Equipment Stock: A Warning Before You Double-Book the Crockery
By Andrew Hemphill · 7 September 2025
If you own your crockery, glassware and linen rather than hiring it in, the thing that goes wrong is not running out on the day. It is promising the same eighty side plates to two events on the same date and finding out on the morning.
Puree can tell you at the point it matters, which is while you are still building the quote.
Recording what you own
Open an equipment item and fill in Stock quantity. That is the number you physically own, not a number you are willing to hire in on top.
You only need to do this for the items you would actually run out of. A caterer who owns three urns and two hundred forks needs the number on the urns. An item with no stock level recorded is never checked.
Stock is counted per item. If an item sits inside a bundle as part of its contents, those contents are counted too, so putting a kit on a quote draws down the items inside it.
What you see while quoting
When you add an equipment item to a quote, Puree adds up what every other order on the same date already claims. If that total goes past what you own, the line is flagged.
It is worth being precise about the date, because that is the whole of the check: two events on the same day are compared, two events on consecutive days are not. A three-day hire is not tracked as three days of the item being out.
Pending quotes count towards the total alongside accepted ones. That is deliberate, since the pending ones are exactly the bookings you have not yet decided how to cover.
It warns, it does not block
You can save the quote anyway. Plenty of caterers cover a shortfall by hiring in, and Puree has no way to know you have already rung the hire company. The point is that you find out while you can still do something about it.
It does not track breakages, it does not know what is currently in the van, and it does not reserve anything against a date.
See Items & Categories for setting up equipment items in the first place.