Every caterer running Total Party Planner eventually asks the same question, usually at month end, usually while looking at two numbers that don’t match: how do I get this data out?
There are four routes, they are not equally good, and the one most people reach for first is the one that scales worst. Here they are in the order I’d evaluate them.
1. Use a native integration, if one exists for your target
TPP ships a fixed set of integrations. As of writing that covers QuickBooks (Online and Desktop, US and Canada), Microsoft Office, Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, Mailchimp, Nowsta, StaffMate, Google Maps, prismm and ChefTec.
If your destination is on that list, stop reading and use it. A supported integration that someone else maintains beats anything I would build you, and I’ll tell you that on a sales call.
The catch is what the list doesn’t include. There’s no HubSpot connector. No GoHighLevel, no Pipedrive, no Salesforce. TPP has its own lead management and pairs Mailchimp for email, which is a coherent product decision — it just means that if your sales pipeline lives anywhere else, the native path stops here.
2. Scheduled CSV export — the honest starting point
Every serious system exports. It’s unglamorous and it’s often correct. If your requirement is “the accountant needs last month’s events in a spreadsheet,” a recurring export answers it completely, costs nothing, and breaks in ways a human notices immediately.
Not everything needs to be an integration. A meaningful share of the teardowns I run end with “you don’t need me, you need a calendar reminder and a shared folder.”
Where export stops being enough is when you need near-real-time data, two-way sync, or line-item detail. Test that last one early — individual menu lines, staffing, rentals and taxes are where exports thin out, and it’s exactly the detail accounting needs.
3. An API, if you have one
This is the route everyone assumes exists, and the one you must verify before budgeting anything. TPP publishes no public API documentation, no developer portal and no partner programme. That doesn’t necessarily mean nothing is available to you — vendors sometimes offer data access under a specific licence without advertising it — but it does mean you cannot plan around one until someone at TPP confirms it in writing.
We’re integrating our event data with [system]. Do you offer API access, a data export endpoint, or direct database access on our plan? If so, what does the documentation and licensing look like?
Get the answer before you scope work. I’ve watched an operator budget for an integration on the assumption an API existed, and the assumption was the whole project.
4. Email and document parsing
Underrated, and often the pragmatic answer when the routes above are closed. TPP sends notifications and generates documents, and both are structured data wearing a costume. A parser that watches a dedicated mailbox, pulls the fields out of a confirmation or an invoice, and posts them where they need to go is genuinely reliable when the template is stable — and templates in this category are stable for years.
It feels like a hack. It isn’t, particularly. It’s how a great deal of production integration works in industries where the vendor never shipped an API, and it fails loudly rather than silently, which matters more than elegance. The real constraint: you only get what’s on the document. If the field isn’t printed, it isn’t available.
How to choose
Work down the list and stop at the first one that meets the actual requirement — not the requirement you’d like to have. Most catering operators need less than they think. The commonest genuine need is “our event data and our accounting data should agree at month end,” and a well-built export plus a reconciliation step answers it for a fraction of what an integration costs.
The ones that genuinely need building are usually the two-way cases: a deposit, a headcount or a date that changes in one system and must be true in the other within minutes. That’s real work, it’s worth paying for, and it’s a small subset of what gets asked for.
The question worth asking first
Before any of this, count what the current handoff costs. Take the number of events per month, the number of times each one gets re-keyed, and the minutes each re-key takes. Multiply.
Almost nobody has done this arithmetic, because the cost is spread across three or four people and never lands on a single line of the P&L — which is exactly why it survives for years. Sometimes the number is small and the correct decision is to leave it alone. Sometimes it’s a salary. Either way you’d want to know before you spend anything.