Where this came from

We got engaged, and then for a couple of months we did almost nothing about it. That was deliberate, and I'd recommend it to anyone. Eventually we started looking at venues.

Three of them sent quotes back, and I sat down to compare them and simply couldn't. One priced per head with the bar included. One had a room fee plus a catering minimum. One bundled in chairs and linens that the others billed separately. Every number was reasonable on its own, and there was no way to line them up and see which was actually cheaper — or, more to the point, what we'd be getting for the money.

So I put them in Excel by hand. One row per line item, one column per venue, and anything one place included that another didn't got its own row, so the gaps were visible instead of hidden. It took an evening. At the end of it we knew exactly what we were choosing between, which we hadn't an evening earlier.

That worked well enough that I did it again for florists. And again for photographers. That's when it stopped being satisfying — because each time I was laying the whole thing out from scratch. The categories were different but the shape never changed: a few vendors, a pile of inclusions that don't line up, and a decision waiting on someone to do the tedious part first.

The guest list broke in a different way. Invitations go out to groups — a couple, a whole family, one envelope, one address. But replies come back one person at a time, and so do meal choices, and so do allergies. I kept flipping between a list organized by household and a list organized by human being, reconciling the two by hand, and being quietly certain I'd miss somebody's shellfish allergy.

So I kept building, and kept improving what I'd built as I went. All of it in Excel — I spent my career in consulting, where I practically live in it, and where the work is mostly taking something sprawling and unclear and breaking it into pieces small enough that each one has an owner, a deadline, and an obvious next step. A wedding turns out to be exactly that shape.

By the time we got married it wasn't a pile of spreadsheets any more. It was a system — each piece feeding the others, and organized well enough that someone who hadn't built it could pick it up and follow it. That's the point at which it stopped being my wedding admin and started being something worth handing to other people.

About that workbook

It was never a product. I didn't sell it, and I'm not going to — it was one wedding's worth of spreadsheets, built for one wedding, mine. It matters only because it's the reason there's something real to build from here, rather than a guess at what would help someone. Everything on this site is being built out of what it proved.

Where things stand

We're pre-launch. Nothing described on this site is available to use yet — it's being built now, and this site is how we'll tell you when that changes. There's no product to try and nothing to buy.

Two things you can do today. Leave your email on the homepage and we'll tell you the moment there's something to plan with. Or read the guides — the timeline, the budget method, the venue questions. Those aren't previews of the product; they're the actual thinking the trackers came out of, and they're useful on their own.