Running a restaurant means that you have a lot on your plate. Adding catering into the mix could be a recipe for business success or failure. It all depends on the tools, software, and apps at your fingertips—and whether or not they make your work life easier and business run smoother as you grow. That’s why choosing the right affordable and/or free catering software, restaurant business software, and catering apps are essential.

You may already operate a catering business and need to streamline operations. Or, perhaps you’re a restaurant owner/operator looking to increase revenue and reach new markets with catering. Either way, you need business management and catering software to help you on all fronts from catering management to marketing, sales, accounting, logistics, customer relations, and project and time management.

As experts in corporate office catering, Foodee has helped hundreds of successful local restaurant partners across North America grow their businesses with catering. We’re here to help you too. Here are our expert tips based on what restaurants and caterers look for in free catering software and apps.

Top 5 free and affordable catering software for restaurants and caterers

1. The best free employee management software: Connecteam

When you’re expanding your restaurant business into catering, you need a solid employee management platform to support you. Here’s why and what you need to oversee and manage (or offload on to your management team):

• Employee scheduling and staffing
• Task and project management
• Time management
• Catering and event booking calendar management
• CRM (customer relationship management)
• Reporting
• Knowledge sharing online among employees

Our favorite one-stop-shop for employee management software is Connecteam. It’s an award-winning catering business software that’s an all-in-one of everything we listed above and more. It’s easy to use and simplifies work life for many restaurants that use it for employee processes. Plus, it’s free for life for small businesses with up to 10 users.

2. Top free corporate catering online ordering software: Foodee

For corporate catering online ordering software, Foodee has the best product and service—and our corporate clients and restaurant partners agree. There are many reasons why:

1. Foodee only partners with the best local restaurants and caterers in the city. Our corporate catering clients expect that if your business is partnered with us, that your restaurant is among the best.
2. Foodee exclusively caters to corporate clients, including some of the US and Canada’s top companies and organizations to work for. Many of them have hundreds to thousands of employees in offices across North America that feed their staff daily with Foodee.
3. Foodee’s corporate catering online ordering software is easy-to-use—both for your restaurant catering staff and our corporate clients eating your food.

What to look for in the best online ordering and corporate catering software (and what Foodee excels at):

• Dedicated support for your business and clients
• Reliable delivery service
• Sales and marketing support for your business
• Logistics management
• Order invoicing and reporting
• Easy-to-use and integrate into your existing systems

Foodee is free for any restaurants and caterers to sign up for. It’s also free to set up your catering menu and photos, which is simple to do. We’ll work with you to make sure that all your business and menu information is correct. Plus, we have useful menu-creation tips for what travels well and works best in corporate catering settings, such as important breakfast meetings, daily team lunches, and company-wide staff parties.

(We also share other helpful restaurant business tips on our blog. For instance, here are 5 Steps to increase your restaurant sales with catering.)

Foodee’s only cost is a small fixed percentage of revenue share per order that is 33% less than industry average. Sign up for Foodee’s free catering software.

3. Best integrated apps for business management software: Odoo

There is simply too much going on at once for small business owners to keep track of everything, get stuff done, and improve efficiency—let alone think about growing the business. That’s why so many restaurateurs and caterers like you are turning to robust business management software to support them behind-the-scenes. There are so many helpful apps and platforms out there.

Depending on your restaurant or catering business’ needs, Odoo is a great all-in-one platform with integrated apps available to add-on for every business management need, including:

• CRM
• POS (Point of Sale)
• Sales
• Project management
• Time management and timesheets
• Helpdesk and knowledge sharing
• Inventory management
• Website builder
• Marketing
• Invoicing and accounting
• HR support

You can have a single Odoo app for free. However, if you wish to gain access to all their apps for a single price, their monthly plan starts at $31.10 per month.

4. Catering and event management software: Enerpize

Enerpize is a cloud-based software for small and medium businesses to help manage and improve operations, such as finance and accounting. Their solutions have also helped streamline catering and event management for restaurateurs and caterers like you. This cloud-based catering and event management web application is ideal for managing event bookings, orders, clients, logistics, as well as:

• Optimize event catering workflow
• Focus on accounting, finance, and sales
• Empower employees with task and employee management
• Track inventory and logistics
• CRM

Monthly plan starts at $14.95 per month.

5. Favorite full-scale restaurant business management software: HoneyBook

Another favorite all-in-one business management platform that we know restaurants and catering companies love to use is HoneyBook. They like it because it is easy and intuitive to use and has a mobile app for business management on-the-go. Geared toward invoicing, payments, and contracts, HoneyBook is ideal for caterers that need to manage a lot of catering events and bookings at once that may or may not turn into repeat clients. Use the software to:

• Capture leads
• CRM
• Project manage
• Workflow automation
• Automate proposals, contracts, invoices, and payments
• Mobile and desktop

Monthly plan starts at $39 per month.

Expand your reach and revenue with Foodee corporate catering

We know how challenging—and rewarding—getting your catering business off the ground can be. Finding the right software to support your business growth can take a lot of your already-full plate. It can also help you get out of your own way so that you’re not slowing or blocking important things from getting done. After all, some processes can and should be automated. Others offloaded to the best person or software for the job.

So while you focus on your restaurant and catering business, we’ll focus on delivering the best catering software just for you. Together, we can grow your business through Foodee corporate catering, like AAAmazing Salads that increased sales by 30%.