Likelihood to Recommend Really like the appearance of reporting and the web booking.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Separation of payer and the person attending the activity. For example: children incur charges, but the parent is responsible for paying them. Fast - in our old system there was a delay while customers waited for the system to respond. Read full review Quick updates to contracts/files Great integrations available Report generation Read full review Cons I really like the look and feel of ActiveNet Reporting, but it isn't extremely customizable. Maybe there is something I am missing, but other employees have shared that same feedback. It would be nice to have the system synchronize with other software we use. (EMS, StarRez, etc.) When planning conferences, we currently have hotel guests and registration that we would like to share information for through each system. Currently it is just double data entry. Would like to be able to add more resources and details to a room booking and have the corresponding departments be notified of the order/track inventory. Read full review 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. Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered ACTIVE Network allowed: grouping of classes, good interface, allowed importing of records, complex payment plans, per class fee structures, user fees, and trial classes.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Not sure yet. It is newer to me and my department. Double data entry which is just extra man hours. Read full review Has made our team more efficient and be able to have a central place to store all info so everyone can access it. Manually printing BEOs has proven to be incredibly inefficient as they get updated quickly and often times just causes confusion and mistakes. It's nice to be able to generate contracts fairly quickly for clients Read full review ScreenShots