Events Management Overview

With our new Events Management tool, BentoBox makes it easy for restaurants to manage their events workflow — from website inquiries to booked events — and to deliver professional guest experiences with one tool, all from one place. 

• Book more events to drive high-margin revenue. Remove drop-off for on-premise and off-premise events through smart online forms with notification routing to the right staff. 

• Save your team time managing events end-to-end. Streamline your operations and send faster proposals with saved menus, print pre-formatted BEOs (banquet event orders), and collect digital payment.

• Drive repeat business from high-value customers. Deliver a guest experience that exceeds expectations with proactive communication, professional contracts, and secure deposits. 

Inquiries are private and/or catered events requests submitted by guests on your website, or internally by your staff. New inquiries appear in BentoBox when a guest writes in with interest by filling out a form on your website, or when a staff member manually adds a new inquiry. If your restaurant has the capacity to handle that event, you can convert the inquiry into an event.

Events are where qualified inquiries live. You can customize the specifics of an open or booked event, like Food & Beverage Items, Line Items, Fees, Discounts and more. You can also add notes for your Kitchen or front-of-house (FOH) staff using our banquet event order (BEO) functionality.

Proposals are branded snapshots of an event that you send to a guest either to confirm details or to serve as a contract that captures payment. BentoBox users can control what they want to be inserted into a proposal from the event details, including contract language like Terms/Cancellation Policy or Event Breakdown information, charges, and/or a request for digital payment. While you can create multiple proposals per inquiry, there can only be one active proposal sent to a guest at a time.

Paperless Payment is the option for a BentoBox user to ask for a partial or full deposit. This can be a percentage of the event total, a dollar amount, or the remaining charge. Payment requests can be sent with or without the event charges or contract language, but will always have the event details branded at the top. 

Events Management gives a seamless guest experience from initial inquiry through to after the event. Branded emails are sent from the restaurant to the guest, confirming their initial interest, confirming when a proposal is accepted, reminding of an upcoming event date, and thanking a guest afterwards.

A guest will receive the proposal directly to their email. If there is a monetary exchange in order to book the contract, they’ll complete the need to complete the required Credit Card and Information fields. This will store the credit card information in your payment processor that you’ve connected. 

Once a guest books a contract, they will receive a notification that the proposal has been accepted. You can also enable notifications so members of the team can receive these emails as well. 

1. Ensure your payment settings are connected

2. If you’re using Private Events, please create your venue boxes 
   You’ll want to ensure that your venue box is associated to the correct location

   • Note: If you do not have a venue, you’ll need to create 1 venue called Private Events.
     Reach out to support@getbento.com if you have any questions about this

3. Go to Events > Settings. 

   • Find the location with Events Management enabled

   • Select “Manage” for either Catered or Private Events to configure their respective settings. These settings will become the default for all of your Events to save you time in creating proposals

4. Add Menu Templates or send your menu PDFs to support@getbento.com and we'll do it for you. 

Table of Contents

1. Inquiries

   1. Understanding Inquiries

   2. Adding a New Event Inquiry in the Backend

2. Events 

   1. Understanding Events

   2. How to add Food & Beverage details to an event

   3. Understanding Proposals

3. Menu Templates 

   1. Event Menu Templates 

4. Settings 

   1. Settings & Notifications for Events Management 
      

Don’t use Events Management? Learn more or email us at upgrades@getbento.com to get started. 

For further assistance with this, or anything else BentoBox related, please reach out to our Support team by email at support@getbento.com or by phone at (646) 585-5021.