Likelihood to Recommend This is an ideal program for any school or district looking for a way to monitor room and maintenance requests. The digital routing availability will help ease the burden of paper copies and make it quicker for everyone to use and submit their needs. Schools with a variety of staff members are best suited, especially since when submitting a request you can designate those that need to be involved and what specific needs you have from facility to technology.
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 You are able to designate whether you are submitting a maintenance request or a schedule request (for rooms). You can set recurring schedules for areas or rooms you may need weekly or monthly to be requested on a set day or time. SchoolDude autoroutes to the personnel you designate, taking out any physical paperwork involved. You can see your history of requests (both maintenance and schedule) in the database. Read full review Quick updates to contracts/files Great integrations available Report generation Read full review Cons The filter and ability to sort through your request history is a little difficult to navigate and can be glitchy if you are not sorting in the correct way. There should be a quicker and simpler way to verify whether a room is booked prior to scheduling. A cleaner, more simplistic look and navigation would go a long way. 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 This is the only program I have used for the facility, maintenance, technology, and room requests. However, there are programs that include similar features.
Frontline Professional Growth is a platform that includes digital forms and routing similar to SchoolDude. But it is a vastly more in-depth program with features that go beyond what SchoolDude is often used for.
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 Less printing and copying in a district. Quicker submitting and processing time. Able to track requests and see what is being used in the district. 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 Brightly Event Manager™ Screenshots