Calculators
The sums event professionals and venues do on the back of an envelope, done properly. Free, no sign-up, and nothing to hand over to get your answer.
Room capacity by setup style
How many guests fit in a room once the dance floor, stage, buffet and bar have taken their cut. Four setup styles compared side by side.
For: Venues, planners, caterers working an unfamiliar room
Catering price per head
Build a per-head price from food, staff, hire and travel, then check it against the food cost and labour benchmarks before you send it.
For: Caterers, private chefs, venues quoting F&B
Food quantity per person
How much to prepare per guest, split across the choices you offer, and converted into the raw weight you actually have to order.
For: Caterers, chefs, anyone writing a supplier order
Every figure is calibrated, not guessed
Most calculators of this kind repeat a rule of thumb somebody half-remembered. Each of these was built by taking published industry figures, checking them against a second independent source, and keeping only what survived. Where the two disagreed, the page says so.
- Room capacity is anchored to 60 inch rounds on 11 foot centers, the standard comfortable banquet spacing, and cross-checked per table against the published capacity charts of two hotels covering 71 rooms.
- Catering price per head reproduces a published 100 guest worked example to within a quarter of a percent, and prices from every cost rather than from the food-cost-percentage shortcut that ignores labour.
- Food quantity per person sums to exactly 1.25 pounds of savoury food a head for a buffet, which is the top of a completely separate published band. Two sources reaching the same number by different routes.
Each one also found something the conventional advice gets wrong: that a dance floor and a buffet line cost you 40 to 60 covers, that marking costs up is not the same as taking a margin, and that a portion chart gives served weight while your supplier sells you raw. Those are the parts worth reading even if you never touch the calculator.
Free, and no sign-up
No email wall, no account, nothing to hand over to see your answer. Every result can be copied or printed, because these get used standing in a room or sitting in front of a client rather than at a desk.
Stop working it out twice
1pm keeps the answers against the room, the menu and the client, then carries them through to the quote, the BEO and the run of show your crew works off on the day.