Custom and catering requests
Take one-off bakes and catering bookings as structured requests — where they land in Kitchen, what you do with each one, and the doors you control.
Published
Yes — you can take custom cake and catering work on Pantryk, and you do not have to run it out of your inbox. A buyer fills in a structured request on your storefront, you answer with a quote, and they accept it from a link of their own — with a tap, or with their payment when the quote asks for money online. Everything after that behaves like any other order you have taken.
Two doors, one path
A custom order is a one-off bake: a birthday cake, a batch of cupcakes, a shape you only make on request. A catering request is a larger booking priced per guest — a fika buffet, an office breakfast.
They are two doors on your storefront, and you open or close each one on its own. Behind the doors they are the same thing: one request, quoted once, accepted once, completed once. Only the intake differs — catering asks for a guest count and an event date where a custom order asks for servings and a date you can make it by.
What the buyer sends you
The request form asks for the things you would otherwise have to chase:
- what they have in mind, and what the occasion is
- the date they need it for
- how many servings, or how many guests
- a budget range, if they have one in mind
- allergens that must stay out of it, and any diet to respect
- up to three reference photos
- their name, email and phone
If you publish a menu of Offers, the form leads with it: the buyer picks one, chooses a size or a guest count, answers your option groups, and sees either a running estimate or your From price, depending on how the Offer discloses its pricing. An estimate is not a price you owe. The quote you send is the only binding price, and you are free to price the request differently from the estimate the buyer saw.
Where requests land
Every request arrives on Custom orders in Kitchen, soonest date first with overdue work at the top, grouped by what you owe:
| Segment | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Needs quote | Nothing priced yet — or a buyer who wrote back after your quote went out |
| Awaiting buyer | A live quote, waiting on them |
| Accepted | Accepted, with the pickup day still to set |
| In progress | Accepted and the pickup day (or delivery address) in place — and an accepted request whose cancellation is still pending |
| Completed | Handed over and closed |
| Declined & expired | Every closed ending — declined, expired, cancelled, withdrawn, no-show |
Needs quote splits again into All and Waiting on buyer, so a request you have already
asked a question about stops looking like one you have not touched. You can filter by type
(All · Custom · Catering), sort by event date, newest received or requester name, and search by
name, reference or title. Each request carries a short reference of its own, like CR-4F2A1B.
Two cues appear on the rows without you asking for them:
- an open request whose date has already gone past your storefront’s today is flagged as overdue. No date expires a request on its own — the cue is there and the decision stays yours.
- a second open request from the same email for the same date — or, when either has no date, within seven days of the first — reads Possible duplicate of CR-…. It is a hint, never a block.
Working a request
Open a row and the request opens beside the list; on a wide screen Open full page gives it the whole screen. One place holds all of it: The brief — with anything that must be free from an allergen called out first — the quote history, your conversation with the buyer, your own internal notes, the money, and the order once there is one.
From there you can:
- Compose quote — price it and send it. See Send a quote.
- Ask for details — post your question on the request’s thread and mark the request as waiting on the buyer. The mark clears the moment they reply, or the moment you quote, decline or cancel. Once a quote is out you cannot ask again: from then on the quote’s own state is the answer.
- Decline — with a reason. The reason is read by the buyer, so write it to them. A declined request can still be quoted later if they come back.
- Cancel request — for a request you are closing yourself rather than answering.
- Mark accepted — records a yes the buyer gave you somewhere other than the link you sent. It works for a quote paid at pickup only: a quote with online payment terms is accepted by its payment and refuses it, so to record an offline agreement on one, re-quote it with Pay at pickup terms first.
- Mark quote expired — retire a live quote now instead of waiting for it to lapse.
- Mark completed — once the work is handed over.
What the buyer can do
Before a quote is out, the buyer can withdraw their own request. It closes as withdrawn, which is exactly what tells it apart from a request you closed yourself.
Once a quote is out they accept it or decline it, and a decline can carry a line of their own reasoning — which is your whole brief for the next version. The submitted brief is never edited: a change of mind travels through the conversation and a new quote.
The doors and defaults you set
Everything you control sits in Settings › Custom orders:
- Request doors — Custom orders and Catering, each open or closed. Closing one takes that form off your storefront; nothing already in flight is affected, and you still quote and finish every request you have.
- Minimum notice — per door, the fewest days ahead a buyer may ask for. Their form refuses an earlier date, so you never read a request you could not have made.
- Blackout dates — ranges nobody can ask for, on either form. They bind the buyer’s date only; the date you quote is never checked against them.
- Quote defaults — how long a new quote stays open, its payment terms and a deposit percentage. They prefill the composer and you can change any of it on the quote itself.
- Acknowledgement message — what a buyer reads the moment their request lands, before you have looked at it. Say when you usually reply. It is read live, so an edit reaches every buyer still waiting.
After a quote is accepted
An accepted quote becomes one custom order in your order book. It takes no units and no pickup time from a drop, and sits in no drop, but it counts everywhere an order counts: your earnings, your VAT report, the customer’s record, the review invite after pickup. Completing the order completes the request, and completing the request completes the order — whichever you do first, the other follows.
If the quote carried a deposit, the balance is still open after acceptance. Take it online through the buyer’s own link, or record it as collected when you hand the order over.