It is amazing just how difficult it can be to decide who to invite to your wedding. Your entire extended family? Of course! College buddies from undergrad? No problem! The barista at the Starbucks down the street who makes the best tall, non-fat, upside-down Caramel Frappuccinos? Why not, what’s one more person, right?
Picking good and bad guests for your wedding and event is a difficult task. You have to think about all your guest’s interests and behavior. Then you have to arrange your venue – where they will sit, what they will eat, and how will you manage them.
Many weddings start with magazines and Post-It notes.
Like the many wedded couples who have come before us, we found ourselves wanting to invite everyone and anyone we knew. Countless hours were spent writing on random sticky notes at work, sketching on napkins at restaurants, and texting back and forth the names of all the people we wanted to be there for our special day. All this was fine and dandy until our vendors expected us to pay deposits based on our anticipated headcount.
So we gathered up all of our notes and dusted off the calculator. A reality check was in order – we had doubled our budget! We love our family and friends dearly, but not to the point where we want to go into debt for all of them. Simply put, the easiest way for us to stay within our budget was to cut the number of people. If we limited the number of invited guests, we could reduce the amount of money spent on food (and cake, favors, and juice .. you get the idea).
Relatives? Sure, let’s invite them. But maybe we will leave the puppies at home.
In order to minimize our budget, we wanted to build a series of “draft” guest lists that would show how our bottom line changed as we continued to add or remove names. For example, one draft would show us “How much will we be committing to spend if we invited Uncle Bob* and Aunt Barbara?” while another would answer “How much will it be if we invited Uncle Bob, Aunt Barbara, and their four kids, Ben, Betty, Bobby, and Boo?” If adding their four kids tipped us over the budget, the decision was easy (sorry kids)!
We scoured the Internet for an app or site that could help us build and refine our guest lists but our search turned up dry. So we decided to build one! A guest manager tool and app allows you to link your guest list to your budget so you can continually add and remove guests and see how these numbers affect your bottom line. The idea is to stay organized and stay within (or under) your budget.