Total Party Planner Reviews

We've grown our business since starting with TPP. As we are able to track more.

Very useful for creating proposals and invoices. I also love the calendar.

Everyone working within TPP is kind, knowledgeable & super helpful. If anything else, you will definitely appreciate their amazing customer service. [sensitive content hidden] is amazing. She answers any questions that you have & checks in with you to see how you're coming along with the program. [sensitive content hidden] is super responsive & helpful when it comes to TPP Pay and is very friendly. [sensitive content hidden] (from Client Care) has been the best person throughout this entire process. He's very patient, caring & works hard for you to make sure that everything is running smoothly.

Tracking and Preparing for Events

This has made my life much easier. I needed something that was pretty much out of the box good to go and I found it. I would highly suggest at least looking at this product.

I work for a mid-sized off-site catering company. We have used Total Party Planner (TPP) for more than a decade, so we have lots of experience in using this product, over 25,000 events. We started off on the stand-alone version and ran it for about 8.5 years, then switched over to the web-based version more than a year ago.

Before we purchased TPP, I tried 3 or 4 other pieces of event planning software over several months. TPP was clearly the best: The most organized, and the easiest to use. And the web-version is easier and faster to use than was the stand-alone version.

TPP is an excellent piece of software. It is stable, and just plain works well. You can tell that the people who designed the software have a background in catering, because it does the things you need it to do to help automate the process.

Many of our sales people (5) are not what I would call 'computer people', and one in particular took some time getting used to TPP, but now they are all lost without it.

One thing we do that is somewhat unusual (for a catering company) is we do a fair number of deliveries where the food is delivered in disposable containers, with no servers, mostly business lunches. We use a different report for these to make clear to the kitchen at a glance that this is a delivery and not a full-service event, and the people at TPP helped us to 'tweak' that report to include everything we needed in it. That was hugely important to us, and TPP was glad to help modify the report.

To be fair, I cannot comment on a couple of features. We don't use the room reservation system, as we have no rooms to manage. I also cannot comment on the recipe section of the software, as we used different recipe software before TPP came along and have stuck with it, because the kitchen people know how to use it.

The best part of TPP may be their Tech Support. It's simply the best I have ever used, for any software. 95% of the time when we call them, a real person answers the phone, and our issue is generally resolved in 5-10 minutes. On the very rare occasion when we get the answering machine, we always receive a call back within 10-15 minutes.

No software is perfect, and TPP is no exception. Occasionally it feels like there is an extra mouse click or two required to do some simple thing, but at least the program is consistent about that from section to section.

For event planning, it would be hard to improve upon Total Party Planner.

They actually listen to their clients and work on supplying them the most efficient ways of utilizing their system. Overall; I have had more "wow" moments from the type of service they have provided. From the friendly way they respond to phone calls to the "all-hands" approach to trying to help you solve an issue...even if it has nothing to do with their software. THAT is EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE!!!

Our order taking time has definitely improved, and since the reports generate on their own, that saves a ton of time. We used to fill out a paper form, then translate it to a PDF confirmation to email our clients. This software has made my life easy! It's easy to jump between events, and go back in, without losing any information in the process.

Overall, the experience with TPP has been good, with some room for improvement.

It has been something I’ve wanted to do for years and I finally made the commitment and extremely happy I did. I was hoping to utilize the packing list portion of the software but just haven’t yet but hope to at some point.

Well, I started out as a desktop user and I cannot say enough about how TTP changed my life--it cut my time planning events in half and my food cost went down 10%. Making a shopping/ordering list is now something that I can do in 10-15 minutes for a whole week's worth of orders.
Customer service is A+++++. They are personally invested in my use. It is unbelievable how helpful the staff is and their follow up. I love the way support calls back to check on me a day or two after a question or a problem.
If you take the amount of time you save on event planning, menu costing and ordering and put an hourly dollar value on it, you will find that TPP costs probably half of that a year. I'm just a small business with around $300,000.00 in annual sales and it changed my life. There are also features that a larger catering business would find extremely helpful. I use some new feature regularly and I am always surprised at how much time it saves me.
Just do it! The cost will never be an issue because Total Party Planner pays for itself!

Staying organized, keeping everything in one place
Proving a nice contract for the customer.
Ease of sales

I started with a Competitors software some 20 plus years ago. I immediately found it to be OVER priced. The promises made by that competitor about Customer Support- didn't happen. Then, by fate, I was presented the dreams of a young man that created Total Party Planner (TPP). I have NEVER ONCE, in all these years, been denied the help that I needed in Customer Support almost immediately, every time! I know others that use TPP and they agree with me. Additionally, I am 70 years old, technology challenged, and guess what? I learned in a few hours how the master the program ! I am not only pleased with the quality of those people at TPP but can't understand why a consumer would go any where else. My thought, you might find a whistle or bell somewhere else but in my Catering business its called Customer Service !

I have been using TPP for over 7 years now. I love this software because it is good with all the different areas of catering. Some software is good with Invoicing and Sales but has no function for BOH. TPP is good at many different categories.

it just works

We have been using Total Party Planner for 10 years now. It only gets better and more powerful as time goes by.
I used to put proposals, menus etc. on Excel, not professional enough in this day and age.
TPP makes us look professional.
Food costing is so important if you want to stay in business, I did not do food costing and it was killing us. In TPP you can build recipes down to the Nth degree, you will know what the menu cost is. This also goes for building staff for events, having it pre-costed so you will know if the price you give is correct.
Stopping in at the TPP booth at Catersourse, I met John Cohen, the owner. I am still thrilled that he listened and was able to understand my needs and get me signed up.
If you need catering software you owe your company to call Total Party Planner and get onboard.

Again GREAT customer service!

The customer training and support has been outstanding. It is really helpful to be learning how to use the system with someone who has working at a catering company so they have a clear understanding of what the day to day and event to event work is within a catering company. I also really appreciate that they have a system or suggested process to follow in terms of how to introduce the software to your company in stages as opposed to having everything ready for full functionality at the start.

Great customer service, have always been fast to respond. Courtesy call to check on how we are doing a few times a year.