As the wedding day gets closer, it’s sometimes easy to let details slip through the cracks until the last minute. A couple of these details go hand-in-hand: the finalizing of your guest list, and a basic seating plan to organize where everybody will be sitting at your reception. If your guest list includes more than fifty individuals, you’ll be doing yourself (and your vendors) a favor by drawing up a diagram of where everybody and everything will be located. And if you find yourself with your back to the wall regarding time, there are some online tools that can be of assistance.
Finalizing the Guest List
First things first: who’s coming? You should have a deadline set for your RSVP responses, though some last-minute stragglers are likely to trickle in to the bitter end. By two weeks prior to the wedding, you need to get the final headcount to your caterer and other vendors, so a week or so before this (at about three weeks out) you should call or send an email requesting a definite yes or no from those who haven’t responded. If you’ve been using your wedding website’s RSVP feature to track guest responses, it will be easy to broadcast a general announcement to those who haven’t responded.
WedShare's email broadcast allows you to request a response from any guests who have not yet done so. This can help spur on those procrastinators in the final weeks.
You can also use WedShare’s e-Stationery to send a reminder that includes a link right to your wedding website’s RSVP page. Can’t make it any easier than that for those procrastinators!
Send e-Stationery with a link right to your RSVP page with WedShare. The link automatically authenticates the guest to make it as easy as possible.
Nail Down a Seating Plan
Next decision: will you be be opting for designated (arranged) seating, or will you leave it open and casual? If you have less than fifty guests and if most folks know each other, you may want to leave it open…it’s really a matter of preference. But otherwise, my opinion is to set the seating yourself if you’re doing a sit-down reception. It’s more work–another to-do task for you, and a potentially hairy one–but your guests will appreciate it. Most would rather have the seating (thoughtfully) taken care of for them than have to figure out where to sit, and with who, on the spot.
Adding guests to a table with WedShare's Table Chart Tool
To make it easy, you should sketch out the basic floorplan of your reception visually: head table, dance floor, DJ booth/band stage, guestbook table, food stations, and so forth. Place the individual guest tables on the sketch. You can use a spreadsheet–or a seating chart tool if your wedding website service provides one–to designate a column for each table and decide who goes where, then finally add the names to your floorplan sketch at the appropriate tables.
Some couples use sticky notes to decide who sits with who, others prefer index cards. You can manually slide guests around, shuffle the table groups, and reshuffle until you have a good final arrangement to jot down on your diagram.
There are also online tools available to help with all of this, from arranging your guests to printing out the table place cards. The most thorough and feature-rich I found was Perfect Table Plan, available from Oryx Digital Ltd. It’s been positively reviewed many brides, and is currently available online for $29.95 US. Perfect Table Plan runs on both Windows and Mac.
Perfect Table Plan
Set seating preferences, including guests you absolutely don't want seated together and those you do.
An auto-seater wizard can automatically seat your guests depending on your preferences (above), or you can manually drag and drop them into the diagram. Visualize by various criteria, such as gender or group
Print stationery and guest placecards based on your seating plan
Seating Arrangement for Weddings
There are also free seating planners available, such as Seating Arrangement for Weddings. This particular software is similar in functionality to Perfect Table Planner, but does not include guest names on the chart and will only run on Windows, not Mac.
Seating Arrangement for Weddings lets you create seating charts and print reports for free
A finalized seating plan will be indispensable during the last few weeks of your planning, as the final reception details are ironed out. Go over the chart with your reception coordinator, florist, caterer, and other vendors, making sure everyone is on the same page. Print your guest place cards. Print copies of your seating diagram for your vendors, as well. Keep in mind that your guest list will likely change a bit up to two weeks before the wedding, so keep things flexible. And make use of those online tools whenever possible, including your wedding website and any integrated guest management tools there.
For more useful tips on managing your guest seating, check out this great blog article.
About Jason
Definitely, for weddings with fewer than 50 guests there’s no real need for arranged seating although you might want to make sure you’re definitely sat next to your close family. For more than 50 guests it’s certainly worth thinking about a seating plan. Without one it can take ages for guests to be seated as they’re wandering around trying to find tables with enough free seats for their group. You may also find that close friends and family end up sitting right at the back.