This post is for those of you who are interested in some of the nitty-gritty of wedding planning organization.
Google Docs/Google Drive was so insanely helpful for me that it would seem withholding not to share a bit about how I made use of it.
Here's a glimpse at my Google Drive Folder: “Deirdre & John Wedding” — just to give you a sense (click to enlarge):
Now, I don't think you necessarily need get into all the iterations of all the documents and spreadsheets that I did. I am a very visual person, so I like to see things laid out in front of me (researching photographer options? make a spreadsheet. Thinking about where folks will sit at the rehearsal dinner? make a spreadsheet. This was my M.O.).
I was also planning my MA wedding from DC, and needed to keep several people (like my mom and my groom and various other key planning players) in the loop, so the option to share documents with them was huge. Whether a similar system would work for you depends on your situation, and perhaps you have your own system that's far superior to what mine was.
However, there is one document that I am going to strongly suggest you adopt, at least in some form:
The Master Guest List.
The Master Guest List was my comprehensive spot for recording information about my guests. Below you can see the general layout, and I've broken it down further as your read on (names and addresses have been removed for fairly self-evident reasons).
Of course you have to have a list of who is invited, what their names are, and their postal addresses. Handy to have their email addresses on record, in case you need to be in touch for whatever reason. You might already know your own family and friends' full names and contact info, but when you get into recording such details of friends of your groom (not to mention your groom's friends' significant others), you might need to do some tracking down. And if you are tracking something down, you ought to record it.
And I love record-keeping.
(The following images are close-ups of the above spreadsheet, moving from left to right along the columns):
Now, of course you have a list of the people you invited. You need not only names, but numbers – how many people. And then you need to have the further information of who has accepted — that is, the smaller list of guests who are actually coming.
[On her master guest list document, Suki had an ‘Unlikely to Attend' column, just to add in one more tally that would help her estimate numbers in advance. This was important to her for the time before invitations went out, since for a while she didn't know where her reception would be, and then she knew that her reception space would be limited.]
If you it will affect your meal plans, it's good to have a tally of adults and a separate tally of kids…
For Suki, the ‘Belongs To' category was especially helpful when she needed to go to someone to ask a question about an invitee/guest. A few months after you put together the guest list, you might actually forget who Mr. Bob is, and you need to know who in your posse will have the info for Mr. Bob. She broke her ‘Belongs To' further into ‘bride, groom, bride's family, groom's parents…'
So, for example, if she needed to find out whether Mr. Bob was bringing a date, she could know to ask her groom's parents, since she had already marked down that Mr. Bob belongs to groom's parents.
Here's where my guest list got really handy, even long after the wedding. I used this same place to record the gifts received from each guest, both for showers (if they attended a shower for me) and the wedding gift itself. Then I had another column to indicate whether I'd yet written a thank-you note for the shower gift and a separate column for whether I'd written a thank-you note for the wedding gift.
I recorded the date on which I wrote my thank-you notes. I would say that it's not essential to know when you wrote your note, but you do need to know that you wrote your notes. Maybe some people with very strong memory capacities and short guest lists can keep track mentally of who still needs a note, but for most of us we need a written record of whether or not someone has been thanked. (The ‘w' is shorthand for me to know what stationary I used. [A superfluous detail? Most likely. But some part of me found it helpful at the time.])
I also received gifts from a few people who were not invitees — they were just those very kind sort of people who send gifts to folks on the occasion on their weddings — and I was able to add their names into this Master Guest List for the purposes of recording their gifts and whether I'd thanked them. Technically, they weren't guests. But that's just an example of how this document can be the Motherboard of Information on Anyone Wedding-Related.
With a sheet like this, you can effortlessly alphabetize all your guests by last name, which will come in handy when it's time to address the envelopes. You can always have a running tally of numbers for your reception, since you can enter in responses as each RSVP card comes in. Rosie had her RSVPs sent to our parents' house, but really wanted to know when people had written little notes on their responses — her doc had a place for Mom to enter that information so she could look at it from afar.
You have a central place to record any pertinent info (e.g., food allergies, questions you want to get back to, note that guest will attend wedding but not reception, etc.) and keep track of gifts.
The possibilities go on.
So if you are planning a wedding and don't already have a tool like this lined up, I strongly encourage that you put one together! You can organize yours in whatever way makes the most sense to you. But for what it's worth, here are the categories I used:
(In columns, going from left to right along the top):
Salutation; First Name (s); Last Name (s); Postal Address; Email address; Childrens' Names; No. of Children; Total potential; Total invited; No. Confirmed adults; No. Confirmed kids; No. Small kids; No. Definitely declined; Belongs to (bride or groom); Notes; Shower gift; Shower Thank-you note; Wedding gift; Wedding Thank-you note
I hope that helps!
Next in {pretty, happy, real weddings}:
Your Marriage is your Gift to Others: a Guide to Registering
Previously in this series:
The Wholesome, Good-Times Reception
How to get the Wedding Reception you Really Want
How To: Cut Back on the 5 Big Costs of Weddings
10 Practical Tips for a Calm Wedding Morning
Elizabeth says
I did something very similar with my guest list, only I recorded it on index cards in a file box. This may be a good option for anyone like me who just doesn’t like working on a computer screen. I like to have a physical object, not just a computer file, for important information! 🙂 I know not everyone feels that way.
There was one card for each guest/couple/family. I alphabetized them by last name (of course), and all pertinent information was recorded on the card. (I didn’t think to add gifts and thank-you notes; that would have been a great help!) Then I used highlighters (blue for groom, pink for bride) to mark who belonged to whom. If it was someone I didn’t know at all, I added a note (like “L’s cousin” or “D’s aunt”) so I’d know where to go with questions. That could all just be written on the card. I used 3×5 cards, but if one were concerned about having enough space 4×6 might be better.
I kept the box for my address “book”, and replace cards as people move. Any information such as cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, names/birthdays of children, anniversaries, etc. all goes on there. I like it better than an actual address book, because it’s much easier to replace the cards when they’re outdated and to add new ones in where they belong.
Also, my parents invited a whole pile of their friends that I had never met before, and I stuck all those cards in the back of the box for future reference. This way, if I’m super with-it and plan a surprise 50th anniversary party for them, I’ll have at least enough of their friends’ contact information to get started with, and the names of all the people they have been close to. (This part of the plan hasn’t been tested yet.)
DeirdreLMLD says
That sounds very appealing, Elizabeth! I love the idea of having a box of cards for an address book: I too enjoy having things on paper, but I’ve never been able to commit to a physical address book because it simply seems too confining and inflexible.
I have also found that I return time and again my wedding guest list, long after the wedding. It’s just great to have info centralized!
Of course, there are advantages to the virtual format. Getting and maintaining a guest tally is truly effortless with an automated spreadsheet; the search function can be handy when you want to jump to someone’s name but aren’t sure where they are in the list, etc.
thanks for sharing!
Wanda says
I am very visual as well and have several spreadsheets going for our current wedding. The only addition I have is names for inner and outer envelopes. They are formal on the outer and more casual on the inner. I have always insisted on double envelopes to “protect” the investment of the invitations.
DeirdreLMLD says
I agree about protecting your investment with the double envelope. I never really understood the custom until I saw some of my invitations at my friends’ homes and thought, “aw, that doesn’t look as nice and crisp as it did when I sent it!” Another time around, I’d go for the double. The postal system can be brutal.
Wanda says
It is Deidre! And when you understand the reason they were designed that way long ago it makes sense. I know that many invitations are now assembled in a folder with all the enclosed cards at a glance and that system does tend to eliminate the inner envelope, but we here at Chez Styrsky have never been excited with those. We actually had to change the shape of our invitations this time because the one my daughter wanted most was not offered with an inner envelope. So we went to square and even though postage is more expensive with square, our guest list is smaller this time and the $ amount was manageable.
Brittany says
My husband (who was heavily involved in planning our wedding- unusual, yes, but quite nice!) and I used Google Docs extensively in planning our wedding. It was a great way for both of us to work on things and update and add information from wherever we were, and to be able to share that information with each other easily. We did a lot of our wedding planning discussions over the phone, and it was great to be able to both look at our documents at the same time!
We made a master guest list almost exactly like yours, and loved it! A couple additional fields we had were “mail vs. hand deliver” (since we were invited our entire church, we hand delivered those) and an “offered to help” field for those who were helping with various parts of our wedding, or who wanted too, but didn’t have an assignment yet.
It was tremendously helpful, and I’ve used it since for sending out Christmas letters. 🙂
Erin says
Yes, yes, yes! I had a nearly identical spreadsheet. I did have a column for inner envelope as above. In hindsight I may have skipped the double envelope. We had a number of invitations never make it to their destination and one that arrived in complete pieces, several months after mailing. The post office figured out that the sorting machine likely got jammed due to the slightly thicker invite and I wondered if single envelopes would have made it. It was a near disaster, but my master spreadsheet was sortable by state and city and we were able to figure out that the lost invitations were all headed west and we could make phone calls based on that. I was also very grateful for extra invitations! A year and half later I still use the list all the time. Christmas cards is the obvious, but it was really helpful for baby gifts. I wasn’t completely on top of things after baby, but this helped keep me in check.
Wanda says
Yes! We also hand cancel our invitations instead of running them through the machine. Most don’t know you can do that:)))
Erin says
We asked to have them hand stamped and the employee laughed at us and refused! I even offered to stand there and do it for them. He assured us they would be just fine. When I went back in to investigate the lost invitations a different employee said that we should have asked to have them hand stamped. So frustrating! Lesson learned. Thankfully one of the lost invitations was my sister, otherwise I’m not sure we would have realized the situation until we started following up on responses.
Katie says
Me, too, Erin! Our wedding guest list turned into a master-address-book Google doc that my husband and I share, and if an address isn’t saved or updated there, it’s not to be trusted. =) We’ve added columns and tallies for Christmas cards, birth announcements, etc. over the years.
Does anyone have a good way of spreadsheet-tracking those trickier households where one spouse or partner uses a different last name, or a grown son or daughter still lives at a parent’s home as part of the family, etc.? I’ve come up with some workarounds for the rare occasions when I want to merge address labels (instead of hand-addressing), but it’s always open to refinement.
Melissa D says
Don’t forget to have your invites hand-canceled at the Post Office if you spend $$ on super pretty calligraphy! Otherwise they get rolled through the machine and it looks awful. I forgot, and some of mine had that “put through a cider press” look, or just didn’t arrive.
Wanda says
Absolutely!
Emily says
I did almost the very same with an Excel spreadsheet! Now, a winnowed version of it is my master list for Christmas cards (I use it in combo with Word for a mailing label dump so I can avoid hand-addressing XMas cards). I also have a hard copy printed out (without the wedding-specific columns) for a handy address book. I used to have it just on the computer, but when it came to birthday thank you’d or the occasional handwritten letter, it was more trouble to open up the excel file…thus the necessity of the printed version, which I love. And all from my wedding master list 7 years ago!
Erin says
Yes, I print labels as well. The nerd in me kind of regrets not using an Access database instead of Excel.