Wedding invitations with RSVP that answers itself

The real cost of counting heads by hand

Everyone who has planned a wedding knows this one. Replies come in by WhatsApp, by phone, through a relative, at a family lunch. Someone writes them in a notebook, someone else in a spreadsheet, and three weeks before the day nobody is sure whether an aunt said yes or only said she would think about it.

The problem is not the counting, it is that the information arrives in a dozen different shapes and someone has to turn it into a single number for the caterer. That job falls to the couple, in the weeks when they have the least time to spare.

How it works here

The invitation has a confirmation form. The guest says whether they are coming, for how many, picks a meal if you have offered options, and writes down any allergy or dietary requirement.

That reply goes straight into your guest list. You see at a glance how many have confirmed, how many have declined and how many have not answered — which is the number that actually tells you who to nudge.

What you can ask, and what is better left out

You decide which fields appear: meal choice, allergies, children, coach seat, a free-text box for anything else. Every field you add is one more thing between the guest and the send button, so it pays to only ask what you will genuinely use.

The allergies box is the one worth keeping even if you think nobody has any. It is the field that most often turns up something you did not know, and it is cheaper to find out in March than on the day.

Exporting it for the caterer

The list downloads as a file you can open in Excel or send on as it is. Names, numbers, meal choices and dietary notes, in the format every caterer already works with.

That is usually the moment it pays for itself: not during the wedding, but the afternoon you have to send final numbers and it takes two minutes instead of an evening.