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.
RegPack and the RegPack Customer Service team have just been awesome! We work in a very niche market, and RegPack has assisted us in providing a complete service to our clients in an attractive and user-friendly way. And, where and when we do hit speed bumps, RegPack's team has always been at the ready to hold our hands and walk us through. They are super helpful, super responsive, and proactive at every step.
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.
It can be time consuming to start a new project, however it's nice that you can duplicate a project and edit from there. I think that while some of the setup takes a while, once it's running smoothly it's definitely worth the cost and time and will pay for itself quickly.
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.
There is no way to speak to a human representative, and that sucks. E-mail support is effective but takes 24 hours to respond. That can feel like a L O N G time when there is a problem that needs attention.
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.
Our ROI has been totally positive with RegPack. While it is not the cheapest option on the market, it's $$ to quality is second to none. We have been particularly impressed with the level of assistance that we receive from their team—any and every question, query, doubt has been addressed, and a solution has been found.
