Common questions
What this is for
The fifteen things people ask in the first month. Short answers. If yours
isn’t here, email MeowCaniHelpYou@tryherdingcats.com — a real person
reads it.
How do I sign in?
Two ways, and you pick with the switch at the top of the login page.
Password is the default. Your email and your password, then
Sign in. There’s a Forgot password? link if you need it.
Email code needs no password at all. Click that side of the switch,
type your email, and click Send verification code. Check your email for
a six-digit code, type it in, and click Verify & sign in.
My login code hasn’t arrived. What now?
Work down this list.
Check your junk or spam folder
This is the answer nine times out of ten.Check you typed the address right
One wrong letter and the code is sitting in somebody else’s inbox.Send a fresh one
On the login page, click Use a different email, put the same address
back in, and click Send verification code again.Make sure your email allows us through
If your studio uses a strict spam filter, ask whoever manages it to
allow mail from tryherdingcats.com.Email us
MeowCaniHelpYou@tryherdingcats.com. We’ll get you in.
Codes expire after a while, so if you go and make dinner and come back, ask
for a fresh one rather than typing the old one.
I signed in but it says my account isn’t attached to a company
You’ll see: That account isn’t attached to a company yet. Ask an admin for
an invitation, or start your own workspace.
That means the login exists but nobody has added it to a team. Ask an admin
at your company to invite you — see the next question — or email us.
How do I add someone from my team?
Go to Company, then Users
Click Invite user
Fill in their email, first name, and last name
Pick a Role
- Staff — Limited access to assigned events
- Coordinator — Manages events and staffing
- Admin — Full access to company settings
If you’re a coordinator, you can only invite staff.
Click Send invitation
They get an email headed You’re invited to join {your company} on Herding
Cats with an Accept invitation button. It expires after 7 days.
If the email doesn’t send for some reason, Herding Cats gives you the
invitation link on screen with a copy button — text it to them and it works
exactly the same way.
To change somebody’s role later, use the three-dot menu on their row and
choose Change role.
What’s free and what’s paid?
There are four plans, and each one includes everything in the plan before
it:
| Plan | Events per year | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Alley Cat | 5 | The core: events, staffing, travel, the six starter playbooks, unlimited seats |
| House Cat | 15 | Multiple brands, text-message notifications, custom fields, venue and hotel directories, flight confirmation email parsing |
| Show Cat | 40 | The season board, the booking radar, editing and writing your own playbooks, the company knowledge base, and the assistant’s coordinator tools (it makes changes for you, each on a card you approve) |
| Kitten Kaboodle | Unlimited | Every module that’s on sale, included |
Alley Cat is genuinely free. Not a trial, not a countdown — the
pricing page calls it Free. Not a trial. Run five events a year on it and
never pay us anything.
The features in that table come with the plan, not one by one. Where your
plan doesn’t include one, Herding Cats tells you which plan does — for
example Season board is included with Show Cat and up — and an admin can
move to that plan from Plan & billing.
On top of the plan there are optional modules: Finance, Registration,
Inventory, Payables, Receivables, Merch, Media,
Sponsorship, Ticketing, Show Day, and a few more. Those are
switched on for your company individually, and Kitten Kaboodle includes
every module that’s on sale. Talent & Faculty is part of the core platform
for everyone.
To see where you stand, go to Company, then Plan & billing.
Why can’t I see Finance / Inventory / Registration in my menu?
Because it’s not switched on for your company. Locked areas are hidden
rather than greyed out — a cleaner menu, but it does mean a missing item is
the answer.
If you click through to one anyway you’ll get a page reading
{Area} is an add-on, followed by It isn’t active for your company yet.
We’ll switch it on the same day you ask. There’s a button right there to
ask us.
Can I try a module before I pay for it?
Yes. Every module can run as a free trial — 30 days is the usual length —
and nothing you set up during the trial goes away when it ends. If the
locked page for a module shows Start a 30-day trial, you can start it
yourself; if it doesn’t, ask us and we’ll start one for you. The whole
story, including what happens on the last day, is in
Try a module free.
What happens if I go over my event limit?
On Alley Cat, you can’t. Creating a sixth event is blocked, with a note
saying which plan you’re on and how many you’ve used.
On the paid plans, you can go over — you’ll see a warning as you create it
saying it’ll be billed as an overage, then it goes through. No weekend gets
blocked because of billing.
Is my data private to my company?
Yes. Every piece of information in Herding Cats is tagged with the company
it belongs to, and the database itself refuses to hand a record to anyone
outside that company. It isn’t a filter the app remembers to apply — it’s
enforced one level below the app, so there’s no version of “somebody forgot
the filter” that could leak your season to another company.
Nobody at another competition can see your events, your staff, your
studios, your costs, or your margins.
Can the studios that register with me see my costs?
No. A studio account and a competition account are separate kinds of
account, and the same email can’t be both. A studio has no path at all to
your finance pages, your bills, your ledger, your staff pay, your travel
costs, or your event profit and loss.
What a studio can see is limited to: your company’s name and logo, your
published events’ names, dates and venues, your categories and prices, and
their own registration — their entries, their payments, their balance.
That’s their bill with you, not your books.
Can everyone at my company see the money pages?
No, and this is worth setting up properly.
Money visibility is granted person by person. Go to Company, then
Users, and use the Can view financials column. Admins can always see
financials. Everyone else needs to be switched on explicitly.
Until they are, the Financials tab (home to the P&L and the
Settlement sheet) simply doesn’t appear on events for them, and the
Finance menu item stays hidden.
Does it work on a phone?
Mostly yes, with one part built specifically for phones.
The main app reflows on a phone — the side menu collapses into a drawer you
open with the menu button, and pages stack. It’s genuinely usable for
looking things up and answering a question at the venue, though it’s
designed desktop-first for the heavy building work.
The exception is the gear scanning pages. Point a phone camera at the code
on a case and you get a clean, phone-shaped packing list you can tick off
at the truck. That part was built for a phone in a loading dock. See
Load-outs and QR labels.
There’s no separate app to install. Everything is in the browser.
What happens when I remove someone?
Two different things, depending on what you mean.
Removing them from your company — Company, Users, three-dot
menu, Remove from team. They lose access immediately. Their login
account still exists (it just doesn’t reach your company any more), and
their staff record and history stay in your data. You can re-invite them
later. You can’t remove your own account.
Taking them off one event — open the event, the Staffing tab, then
their assignment, and use Remove or Swap staff. Nothing is deleted.
The assignment is marked as replaced and kept for the record, and any
flights or hotel rooms to sort out are queued as tasks on your dashboard.
See When plans change.
There’s no “deactivate” for people — it’s either company access or no
company access.
Can I get my data out?
Yes, in ordinary spreadsheet files, whenever you like:
- Finance — the season profit and loss as Excel or CSV, and the full
posted-amounts list - Inventory — an asset register as Excel or CSV, which doubles as your
insurance schedule - Registration — an export per event
- QuickBooks — balanced journal files for your accountant
Nothing is locked in. If you need something we don’t have a button for,
ask.
What about competition-day scoring and tabulation?
The schedule side is here today: the Show Day module lays out the
day’s blocks, builds the numbered program from submitted entries,
prints the emcee’s sheet, and publishes the schedule to your public
tour page. See Show Day.
So is the scoring side. The Tabulator lens holds your rubrics and
judge panels and computes the totals — see
Scoring and tabulation — and
judges can either stay on paper while the desk types, or score on
their own tablet or phone through a link, with no account and no app
to install. That’s Judge scoring devices,
and it keeps working when the venue Wi-Fi doesn’t.
If competition-day is what you’re weighing us up on, email us — we’d
like to hear how you run yours, and we’ll tell you honestly where we
are.
How do I cancel?
If you pay us and you have a card on file, go to Company, then
Plan & billing, and click Manage billing. That opens your payment
account’s own page, where you can change your card, get past invoices, or
cancel.
Closing a workspace entirely — deleting all of it — isn’t a button in the
app on purpose. Email MeowCaniHelpYou@tryherdingcats.com and we’ll take
care of it. Export anything you want to keep first; we’d much rather you
left with your data than felt stuck with us.
Where do I get help?
MeowCaniHelpYou@tryherdingcats.com. That’s it. One address, a real
person, no ticket number.
You can also click the cat button in the bottom-right corner of any screen
and ask the assistant — it can answer a lot of this without you leaving the
page. See The assistant.