We continue to look at the Food &Beverage portion of our budgeting process. Having gone through all the reasons why F&B is a tricky budget item it seems only fair to discuss ways to address these challenges in putting a budget together.
A budget is a living document. It is frequently updated as new data comes in and decisions are made. Eventually the budget should list each F&B item but early on – when so many important decisions are being made –people are looking to the budget for answers and it contains the fewest details.
So we need to find a way to get some meaningful data on the budget that gives us the flexibility to decide on a menu later, easily adjust for ever-changing attendance estimates, and is compatible with the venue’s menu.
This is easy enough for lunches, dinners, or breaks – really anything that is priced at a per-person rate.
However, when charges are by quantity as they often are for receptions there is some work to be done. But with a little math and a little finesse we can translate these menus items into our per-person format.
Once we have these estimates we will be able to proceed with a budget that is useful (which means it contains numbers that can be used to make good decisions) and updateable
The budget will be useful because it contains numbers that can be used to make good decisions. It will be updatable because we can edit as more accurate numbers are available without reformatting the document. This is important as it not only makes the work simpler but easier for organizing committee members to follow the changes from one budget version to the next. When budget numbers change, a good committee member/client will want to know what changed. The easier that person can see the differences between the versions, the more confidence that person will have in that document.
During the next few entries we will explore a process by which we build a per-person/per-bite line item into our budget by coming up with a useful price estimate, determine the amount of food to order per person and estimate the number of attendees.
So we will be looking at developing a good estimated cost, a good estimated attendance and a good per-person/per-bite estimate to put in our budget.
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