Cater-Easy
Rating: 7 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
Our event sales team uses Caterease in order to manage our events. We have a team of 6, so organizing all of our events and our calendar can sometimes be a bit complicated. We have dozens of events every month, and we need to make sure that we’re not double booking our venues equipment/staff/etc. Caterease makes it incredibly easy to check to see if there’s an equipment or venue conflict. In fact, it will actually make it incredibly difficult to move forward if it senses that there is a conflict, which allows us to adjust our proposals before we send them to our clients and potentially run into trouble with our clients. This saves us a lot of time and human error, as we don’t have to go into each individual event and double check our equipment against what has already been sold for any given day. It also allows us access to any event on the calendar, so if someone is out of the office and their client calls in, we can often assist them without having to wait, which makes us look efficient and client-friendly.
Pros
- As mentioned before, Caterease is great at helping identify conflicts with equipment, staff, and venues without the user having to go in and manually check. This is a great resource and saves us a lot of potential trouble with clients if we were to double book a piece of equipment.
- Caterease is also user-friendly. There’s a slight learning curve with some aspects of the program, but once you have been in the program for a while, it’s pretty accessible and makes it easy to search, edit proposals, and add new contacts.
- It’s really effective for multiple users. I like the accessibility and the fact that, even though many of us are often working in it at the same time, it doesn’t seem to stall or slow down, even with multiple users on the same license using it at the same time.
Cons
- 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Caterease is well suited for a smaller company that has a lot of different events that they produce with overlapping locations and equipment. Our company is relatively small, and we do a lot of events on-site, so it easily allows us to see if the equipment or venue we would like to sell has already been used. It’s pretty effective for our event company, but it might not work as effectively if there were more people in the program (though I can’t say for sure). That would be the only scenario in which I would not recommend it, but I can't even really say that for certain.