We’re all about efficient event management at Perfect Venue. That’s why we’ve written four BEO software reviews to help you understand your options when looking for a solution to streamline event planning.
As the person in charge of managing events at your venue, you have a lot on your plate. There are numerous elements, internal departments, and vendors to bring together to host a successful occasion. That’s where BEO software comes in - it helps everyone involved in the planning process track all the details and meet agreed-upon expectations. Â
What is a Banquet Event Order (BEO)?
A BEO contains all the important event details, including the planner’s contact information, event timeline, menu information, floor plan, and financial summary. In short, this document is a source of truth that covers the key event details. This way, stakeholders are on the same page when executing the event.
When starting out, you might use spreadsheets, pdfs, or a free BEO template to manage the planning process. But, as your events scale, there are powerful BEO software products to help you automate and streamline the process.
We won’t go into much more detail here. You can read more about what a BEO is, the different types of BEOs, and the information it should include in the link.
Top 4 BEO Software Reviews
The solutions below are specialized event management and event planning apps with their own built-in BEO software. You get access to this software by signing up for an account.
While the platforms offer free downloadable templates and a free electronic signature software download, the more powerful frameworks that scale with your event needs are accessed through an account plan.
1. Perfect Venue
Perfect Venue is event management software designed to help restaurants, caterers, and unique venues organize and manage events from one consolidated dashboard. In addition to tons of handy tools and features, Perfect Venue has a library of professional pdfs, contracts, and banquet event order templates you can complete and send in minutes. Â
Speed is always key when putting together digital proposals - it pays to get your proposals into a potential client’s inbox ahead of the competition. On Perfect Venue, you can automatically generate accurate BEOs from stored data without having to pull it manually.
After sharing banquet event orders with the relevant stakeholders, you can adjust the documents online. As it’s cloud-based software, edits are updated in real-time for everyone. You can also add internal and proposal notes to your order, providing context or additional information where necessary.
Instead of having a wad of pages to rifle through, your event details are consolidated onto one easy-to-read document, which often fits on a single page. This lessens the chance of accidentally missing critical information and saves trees if you plan on printing out your documents.
Perfect Venue also allows you to download BEOs in bulk. Whether you’re planning one event or five, or need different types of BEOs to send to various departments, you can get the correct information across to the people who need it.
For the main banquet event order, there’s a full finance breakdown, including taxes, additional fees, remaining payments, F&B Minimums, and more. You can also download it without finances for the Chefs and Kitchen version.
Note that you can add custom fields to the document but can’t customize the layout. That said, the design is intuitive and clean-cut to make for a professional-looking banquet event order.
Pros
- Automatically generate professional banquet event orders
- Consolidate information onto one page
- Real-time edits using cloud-based BEO software
- Bulk downloads
Cons
- Can’t customize the BEO layout, only the fields
2. Tripleseat
Like Perfect Venue, Tripleseat offers built-in BEO software as part of its standardized software solutions for event management. It also has free downloadable templates, although you unlock the real power and benefits within the account plans.
As Tripleseat is designed for larger hotels and chains, it offers a bit more in the way of template, contract, and proposal customization. In addition, there are advanced features around billing organization, such as notifications when your document has been viewed, signed, and approved using the online signature tool.
Like Perfect Venue, you can develop custom menus to suit the occasion, set discounted items, automatically fill in event details, and add notes. Stakeholders will get instant updates so that they can follow along with any changes in real-time.
You also have access to bulk downloads to create different document versions for the front-of-house, the kitchen, and people involved in the event setup. Â
While Tripleseat offers top-of-the-line BEO software, it’s not perfect. Loading your event orders can take a while, resulting in lost time when planning big events. Additionally, it’s often difficult to find the features you need, so it can take longer to populate the forms.
Pros
- Cloud-based software with real-time updates
- Customize your documents to suit your brand
- Bulk downloads
- Billing organization features
Cons
- Documents can take a while to load
- Features are hard to find and use
- Filling in forms can become complicated
3. Planning Pod
Like the other platforms on this list, Planning Pod’s BEO software provides the framework to write up and customize event orders within minutes, giving teams a baseline from which to work.
It too has the functionality to generate multiple custom BEOs to suit specific stakeholders, including, Front-of-house, Kitchen, delivery, and clients. You can draw upon stored data to auto-populate form fields and use tools to sync dates, times, locations, and other details to create your BEOs.
As Planning Pod’s suite of tools is designed for large venues or businesses with complex setups, it’s relatively customizable. You can adjust your banquet event orders and create document designs to suit your needs. If you’d prefer to work from a pre-built layout, that’s possible too.
If you’re planning a big event with catering, the BEO technology connects to their catering app, allowing you to easily add food and beverage packages. This is useful for the kitchen and service staff, as menu descriptions are incredibly detailed, with everything from dietary information to serving times and prices included.
Once you’ve shared your BEO with your vendors and clients, they can sign off on the event using the e-signature function. You’ll receive a notification and can view signature statuses from your dashboard.
Unlike the other software solutions on this list, Planning Pod doesn’t offer free BEO software to trial. Plus, it’s only possible to trial the entire suite for 14 days before moving onto a paid plan. With a lengthy onboarding and setup process, Planning Pod isn’t the most accessible BEO software to hit the ground running with.
Pros
- Customize your BEO template
- Use stored data to generate BEOs
- Quickly add food and beverage information
- Send and share documents with clients, vendors, and your team in just a few minutes
- Collect e-signatures
Cons
- Complex onboarding and setup process
- Not the most straightforward app to use
4. Caterease
Last to mention on our list of BEO software reviews is Caterease. This company is one of the longer standing names in the industry and is primarily designed for catering companies. That said, it’s also popular with hotels, banquet halls, and country clubs (among others) that use its event and catering management systems. Â
As part of its suite of tools, you can build and design your own banquet event orders, invoices, and contracts. Because no two events are the same, you can use programmable fields to display only the necessary information. Plus, front and back-of-house templates are available to create clear-cut documents to suit the recipients.
On the dashboard, you can access past data and communication to merge it with existing client and venue data. This gives you a more holistic overview of the event planning process and allows you to automatically fill in forms without forgetting any details. Â
Despite the power of this software, it isn’t quite as intuitive as its counterparts when it comes to user experience. This is likely due to it being an established platform that has been on the market for some time.
Pros
- Create custom document layouts
- Hide or show relevant event details
- Use BEO software to merge event and client data
- Programmable fields for customization
Cons
- Not as slick on user-experience
Conclusion
Being an event manager involves a constant dash to ensure operations run smoothly. But with the right BEO software, you can eliminate busy work and focus on essential details that need your attention.
Hopefully, our BEO software reviews have helped to highlight what you should be on the lookout for. Different solutions suit different types of businesses, so it’s key to dig into what would work best for you.
We strongly recommend trying software out for free first - speaking of which, try out Perfect Venue’s full suite (including our BEO software) by clicking here.
