Account Manager

Like the other manager screens, Account Manager is now completely customizable. Move fields from one area of the screen to another (for example, from the "Miscellaneous" tab to the "General" tab), rename these tabs, rearrange or remove tabs, etc. You can even save your custom display and optionally share it with other users on your Caterease network (and that process is easier in this version, as well!)

As with Event Manager, the mapping interface in Account Manager has been enhanced to offer the options of Google Maps and Virtual Earth, in addition to MapQuest.

If your client wants their address to be used as the delivery location for their events, you can default that information with a single mouse click. You never have to type the same thing more than once!

Contact Manager

Caterease reminders (available if you own Contact Manager) now mimic Microsoft Outlook. They can be set to pop up at a specific time, and can be optionally "snoozed" or "dismissed" exactly as the can in Outlook.

Event Manager

"Closed" is now included as an event status. If you choose a status of "Closed", the program automatically records the current date as the "Closed Date".

The "Operation" field in Event Manager can now be set to default to a certain value for all new parties or can be established as a required field (so it cannot be left blank).

The Sub-Event window has been completely redesigned to be cleaner and more logically arranged. In addition, this new window is able to be completely customized - move fields from one tab to another, rename tabs, remove tabs, rearrange tabs, etc.

If a client wants to hold their meeting or event at their facility, you can instantly copy their company's address and detailed directions into the site location area of the Sub-Event display.

This one will be popular! Now you can create a custom menu item in Event Manager, and dynamically copy it back into the Menu Manager for use in the future! You can even edit an existing menu item in Event Manager and then copy those changes back to the item in your default menus. Really - you never have to type the same thing more than once!

Now the quickpick list of statuses ("stati"?) can be customized by you. Although the "primary" statuses you have always had cannot be deleted (there are so many reports, etc. that depend on them), you can add others and choose custom colors to represent them.

Menu items can now have default quantities. For example, when you pull a "Setup Charge" into an event, it could come in with a quantity of one automatically. You can even use default quantities for menu package items, and combine them with the "link quantity to guest count" feature (see "Menu Item Default Quantity" under Menu Manager Enhancements).

Even the details at the TOP of Event Manager can now be customized! The "Client" details at the top left and the "Financial" details at the top right can be manipulated to show certain fields and to not show others. Basically, you build your own program your way!

Any field on the "Event" display (formerly the "General" display) can now be placed anywhere. The two tabs ("General" and "Miscellaneous") can be renamed, repositioned or removeed - and any field can be moved from one tab to the other.

This tool allows you to make items "inactive" - so you won't see them in your menus as you select items for an event, but they will remain in Menu Manager in case you want to make them active again in the future.

Similar to item Descriptions, you can create label text in Menu Manager so that it pulls into an event with an item, or you can create or edit label text in an individual event.

The Supplemental Food/Service Window, which used to only be available in the Professional version of Caterease, is now available in the Standard version as well. Among other things, that means those users now have the ability to modify ingredients on-the-fly within an individual event.

As mentioned above, the Supplemental Food/Service window is now available in the Standard version of Caterease. This means that those users can also modify Required Items (packaging lists) on-the-fly within an individual event.

In addition to hiding a SINGLE menu item on your various event prints, you can now select MULTIPLE items and hide them all with a single mouse click.

In addition to linking the quantity of a SINGLE menu item to an event's guest count, you can now select MULTIPLE items and link them all with a single mouse click.

Now you can get detailed driving directions from your favorite mapping website. The popular mapping interface has been enhanced to interface with MapQuest, Google Maps (which even allows for foreign language translations) and Virtual Earth.

The "General" display in Event Manager has been renamed to the "Event" display, since its details reflect the event - as opposed to the sub-event.

The "Room" tab on the Sub-Event display has been renamed "Venue", to more precisely describe the information stored there. However, with this new version, fields can be moved to any tab you want, and the tab itself can be renamed, repositioned or removed!

In addition to copying ALL menu items from one event to another, you can now select specific items (as opposed to ALL items) and copy just those.

In addition to (or instead of!) selecting specific employees to work a party, you can choose "shifts". For example, instead of choosing "Steve" and "Susan" to be bartenders for an event, you can simply choose that you need "2 Bartenders", to be named later. Furthermore, you have the option pass along a fee to your customer for each shift (perhaps, for example, you bill your customer $20 for each hour worked by each of your bartenders).

As mentioned above, Caterease now allows you track "shifts" in addition to individual employees - and as a part of this you can establish rules for each of the shifts you track. For example, you could state that for any party with a theme of "Wedding Reception", you need 1 bartender for every 10 guest. However, for any other party you can have 1 bartender for every 20 guests. The program will then automatically inform you of the required shifts for each event, and will let you know which parties are understaffed.

You can now include staffing details on the various event prints you create in your Print Designer. These details can be included in a "table" format - meaning specific columns of information - or in a "narrative" format - meaning staffing explained in sentence structure (e.g., "2 Bartenders, 12:30PM-2:30PM (2 Hours), at an hourly rate of $20.00, totalling $80.00.")

Newly available in the Standard version, this feature in and of itself is worthy of note. Using this tool, you can create dynamic custom grid views of an event's menu items, including details that are not available on the Food/Service tab of Event Manager. This versatile tool gives you a ton of power to review an event's menu items.

General Program

Change the look and feel of every window in the entire program using these fun, attractive skins. (Incidentally, this does mean that the ability to place custom images on your Caterease desktop has been eliminated with this updated. But skins are better, anyway, because they let you control the look of the WHOLE PROGRAM!)

Using the Shift Manager tool, you can manage employees and shifts for multiple parties from one single window. Add, remove or confirm various employees for several events without even having to open your Event Manager!

Those users who do not use Extended MAPI email through Microsoft Outlook are no longer stuck using Simple MAPI. You can now establish direct email settings where your emails go out directly through your SMTP server. Want the non-techy explanation? Your Caterease emails can now support beautiful, rich-text formatting (colorful fonts and such), no matter what!

From now on, when you update your Caterease program (Help > Caterease on the Web > Download Latest Updated from the Web), the entire process will be even faster because only certain files will be updated!

Now screens throughout the program are even MORE customizable! You can pretty much redesign the entire program to suit your company's preferences!

"Gratuity" has been added to the Tax/Service Charge rates in the program. Thus, you can establish a default Gratuity rate for each type of menu item - optionally applying a tax to the Gratuity - and can be edited when necessary from within an individual event. As you probably know, unique Tax/Service Charge (and now Gratuity) rates can be assigned to default for a particular client or site location.

In addition to interfacing with MapQuest, the Caterease mapping feature now offers the options of Google Maps (which allows for foreign language translations) and Virtual Earth.

Now when you redesign your various screens and save those new settings, they follow you as a user! Therefore, if you go to a colleague's computer and log into Caterease under YOUR name, you will see YOUR screen displays as YOU'VE designed them!

The powerful custom querying tools have been made even more powerful with the addition of new comparison terms - "In" and "Not In". For example, you can find all parties whose Theme is "In" Wedding, Reception, Rehearsal (in other words, the Theme must be one of those listed).

To go along with the added flexibility mentioned above, once you create your custom screen displays you can easily share them with all the other users on your Caterease network. Managing custom screen displays is now a piece of cake!

Your Caterease email settings - including your personal email signature - are now linked to your user name, and will follow you no matter which computer you log into Caterease on.

You know that Caterease gives you many customizable quickpick list to make your data-entry process easier. Now you can require the use of those lists - in other words, prohibiting users from typing into a quickpick list field.

In addition to the powerful new Shift Manager, a detailed report will break down all shifts scheduled for any day or date range - even identifying which shifts are currently understaffed!

Every screen display in the program has been redesigned so that future updates of the program will not necessarily reset entire widows that you have customized. For example, if a field is added to the sub-event window in Event Manager, then that is the only area of the program that will be reset; all other windows will remain as you have customized them.

Caterease v10 introduces the concept of "shift management" - allowing you to manage "shifts" for a party in addition to (or in lieu of) specific employees (e.g., "we need two bartenders for this event" as opposed to "we need Steve and Susan"). The amazing Shift Manager allows you to manage multiple shifts for multiple parties from one window. You can select employees to work various events, confirm them, remove them, etc. - all from one powerful window! This is a huge time saver!

The "navigation bar", or sidebar, along the left of your Caterease screen has been updated to allow you even more flexibility!

Menu Manager

Now you can add menu items to your default menus from Event Manager. If you create a custom menu item (or edit an existing one) from an event, you can optionally copy those changes back to your Menu Manager.

If you have any menu items in your default menus that you don't usually sell anymore, but you don't want to delete them from your menus, you can make them inactive. This means that won't see those items as you select menu items for an event; however, they will still be in your Menu Manager so you can perhaps make them active again in the future.

You can establish a default quantity for any menu item. For example, if you have a "Podium" that you rent, most likely it will always have a quantity of "1" for every event that uses it. Therefore, you can have the item default to a quantity of "1" whenever you retrieve it. (Of course, you can change that default quantity within an event if necessary.) As an optional extra level, you could default the quantity of an item AND link that item to the guest count of a party. For example, if you like to serve one and a half bagels per person at breakfast, you can give "Bagels" a default quantity of 1.5 and then link it to the guest count - thus, if there are 30 guests at a party, the quantity of "Bagels" will automatically be 45 - 1.5 times 30 guests. How's that for dynamic?

You can create labels or display cards for your various menu items, and print them from each event! This tool works similarly to the Menu Item Description feature - you can enter label text in Menu Manager and have it pulled into an event automatically with the item, or you can create (or edit) label text within an individual event.

This new field will automatically calculate the price of a single menu item or multiple items by multiplying the item cost by a markup factor that you can define.

If you have a decimal number as the default quantity of a menu item, and you have the quantity defaulting to the guest count, this option will round the resulting number for you. For example, above we imagined that we wanted 1.5 "Bagels" per person, and that we linked that quantity to the guest count of each event. Thus, an event with 30 guests would require 45 Bagels. However, what if the guest count were 25? Then "1.5 per person" would result in 37.5 Bagels. So you could choose "Up" under rounding to force that total number to round up to 38; or you could choose "Down" to have it round down to 37. You can even choose "Round Quarter Up/Down" or Round Half Up/Down" if you have decimals that are even smaller than our ".5" example!

Required items are now created and stored in a master list, much like ingredient items. But don't worry - we've taken the trouble to move all of your existing required items into the new master list for you! (You're welcome!) Also, dragging and dropping both required items and ingredients up and down in their lists has been greatly enhanced.

Yet another powerful activity query has been added to the program - to help you track required items. This tool works like your other activity queries, with just as much power and flexibility.

Prospect Manager

Build your own Prospect Manager! Fields can be moved from one tab to another; tabs can be rearranged, removed or renamed. Custom displays can be saved and more easily shared with other users on your network. Like every other manager, you call the shots!

Create detailed proposals in Prospect Manager without needing to make the prospect an active client. Basic details - theme, date, times, price estimates - can be included and custom proposal prints can be generated.

Scheduler

And also - you can now view reminders in a calendar display, with all of the amazing functionality this powerful tool provides.

Now you can view a calendar of staff members working upcoming parties. Again, all the same calendar options apply - the various views, the option to group staff by certain details, etc.

This remarkable new tool lets you view sub-event details (the details of each "meal" - breakfasts, meetings, cocktail receptions, etc.) in their own calendar tool. Furthermore, you have all the same amazing tools the event calendar offers you - including separating sub-events into groups and optionally dragging sub-events from one group to another.

After you have separated your events, sub-events, staffing or reminders calendars into groups, you can drag and drop records from one group to another. Drag an event from one "Operation" to another; drag a sub-event from one room or site location to another; drag an employee from one position ("waiter", bartender", etc.) to another; drag a reminder from one user to another; or any of a host of other options. This is tremendous power and flexibility!

This incredible tool allows you to literally create separate event calendars in your Scheduler, each showing a different group of events. For example, perhaps you want to group your events based on sales representative, in which case you would see multiple separate calendars (in month/day/week/work week view) - one for each of your sales reps. You can group them by Theme, Business Type or a variety of other important event details - even dragging and dropping parties instantly from one group to another.

As with the other calendar options, you can also group your calendars of reminders - thereby viewing a separate calendar of reminders for each sales rep, for example; or perhaps a separate calendar for each type of reminder. And also as with the other options, you can drag and drop your reminders from one of these groups to another - for example, from sales rep to sales rep, etc.

As mentioned above, you can view your staff in a calendar - and then separate them into groups based on various details. For example, you can see a calendar of all "bartenders" working a party, a separate one for "waiters", and one for every other position at your company. Then you can even drag and drop employees from one group to another if you need to!

This one takes the Event Grouping feature mentioned above to a whole new level! Here, you can create separate calendars by grouping SUB-EVENTS, using SUB-EVENT details. For example, if you use banquet rooms for your events, you can group your sub-event by room, and VIOLA - instant rooms graph. If you don't have banquet rooms, you might choose to group by the site location of the sub-event. Or you might want to group based on description ("Dinner Buffet", "Meeting", Cocktail Reception", etc.), type of sub-event or even several event-level fields such as status, sale representative or operation. You can even drag sub-events from one of these groups to another! You're going to be amazed!

The Scheduler now offers the option to view holidays on the calendar screen. You even have a Holiday Editor, which allows you to choose holidays for a particular country and also add your own custom "Holidays" in addition to the default ones.

By combining the new dynamic sub-event grouping feature and the new time display, you can optionally view a rooms graph (or a graph of site locations, or other details) horizontally rather than vertically.

A new "Time" view has been added to the scheduler, graphing events horizontally across the screen on a timeline. This can be used as an optional display for the "Rooms" graph, showing bars blocking rooms horizontally as opposed to vertically.

The month-at-a-glance calendar display now has the option to compress weekends so that Saturday and Sunday share the same box on the calendar, or to hide weekends so they do not appear at all.

If you group your sub-events by banquet room (viewing a rooms graph), you can choose not to see breakout rooms blocked on the graph. (A "breakout" room is a smaller room that is relate to a larger one; for example, "Ballroom AB" can perhaps be "broken out" into "Ballroom A" and "Ballroom B".) Even if breakouts are not being viewed on the graph, those rooms will be blocked and you will be notified of any booking conflicts.

You can optionally show a secondary time zone on your calendar. For example, if your company does business in both the Eastern and Central time zones, you can have both appear on the calendar screen. You can even label each time zone anything you want.

Instead of viewing the week-at-a-glance calendar in the default two-column display, you can opt to show it in a single column listing all the days of the week. You also have the option to hide weekend days from this view.

Since the Year-at-a-Glance display in the Scheduler shows so many days on one screen, things obviously get a little "squished up". Now, rather than showing separate event bars on each date (which can't fit in the display anyway), you have the option of showing a single number on each date indicating the number of events on that day.

This incredibly useful feature allows you to instantly create a custom note on any date in your Scheduler. For example, if a client is considering a date for an event, you can make a quick note on that date so everyone will be aware when they are reviewing the calendar.