Siriusware seems best suited for organizations that are working with many programs and events that are running at different times. You are able to easily check registration for different events at the same time which is very helpful. If you have staff that are focusing just on data analysis and reporting then Siriusware would be very useful for them. On the flip side if you need to train seasonal staff on the point of sale and process multiple sales in a quick amount of time then this is not the best fit. The interface can be clunky and slow especially when you have internet problems.
Integration with Microsoft Access - We use Access for a lot of different Queries, such as for our bar back to know the specifics of each bar. Caterease allows Access to pull data directly so all we have to do is run the report instead of entering all the information manually. Same with diagramming, having software like Placez that pulls from Caterease allows for such things as table and chair counts to be pulled directly from Caterease instead of having to place each individual table.
It’s a great program, but it’s missing some aspects that would be incredibly useful. It has the ability to store venues and locations that you’ve used in the past, but it doesn’t allow you to associate a tax rate with the saved venue. As our company handles events all throughout Southern California and tax rates are constantly changing, it would be nice to be able to assign certain tax rates to certain zip codes and venues.
It can be a little finicky sometimes with its equipment conflict algorithm. There will be events In the system that have been marked as cancelled, yet it will insist that an event I am working on has an equipment conflict with it (even though that event is not going through). It will not let you save out of your event and, sometimes, will end up deleting all your changes and progress, which is incredibly frustrating.
I wish there was a way to export PDFs of your proposals without re-saving your entire proposal. Sometimes, clients will ask for two versions of the same proposal with just slight changes, and it’s annoying to have to go in and completely re-do and save the proposal and have to adjust it back to the original.
It would be nice if there was a way to see a history of all of the changes that had been made in a proposal, that would be great. Because we often have many hands on each event we do, having a comprehensive list of all the changes made to each proposal and the date and times, and users who made these changes would be an incredible asset.
I have not had to use the support in my over 3 years of using Caterease. This is why I gave it a 9 rating because even though I haven't had to interact with support, the fact that I haven't had to use support speaks volumes to how good the software is and how it is user friendly.
Any POS implementation is a lot of work, and a lot of learning for Admin, IT, management, end users, etc. This was selected by a consultant we hired. We have many regrets regarding the process, but are now kind of stuck and it is basically getting the job done. It is not ideal, but the people who chose this have learned a lot in the process.
I haven’t used too many other events programs in the past – at a former company, we used the back end of our website in order to create events, but Caterease is a lot more user-friendly. Our website wasn’t particularly fancy – it didn’t allow us to conflict check or see if there was another event at the same time. It was used for the sole purpose of posting the information to our system – not for creating full proposals. Caterease is much more effective for what we need to use it for in this context.
It has allowed us to look at our total revenue more easily and figure out where we are falling short.
We do face more issues from the customer having difficulty registering for programs because of some of the limitations when being used as a online ticket point of sale.
It has allowed us to process refunds ourselves, which we were not able to do, which has allowed for better customer interaction.
