Tuesday, November 1, 2011

What to do? How to do it? - Wedding Planning

I decided not to book a wedding planner for my wedding.  Since I was a little girl, I've envisioned myself planning my wedding.  On the other note, I am still thinking if I would consider hiring an On the Day Coordinator who would help me during the ceremony and assist me during the reception.  I have the option, though, to ask one of my older cousins who got married already to help me or look for an "OC" friend who can do the trick.
Since I already need to get started with the planning stage,  I began searching for free wedding planner in the internet.  I saw some but most of them didn't contain the complete list of items that I need.  There are also online sites that would provide you the list plus the convenience of sending RSVPs to guests but you would need to subscribe at least $12 per month.  Yesterday, as I was surfing the net, I discovered the Google Docs for Wedding.  I saw different documents really helpful in organizing weddings and the best thing is that they're free. :)  Here are the list of documents that you can download:


I downloaded the Wedding planner since it contains all the other documents in one sheet.  Wedding planner has different tabs on it.  I just removed the "Do Not Play" list to just focus on the list of songs that should be played in the wedding.  Every important aspect in the wedding is in the document already, so the only thing that you have to do is to enter the possible suppliers or booked suppliers in the sheet.  These are the helpful items you'll find in the sheet:
Guests - contact details of your guests;
Budget estimator - what is your overall budget?  The sheet will automatically compute the allocated percentage of your budget per item
Budget - you can enter your estimated budget and the actual money spent for each supplier / item
Venue, Caterer, Photographer, Videographer, etc. (and other suppliers) - if you have several choices, you can indicate them here
Music - one of the important tabs in the sheet.  You need to list all the music that you want to play in your wedding.  You can also show it to your band, as well, so that they can prepare the preferred songs in the list.

*sample only*
Seating chart - if you want to arrange the seats of your guests, then you can make good use of this.  I made sure that all sponsors are seated together; same with the entourage, my family and Pong's; our friends.

To dos - You can indicate in this tab your "to do" list all throughout the planning stage.  Since I have a problem remembering things, I put all my activities like when to pay the downpayment, send invitation and etc. in this tab.

Wedding Day Schedule - this is one of the most important tabs in the Wedding Planner.  As of now, I don't see myself hiring a coordinator, so this would be very helpful.  I can give this list to one of my trusted friends or cousin who can help me ensure that everything goes as planned.

If there are items, which you think are not of any use, you can edit the document.  I felt a little better having this document because it's an organizer.  This keeps me focused in doing the challenging and tedious work in planning the event.
Every bride wants her wedding to be the best and it offers a great deal of ease to have one of these planners for help. :)

1 comment:

  1. That’s a great idea not to book a wedding planner if someone don’t have budget like me. I had planned everything for the day myself. We had booked San Francisco wedding venues from online and got great discount as well. Everything had planned beautifully and everyone loved my efforts.

    ReplyDelete