipes, as outlined above. Multiple of these menus can be defined.

Caterer can then assign the applicable menu to each week; therefore, if required, each week can have a different menu and, therefore, a different selection of meals/products available.

Caterer supports fleet or vehicle management. It can record details of the vehicles managed by the organisation. It can also record details of authorised staff owned vehicles that can be used for business purposes.

Caterer can records trips undertaken by staff in these vehicles for business purposes and then process refunding of costs to staff. These costs are also added to the organisation's balance sheet.

Caterer uses the timesheet data to calculate payroll costs; this data can be manually entered into Caterer, can be imported from another source using a Microsoft Excel file or, if Chancellor is installed and linked, can be collected from its timesheeting facility. These costs are then added to the balance sheet so that a full picture of the financial state of the organisation can be viewed.

As mentioned, Caterer can import a payroll expenses report from your payroll solution; for that purpose a sample layout Excel (.xls) file is included so that the format of this file can be identified.

Caterer, as already mentioned, supports the operation of stores within the organisation. It can maintain stores of available items and manage re-stocking.

It maintains a list of suppliers and the items they supply. It can issue purchasing orders and maintains an inventory of these.

It can receive requests for items and fill them and update the inventory so that the current available stock of any item is known.

You can view at any time the purchase transactions and inventory transactions.

Caterer can print a report which items require re-ordering to maintain the stock levels preferred. It can produce many reports that assist in analysing the inventory. It can also print a Suppliers Directory listing every supplier and the items they provide; this can be used as an easy reference when ordering new stock.

Caterer now has improved stock levels monitoring and can generated re-ordering purchasing order semi-automatically. It will enquire to identify those stock items below the desired level and generate purchase orders for them which can be reviewed and modified by the user, if required.

Caterer now supports the operation of a retail shop; this can support for those caterers that that also sell pre-prepared, or prepare on the spot, walk-in customers to a retail shop front. It can record sales, print receipt dockets and updates the inventory and financial accounts.

Caterer provides inbuilt Emailing facilities. Emails can be imported from your Email Server without the need for an Email client like Microsoft Outlook. These Emails are then stored within the database along with any attached documents.

Emails can be printed.

Caterer can also send Emails through your Email Server without the need for an Email client like Microsoft Outlook. These Emails are then stored within the database.

While the main Chancellor application is for use by staff directly involved in the business processes covered by Chancellor, we also provide a supporting application, Chancellor Employee Portal. This application if for all other staff members and allows then to perform the functions that they require, like:

• Display their employee’s details record.
• View the shift plans.
• Lodge claims for refund of expenses.
• Send Emails which are stored within the application’s own database for easy access and storage.
• Record an employee's timesheet and it can be submitted for review and approval.
• Print a salary package letter at any time so that the employee can access this information.

And what's more important, this application is free; purchase licenses for the use to the full Chancellor application and then you can distributed this portal application to all other staff members.

Caterer is available in 5, 10, 20 and 50 concurrent user licenses; but we're happy to negotiate any other arrangement. Just contact us.