Food Truck Booking Software: Screen Private-Event Requests With AI

Qualify each private-event enquiry on seven answers before you quote: date and service window, guest count, pricing model, site access, power, menu needs, and budget with deposit. Have an AI assistant pull those answers from the message, flag what is missing and draft the reply, while you make the quote, ask or decline call.

Booking software collects requests; it does not decide whether a job is worth taking, and the jobs that go wrong are rarely the ones with a missing calendar entry. They are the ones where nobody asked about the gate, the power or the guest count. A truck handling a handful of private events a month can run the screening from a form, a spreadsheet and three saved prompts, then judge whether a paid tool earns its fee.

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What booking software handles, and what it leaves to you

Tools for this job fall into three groups, and the price gap between them is wide. A form feeding a spreadsheet costs nothing. Event-business platforms add proposals, contracts and deposits for a monthly fee. Marketplaces send you leads from hosts who are already looking for a truck, which is a different job from handling the enquiries you already get.

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None of these decides that a $600 budget for 70 guests won't work for your truck. They store requests, send documents and take payments. One rule is worth borrowing from the marketplaces: Roaming Hunger's catering FAQ says a truck counts as booked when the deposit is paid and the catering agreement is signed, not when the host says yes in a message. Vendor prices change, so confirm each one on the vendor's own page. Every step below works with any of these tools, or none of them. For a wider comparison of quote tools aimed at caterers, catering quote software covers the same ground with kitchen-based businesses in mind.

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Seven answers every enquiry must produce

An enquiry that arrives as "Hi, how much for a party?" has told you nothing you can price. Make seven answers required on the form and treat everything else as free text. The questions below are written the way a host would answer them, and the right-hand column says what should make you pause.

The wording matters. Ask for the time "we'd be serving", not the "event time", because a party that runs from 6 to 11 pm may want food for only two hours of it. Ask whether the guest number is firm or a range, because guest lists run high and attendance runs low. If your form tool lets you mark fields as required, set these seven and leave the rest optional. For ideas on the optional part, an event planner's intake form is a good model: it was written for planners, but it catches the details that change a quote.

Per head or minimum spend: the sums that decide

Two pricing models cover most private events. With per-head pricing, the host pays a set price for each confirmed guest. With a minimum spend, sometimes called a minimum guarantee, the host owes at least a stated amount whatever the guest numbers turn out to be. Roaming Hunger's party-catering page warns hosts that parties of 50 guests or fewer will probably be affected by minimums, and that the price per person rises as a result.

To set your own minimum, start from what an event costs you before a single guest eats. These figures are illustrative: a three-person crew and a three-hour service.

Break-even is $505 divided by $12.60, which is 40.1, so 41 guests. If you want $300 left over, the target is ($505 + $300) divided by the share of each sale you keep ($12.60 out of $18.00, or 70%), which is $1,150. That is your minimum for this menu and this crew. Now watch what it does at different party sizes.

At 30 guests the per-head price loses $127, which is the whole case for a minimum: the truck's costs don't shrink with the party. At 64 guests the minimum stops mattering, and above that it never applies. A host who can't reach the minimum should be offered a different structure instead of a discount: a higher per-head price for a small group, a shorter service, or a single-item menu that costs you less to make.

A third structure suits hosts who don't want to pay per head. Guests buy at the window and the host guarantees the minimum, paying any shortfall afterwards. It works if you can total the sales at the end and the host has agreed in writing that the shortfall is theirs. It fails when nobody wrote that down. Whichever model you choose, set a date for the final guest count (seven days before, for example) and say whether you charge for the confirmed number even if fewer turn up. The menu prices behind the $18 are covered in food truck pricing after fees, fuel and pitch costs, and a cost-per-person pricing sheet shows the same logic for caterers.

Capacity, power and access: questions that save a wasted trip

Check throughput before anything else. Roaming Hunger's catering FAQ says a truck can typically serve 60 to 100 guests an hour, but your own number matters more: find your busiest hour last month in your point-of-sale report and count the orders. Say it is 55. Divide each enquiry's guests by its service window and compare.

The 180-guest launch needs 120 orders an hour, so no amount of enthusiasm from the host changes the answer. The 120-guest lunch is a judgement call: a pre-order list or a 2.5-hour window brings it under your peak. The screening prompt asks the assistant to show this arithmetic, so cases like these get flagged automatically.

Power and access come next, because they fail quietly. That FAQ also tells hosts that power is a good idea for events longer than a few hours but not necessary, so whether you need a hook-up depends on your own generator. What you need from the host is a mains socket near the parking spot and its rating, or confirmation that a generator is allowed at the site at all, since noise and fuel can be a problem for neighbours and venues. On parking, the same FAQ says a truck on private property needs the property owner's permission, and a truck on a street must follow posted parking signs. So ask who manages the land and whether they have agreed. Hosts and venues often ask for proof of your permits and insurance too, so keep both ready to attach to the quote.

One way this goes wrong: the enquiry says "plenty of space in the garden". The truck arrives to find that the only way in is a gate narrower than the truck with its mirrors out, and the lawn behind it slopes. The day is lost and the deposit becomes an argument. Three questions would have caught it: how wide is the narrowest gate on the route, what is the surface, and can you send a photo of the spot and the way in? Add "send a photo" to the form as an optional upload; a picture answers half the access questions at once.

Distance is the last access question. Roaming Hunger's party-catering page tells hosts that trucks may charge a per-mile fee when an event is outside their normal travel radius, which it puts at 20 to 30 miles, so a travel line won't surprise most hosts, and an honest one beats quietly absorbing the cost. A simple rule: miles beyond your free radius, times two for the return, times your own cost per mile. For a site 32 miles from base with a 15-mile free radius and a cost of $0.90 a mile, that is (32 − 15) × 2 × $0.90 = $30.60, shown as its own line.

Prompt one: pull the answers out of a messy enquiry

Real enquiries arrive as chatty paragraphs. Here is the one this section works through (invented for illustration):

Hi there! Doing a surprise 18th for my daughter, roughly 70 people, in our garden on Saturday the 14th, probably from about 6. Do you do burgers and something veggie? Budget is tight, hoping to keep it around $600 all in. Not sure about power, there's a long drive and a gate. Thanks, [first name]

Before pasting anything into a chatbot, strip phone numbers and email addresses and keep the first name only. Business plans from the big assistants don't train on your content by default, whereas consumer plans have a model-training switch in their privacy settings, so check which you are on. Then give the assistant a narrow job: extract, don't judge.

You are screening private-event enquiries for a food truck. Read the enquiry below and return a table with these fields: event type, date, start and end time, guest count (firm or range), location type, who manages the site, surface and access, power, menu or dietary needs, budget (total and per head), who pays the deposit.
Write "not stated" for any field the enquiry doesn't cover. Do not guess and do not fill gaps with assumptions; if you must assume, label the row "assumption".
After the table, list the questions I should ask the host, one per missing field, in the order a host would find easiest to answer.
Enquiry: [paste here]

The reply (illustrative) is a table like this one.

Three details deserve a second look. The date has no month, so the assistant correctly marked it for checking instead of picking one; you check your own calendar, because an assistant can't see it unless you connect one, and even then you should confirm the date yourself. The site manager row is an assumption it labelled honestly. And it divided $600 by 70 to get $8.57; the division is right, but check any figure it computes, which is why the next prompt takes numbers from you rather than from the AI. The question list at the bottom of its reply (gate width, power rating, end time, payer) becomes your follow-up email almost unchanged.

Prompt two: rate each area, then choose quote, ask or decline

The assistant can apply rules faster than you can, but it can't invent them. Write your rules once, in a table you keep beside the prompt. The thresholds below use the numbers from the sections above; replace them with yours.

Then the decision rule, which stays with you. Quote when every area is green, or when at most two are amber and none is red. Ask when one red is something the host could change (the budget, say) or when three or more are amber. Decline when a red can't change: a date that is already booked, no access, or a crowd beyond your capacity.

Using the extracted table above and the rules below, rate each of the seven areas green, amber or red, with a one-line reason each. Then recommend QUOTE, ASK or DECLINE. Do not write to the host.
My numbers: price per head $18; minimum spend $1,150 for a three-hour service; peak capacity 55 orders an hour; 14 days' notice needed; free travel radius 15 miles.
Rules: [paste the rubric table here]
Show your arithmetic for orders an hour and budget per head so I can check it.

For the garden party, a sensible reply (illustrative) rates date and window amber (month and end time missing), guest count green (70 guests over an assumed three hours is about 23 orders an hour), budget red ($8.57 against an $18 price per head is more than 15% below), site and access amber, power amber, menu green and deposit green (not raised yet). It recommends ASK: one red that the host could move, plus three ambers. That matches what you would decide yourself, but it has done the arithmetic and listed the reasons in ten seconds.

The same rubric treats the 180-guest corporate launch from earlier as DECLINE, because the red on capacity can't change unless the host extends the window or books a second truck. Offering those two ideas in the reply is kinder than a flat no, and it costs you nothing.

Prompt three: write the quote and the deposit terms

When the answer is ASK, the reply carries two jobs: the open questions and a price range the host can react to. Give the assistant the numbers, because a language model that does its own sums will occasionally get them wrong, and tell it what it must not promise.

Write a friendly reply to [first name] about a surprise 18th birthday for about 70 guests. Use only these facts and figures:
Option A: full menu, $18 per head for 70 confirmed guests, $1,260 in total, three-hour service.
Option B: one main (burger or veggie burger) with a drink, $13 per head, $910 in total.
Deposit: 30% of the chosen option, due with the signed agreement; the date is held only once both are done. Final guest numbers are due seven days before.
Open questions: the month and end time, the width of the narrowest gate, a photo of the parking spot, the power rating at the socket, and who will sign and pay the deposit.
Do not promise an arrival time, and do not mention any other price. 150 to 200 words.

A usable reply (illustrative) reads like this once you've trimmed it.

Hi [first name], thank you for thinking of us for the 18th. We'd love to feed your guests. For about 70 people we can offer two options. Option A is our full menu at $18 a head, $1,260 for 70 confirmed guests. Option B is one main (beef or veggie burger) with a drink at $13 a head, $910 in total. Both include a three-hour service. To hold the date we take a 30% deposit with the signed agreement, and we need final numbers a week before. To confirm it works for us, could you tell us the month and the time you'd like us serving until, how wide the narrowest gate is, and what power is available near where we'd park? A photo of the spot would help too. Who will be signing the agreement? Thanks, [your name]

Before you send it, put both options through your own numbers. Option A leaves $377 on 70 guests ($1,260 less $378 of food and packaging less $505 of fixed cost). Option B, with food and packaging at $4.00 a head, leaves $125 ($910 less $280 less $505). To reach the same $300 target at $13 a head you would need 90 guests, because ($505 + $300) divided by $9 is 89.4. That is the number to look at before you offer B at all. The 30% deposit on A is $378, which happens to equal the food and packaging you would buy for 70 guests, so a host who walks away leaves you whole on ingredients.

Deposit and cancellation terms that match the risks

A deposit does three jobs: it shows the host is serious, it covers the food you buy before the day, and it makes cancelling cost something real. The terms around it should answer the failures this process has already surfaced: a late cancellation, a crowd that shrinks, bad weather and a site you can't use. These clauses are illustrative and written in plain language; have a lawyer read your final terms, because what a deposit can do varies between places.

• Booking: the date is held when the deposit is paid and the agreement is signed, and not before.
• Deposit: 30% of the quoted total, which covers the food and packaging for the confirmed number. It isn't refunded if the host cancels, except where we are the ones who can't attend.
• Guest numbers: the final number is due seven days before. We charge for the final number even if fewer attend, and accept additions if stock allows at the same price.
• Weather: we trade in rain. If the host cancels for weather within 48 hours, the deposit moves to a new date instead of being refunded. Choose whichever you can live with, and say it.
• Access and power: if the site can't take the truck safely, or the access or power described in the booking turns out to be wrong, the full price remains payable.
• Overrun: an hourly rate applies beyond the agreed service window.

The access clause is the one the gate story earlier was missing. Ask the assistant to turn your bullet points into a one-page agreement in plain English, then compare it with the quote line by line, because it will occasionally add a promise you didn't make.

Declining and chasing without losing the relationship

A decline written in advance takes thirty seconds to send and protects a future booking. Keep two versions: one for a budget that doesn't fit and one for a capacity or access problem that can't be fixed.

Hi [first name], thank you for thinking of us for your event. For a private booking our minimum is $1,150 for a three-hour service, so a $600 budget is below what we can do well. If the budget or the guest count changes, we'd be glad to quote again. A larger group or a shorter, single-item menu would bring the price per head down. Best wishes, [your name]

Chasing needs a rule as much as a template. Put the date on hold in your calendar as tentative the day you send a quote, chase once after 48 hours with a single question ("Are the two options what you had in mind?"), and release the hold after seven days unless the host has replied. Say so in the quote ("We can hold the date until [day]") so the release doesn't feel like a surprise. You can ask the assistant to draft both messages from the quote you sent; the approval habit from setting up an approval step for AI-written quotes applies here too, because every message that carries a price should be read by you before it goes.

Test the screening on twenty old enquiries first

Before the prompts touch a live enquiry, run them on twenty old ones. Pull ten you accepted and ten you declined or never answered, strip the contact details, and run prompts one and two on each. Then compare the assistant's call with what you actually did. A table like this (illustrative) is what you are looking for.

Sixteen of twenty matching is a fair bar for starting to use it on live enquiries, with you still making every decision; below that, fix the prompt first. The two repeat customers show why a screening prompt needs a field for history, and the date misreading shows why the prompt should state the format and ask for the day of the week, which a host will correct if it is wrong. Re-run the test after any change to your rules, because a change to the minimum or the peak capacity changes which enquiries turn green.

The whole routine takes about five minutes per enquiry once the form, the rubric and the three prompts are saved: read the extracted table, confirm the date, send the questions or the quote, set the hold. If you outgrow it, that is the moment to price a tool from the first table, with a clear idea of which of its features you would actually use. For the other half of private-event work, finding the public pitches and festivals that fill the rest of the week, see drafting festival applications with AI.

Questions food trucks ask about event enquiries

Should the form turn requests down automatically?

No. Let the form collect answers and let AI flag problems, but keep the decline with you. An automatic refusal will occasionally reject a good job that was badly worded, such as a budget given as a total instead of per head. Send a short reply with the missing questions first, and decline yourself when a red flag survives the answers.

How firm should the guest count be before I quote?

Quote on the host's best estimate, but write a final-numbers date into the agreement, such as seven days before the event, and say whether you charge for the confirmed number if fewer turn up. Roaming Hunger's catering FAQ says trucks usually bring about 10% more product to cover extra servings; set your own margin for late additions.

Do I charge a travel fee on private events?

If the site is outside your usual radius, yes, and show it as its own line so the host sees why the price moved. Take the miles beyond your free radius, double them for the return trip, multiply by your own cost per mile, and add driving time if the trip is long.

Can ChatGPT check my calendar for clashes?

Only if you connect a calendar to it, and even then confirm the date yourself before replying. Treat availability as a human step: look at your own calendar, your public pitch schedule and any festival applications before an AI draft says yes.

Further reads

• Food Truck Food Cost: Use ChatGPT Before Paying for Software — Work out the food cost behind your per-head price.
• AI for Event Venues: From Enquiry to Quote Without Missing Details — How a venue turns enquiries into quotes without missing details.
• Party Rental Contract: Damage, Weather and Deposit Terms With AI — Deposit, damage and weather terms worth copying for event contracts.
• Wedding Catering Proposals: Tastings, Quotes and Follow-Ups With AI — Proposal and follow-up wording from the catering side.
• How Food Trucks Can Use AI to Plan Stock, Pitches and Posts — The wider week: stock, pitches and posts for a truck.
• Food Truck POS: Offline Mode, Fees and Which AI Features Pay Off — Find your peak orders an hour in the point-of-sale report.
• Can AI Write a Business Plan for a Food Truck? A Worked Example — A worked food truck plan: AI drafts the text and formulas, you verify menu costs, pitch fees, loan terms and break-even before a lender or organiser sees it.
• Food Truck Marketing: Build an Email and SMS Regulars List With AI — A window QR sign-up, consent wording and three templates (welcome, weekly location text, monthly email) for a food truck's email and text list.
• Food Truck Ordering App: Pre-Orders, Pitches and Where AI Helps — Compare Square, Toast and food-truck platforms on pre-order slots, location sharing and fees, then see where AI helps and what an app will never do.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Roaming Hunger's catering questions-and-answers page (booking rule, guests an hour, extra product, power, parking permission) and its party-catering page (minimums for parties of 50 or fewer, per-mile travel fees); CheckCherry and HoneyBook pricing pages, read in October 2026. Every event, price and enquiry in the examples is invented for illustration.