Is Total Party Planner (TPP) right for your catering events business? Choosing catering management software isn’t always straightforward. Different platforms bring different solutions to the table, and it’s up to you to find what will work best based on your needs.
Although TPP is easy to use and featured for caterers, it isn’t for everyone. With this in mind, we’re here to help you understand more about the Total Party Planner alternatives available.
No two hospitality and catering companies are the same. So, the software you use to power your business must match your unique needs. In this guide, we’ll cover some of the best alternatives to Total Party Planner and explain who can benefit the most from them.
Seven Total Party Planner Alternatives to Consider
Total Party Planner offers a fairly comprehensive all-in-one catering software solution for catering companies and professionals. Sales teams, event planners, and caterers use it to track jobs across the event lifecycle.
We won’t go into much detail on TPP here (read our full Total Party Planner review for more information). But as a quick recap, some of its best-known features include:
- Banquet management
- Food costing and reports
- Document and proposals
- Task lists
- CRM database
- Client billing and communication
- Custom reports
- Integrations
- Mobile app
By now, you know that TPP isn’t the only catering software company in the lineup. Depending on your needs, you might find TPP focuses closely on catering while you require added features to help with general event management.
Here’s a list of seven Total Party Planner alternatives that should be on your radar.
1. Perfect Venue
Pricing: Free plan with paid plans from $59 per month.
Perfect Venue is all-in-one venue and events management software for restaurants, caterers, events venues, breweries, and hospitality groups. It’s an excellent alternative for unique venues that want a more rounded solution for overseeing events and not just catering. The tools on offer are designed to help save you time and increase your sales.
The dashboard has a central calendar where you can view all information on upcoming events. A team task tab also outlines upcoming tasks that need to be taken care of. You can allocate tasks to team members and send automated reminders to ensure everyone stays on top of their task lists at all times.
Besides internal reminders, you can also automate emails to clients and vendors. One-click email templates mean you can respond quicker and win more business. Perfect Venue also has templates to help you generate professional contracts, proposals, and BEOs (find out what a BEO is in this article).
You can access client email threads and internal communication from the dashboard so that everything is in one place. Perfect Venue also offers detailed event analytics to help you understand your business performance.
Main Features
- Central events calendar
- Email templates
- Digital proposals
- Detailed analytics
- Task automation
- Collect payments
2. Caterease
Pricing: From $68 per month.
Many catering professionals and event managers compare Total Party Planner vs Caterease. They’re both known names in the catering industry.
Caterease launched in 1991, offering catering management software for catering businesses. Today, it has a broader user base and serves various hospitality groups, including hotels, restaurants, and event venues, helping them manage their catering gigs.
Over time, Caterease has become known for its tools to manage aspects of the event timeline. Using built-in features, you can organize leads, accept bookings, and plan, oversee, and report on catering events. Custom prints, flexible reports, automated catering packing lists, and scalable recipes are included to help you streamline your busy catering operation.
There are also custom query tools and metrics tracking to monitor business performance to ensure you’re operating optimally and profitably. Using these, you can search things like client activity and generate financials such as revenue forecasts to keep a finger on the pulse of the company.
But, even though Caterease has many features you’d expect in a catering system, it’s not for everyone. Its user experience is a bit dated compared to some of the Total Party Planner alternatives on this list. It’s also not the most affordable option - the pricing above is for a single user on the entry-level plan, which is relatively limited.
Main Features
- Custom print tools (like menus)
- Automatic scalable recipes and sub-recipes
- Event bookings
- Automated packing lists
- Staff selection tool
- Automated reminders
- Mobile app
Read our full Caterease review here.
3. Curate
Pricing: From $125 per month.
Curate is another popular alternative to Total Party Planner, offering software for florists, caterers, event venues, and event professionals.
As an overview, the platform markets itself as software for event professionals. Its main selling points include generating eye-catching proposals, managing back-end processes, tracking rentals, and managing multiple locations from one dashboard.
Looking more closely at its catering management software, Curate offers tools to plan accurate recipes for events and streamline wholesale orders. This can help make each event more profitable with smarter food inventory management.
Curate also offers an interactive proposals feature, which is pretty nifty. It connects with Pinterest so clients can visualize their events more clearly.
For those in the venues market, Curate offers many of the usual features you’d expect to see, including BEOs, task management, e-signatures, and rentals management.
Clearly, the event management software is diverse. However, this also means there are many features you’re paying for but don’t necessarily need.
Main Features
- Create proposals
- Rental tracking
- Recipe creation
- Event costing reports
- Automated order lists
Read our complete Curate review here.
4. CaterTrax
Pricing: Contact CaterTrax for custom pricing.
CaterTrax isn’t necessarily the first choice for event planners or unique restaurant business venues. This software is designed for food service management companies, offering tools to streamline orders and operate multiple lines of business more efficiently.
The food service industry can use CaterTrax to improve ordering efficiency, access valuable business insights, and provide tools to help businesses operate more smoothly. This is offered through the platform’s three product options (catering complete, take out, floor stock).
CaterTrax is a solid catering system to help your business with menu management and all food-related tasks. However, if you’re looking for a solution that offers a broader range of event logistics tools, this wouldn’t necessarily be the most practical or intuitive platform.
Main Features
- Banquet management
- Billing and invoicing
- Customer database
- Calendar management
- Booking management
- Customizable reports
5. Monkey
Pricing: Contact Monkey for custom pricing.
Monkey is a software platform designed to help businesses in the hospitality industry gain more control over their off-premises operations. To achieve this, the platform offers tools to help manage catering, deliveries, and takeout.
This means it’s not entirely focused on a catering solution and doesn’t offer tools to manage the entire process of events. Although, if you run a restaurant that offers delivery, take out, online ordering, and off-premises catering, then Monkey can be very useful.
Businesses can use Monkey to help them with customer relationship management, online and mobile ordering, order production management, accounting, reporting, and more. The platform’s delivery management software is particularly useful.
It’s important to understand that Monkey is not an event management platform in the same sense as Total Party Planner. For the right business, though, Monkey offers some great functionality.
Main Features
- Delivery management
- Ordering tools
- CRM
- Order production management
- Integrated accounting
- Sales team prospecting and lead management tools
6. Spoonfed
Pricing: Contact SpoonFed for custom pricing.
Spoonfed is an online catering management system for food service management businesses, independent caterers, retail and restaurant chains, and social enterprise caterers.
The platform’s functionality is focused on catering and food service tools. Spoonfed offers a wide range of tools to support online ordering, automating back office production, automated kitchen prep sheets and reports, and client acquisition.
As an alternative to Total Party Planner, features like custom proposals, automated scheduling of event tasks, employee management, and online payments are lacking. This means it’s not as much of a complete event management software solution.
However, if you want software to help with inventory management and enhance catering systems, Spoonfed is a great choice.
Main Features
- Online ordering
- Delivery scheduling
- Cloud calendar
- Production planning
- Tools to manage multiple sites
- Group ordering
- Live reporting
7. Flex Catering
Pricing: Flex Catering for custom pricing.
Flex Catering is a restaurant and catering management solution. The all-in-one solution is similar to Total Party Planner in that it’s a food, venue, catering, and event management platform. But it also offers a great online ordering website that allows you to create fully customized ordering pages that match your branding.
Beyond its ordering functionality, Flex Catering offers corporate catering tools, customer account management tools with CRM, and an event management module. Hospitality businesses can use the tools for contract/license management, booking management, billing and invoicing, menu planning, and more.
The main benefit of Flex Catering is that it’s an all-in-one solution. Unlike many other Total Party Planner alternatives, this software isn’t only designed for catering and food service purposes.
However, this could also be its drawback, as many businesses may not require the complete set of functionality that Flex Catering offers.
Main Features
- Billing and invoicing
- Booking management
- CRM
- Event scheduling
- Menu management
- Cost management
- Quote generation
Conclusion
It’s vital that you understand what Total Party Planner alternatives are available before investing in a software solution for your business. This will help you choose a platform with the right features and functionalities. In turn, this will help you grow your business more efficiently.
Choosing a catering and events software solution is a big decision. Once the software is in place, your business operations will rely on it. So, explore as many different options as possible before you commit to a platform. Use demos and free versions to help you find the perfect solution to streamline your business management.
Speaking of which, why not try out Perfect Venue for free to see if it’s a good fit for your catering business? There’s no credit card required, and you’ll automatically switch to our free-forever plan if you don’t sign up for one of our winning paid plans.
