by Chase Maggiano

Created on: October 05, 2009   Last Updated: October 07, 2009

Starting a catering business is unique in many ways...you have to be a good cook, have a passion for the hospitality industry, and be able to work well in social settings. With these specialties aside, there are some basic things that catering businesses have in common with ALL types of businesses. One of these is the management of the finances, customers, records (recipes), schedules, and employees. You can start managing this on a spreadsheet at first, but eventually as you grow it's going to be very difficult to maintain all of this information in a simple spreadsheet. That is where catering software comes in.

Catering software will help you streamline all of the business processes you deal with, and help keep you organized in a sometimes unorganized profession. But how do you choose the right software package?

One of the first steps in buying business software, after you've articulated your goals and requirements for it, is to identify all of your software options. Creating this long list is critical to ensuring you don't miss any solutions that are potential good fits for your business. Doing so will also better prepare you for the tasks of buying and implementing the software. These benefits, and the ones included below, show why considering all your software options is so important.

It will help you to discover lesser-known products that may be cheaper or better.

Because there are so many different solutions out there, failing to use every resource to catalog them means you may miss some which would best fulfill your requirements. For example, a list based solely on the popularity of certain software programs would miss out entirely on solutions that may not be big names but were developed specifically for your vertical industry. You might also miss out on strong foreign software packages that have entered your market, newer startups with innovative solutions or even older companies who have reinvented their products. Additionally, overlooking an ideal software solution by not being thorough in your initial list can generate huge opportunity costs. The cost to replace or modify underperforming software is magnified by the additional time and resources required for activities that are not revenue-generating. Better to create an exhaustive list in the first place and delay a new software upgrade as long as possible than have to replace a program that was less than a perfect fit within the first year or two.

It will help you to think of additional features

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