Old Iron BBQ
IN DEVELOPMENTCatering Software · Square Payments · Recipe Scaling · Event Ops
A full-stack operations suite for a real catering and popup BBQ business. Built to solve actual problems — not to look good in a portfolio.
The Problem
Running a catering business means juggling quotes, recipes, shopping lists, Square invoices, event history, and customer follow-ups — usually across a combination of spreadsheets, texts, and memory. The tools that exist for this are either too generic or too expensive for a small operation.
Old Iron BBQ needed software built for how BBQ catering actually works — not how a generic POS vendor thinks it should. So I built it myself.
What It Does
Square Integration
Payment processing, invoice generation, and transaction records tied directly to events. No manual reconciliation.
Recipe Scaling Engine
Enter a headcount, get a complete shopping list with quantities and cost breakdowns. Recipe ratios adjust automatically.
Food Cost Calculator
Real-time cost tracking per event — ingredients, prep time, overhead. Know your margin before you accept a booking.
Event History
Log every event with notes, headcount, menu, weather, and profitability. Over time, it becomes a reference for bidding.
Customer CRM
Track customers, booking history, dietary notes, and follow-up reminders. Built for repeat business, not one-offs.
Quote Builder
Generate itemized quotes from templates. Adjust for event size, menu complexity, and travel. Send directly from the app.
Technical Approach
The Square API handles the financial layer, keeping payments and invoices in sync without a custom billing system. The recipe engine is built around a normalized ingredient database — each recipe stores ratios, not hard-coded quantities, so scaling is a single multiplication pass. The event ledger aggregates all of this into per-event P&L that requires no manual entry after setup.
Built for real ops, not demos
Every feature exists because it was needed for an actual event. There's no bloat from imagining users — the user is someone cooking brisket at 4 AM who needs to know whether to smoke two more packers.
The same skills that run supply chain
Inventory management, cost-per-unit tracking, demand forecasting for events — this is distribution logic applied to food. The domain is different; the thinking is the same.
Core features — recipe scaling, Square integration, and event logging — are functional. Quote builder and CRM modules are currently being built out. The goal is a complete ops system by summer 2025.