Catering Business Merchant Account Application with Event Deposit Collection

Streamline Your Catering Business with Smart Payment Processing

Running a catering business means juggling event bookings, menu planning, guest counts, and payments—all while delivering exceptional food and service. This Catering Business Merchant Account Application template helps you set up professional payment processing that's built specifically for the catering industry's unique needs.

Whether you're a growing catering company looking to accept deposits and final payments online, or an established business wanting to modernize your booking and payment workflow, this template combines merchant account setup with intelligent event pricing calculations. You'll capture everything from business credentials and banking details to event-specific pricing rules, guest count adjustments, and automatic gratuity calculations.

Built for catering workflows

This form handles the complexity of catering pricing—per-person rates that change based on headcount, deposit collection at booking, balance calculations, and the ability to adjust guest numbers right up until the event. It also includes optional gratuity processing, so your clients can add tips directly when they pay their final invoice.

The conditional logic ensures a smooth application experience, showing only relevant fields based on your business structure and the services you offer. Once submitted, you can use Stepper to automatically route the application for approval, trigger CRM updates, send welcome emails with account credentials, and create follow-up tasks for your finance team—keeping your payment setup organized and efficient.

Perfect for food service professionals

This template is ideal for catering companies, event caterers, food trucks expanding into events, personal chefs, corporate dining services, and anyone in the food and beverage space who needs flexible payment processing. By combining merchant account application with real event pricing scenarios, you can demonstrate exactly how you plan to use the account and get approved faster.

With Paperform's calculation engine, you can preview pricing logic right in the form, and with payment integrations like Stripe, PayPal, and Square, you'll be collecting deposits and processing event payments in no time. For contracts and service agreements, add Papersign to send catering contracts for eSignature immediately after form submission, keeping your booking process seamless and legally sound.

Set up professional payment processing that actually understands how catering works—with this template, you're not just applying for a merchant account, you're building the foundation for scalable, stress-free event payment management.