How to price a function package (and what to include)

Most function pricing starts as a number someone quoted in 2019, adjusted upward when it started to feel wrong. It usually holds together until a booking comes in that doesn't fit — a small weekday function, a long setup, a group that wants the room but not the food — and then the pricing has to be improvised.

The fix isn't a spreadsheet of costs. It's deciding what shape your pricing takes, and being consistent about it.

Pick a structure and stay with it

Per head

A single price per guest covering room, food and usually a beverage tier. Easy to quote over the phone, easy for a client to compare, and it scales with the size of the function.

The weakness is small groups. Your costs don't halve when the guest count does — the room still needs setting up, the staff still turn up, the kitchen still runs. Per-head pricing on its own quietly loses money on every function under about forty people. That is what minimum spends exist to fix.

Room hire plus catering

Separating the space from the food is more honest about where the cost sits, and it handles the group that only wants the room. It also makes it obvious what a client is giving up when they ask to bring their own catering.

The trade-off is that it is harder to quote and easier to compare unfavourably against a competitor showing one inclusive number.

Tiered packages

Three named packages at rising price points — the common structure, and the reason is behavioural: most clients choose the middle one. Tiers work when the difference between them is legible in one line each. They fail when there are six, or when the differences are subtle enough that the client asks you to explain them.

What goes inside the package

The point of a package is that the client stops itemising. Everything routine belongs inside it:

• Room hire for a stated block of hours, with setup and pack-down explicitly included or excluded
• The menu, at whatever level of choice the tier allows
• Standard staffing for that guest count
• Tables, chairs, linen, standard glassware and crockery
• Basic AV — the things every function asks for and you never charge separately for anyway
• Cleaning

Keep outside the package the things that genuinely vary: extended hours, premium beverage tiers, external suppliers, decorations, and anything you have to hire in. If you find yourself waiving the same "extra" on every booking, it isn't an extra — move it inside and raise the price.

Different guest types, different prices

Children, suppliers and staff meals shouldn't be billed at the adult rate, and venues that handle this by manually discounting the invoice make errors. Define the guest types once — adult, child, supplier — with their own rate against each package, and let the count do the arithmetic.

The costs venues forget

When the margin on functions feels thinner than the numbers suggest, it is usually one of these:

• Setup and pack-down hours. A 4-hour function can occupy the room for nine. If the space could have been sold twice that day, the package has to carry that.
• Penalty rates. Saturday night and Sunday staffing costs are not the Tuesday number, and a single price list charges as though they are.
• Wastage on final numbers. You cater to the confirmed count. If the count was locked too early or too late, the difference comes out of your margin.
• The admin. Quoting, chasing deposits, answering the fourteen emails between booking and event. Real hours that never appear in a cost-per-head calculation.
• Breakage and cleaning beyond normal. Predictable in aggregate, so price it in rather than absorbing it case by case.

Minimum spends and off-peak

A minimum spend protects the room rather than the plate — it says that whatever this function orders, the room is worth at least this much on a Saturday night. It is usually a better tool than a high per-head rate, because it lets a small group book without you losing money and without discounting your headline price.

Vary it by day and season rather than running one number. The Saturday in December and the Tuesday in February are not the same product, and pricing them identically means you are either turning away midweek business or underselling your peak.

Publish something

"Packages from $85 per head" costs you nothing and does two useful things: it filters out enquiries you were never going to convert, and it stops the client bouncing to a competitor who does publish. A venue that gives no indication of price reads as expensive to the people who can afford it and unpredictable to the people who can't.

Whatever you publish, quote it GST-inclusive if you are advertising to the public — see GST on venue hire and function packages for why that matters, and what your tax invoices need to show.

Make the package a real object, not a document

The practical problem with packages is that they live in a PDF while bookings live somewhere else. Every quote becomes a retyping exercise, and the price list on the website drifts from the one the team is actually quoting.

It is worth building each package once — its menus and meal options, its guest-type rates, and the charges it includes — and then applying it to a booking. The quote comes out consistent, the invoice inherits the same figures, and changing a price next season is one edit rather than a search through old documents.

That is how packages work in ezybooked: menus, meal choices, guest types and included charges are configured against the package and applied to the function. See the features page, and the deposit policy guide for the payment terms that should sit alongside the price.

The short version