Planning your day
Your Wedding Run Sheet
The run sheet is the day written down hour by hour, and on the day itself, somebody who is not you should be holding it.
A run sheet is one page: every event of the wedding day in time order, with who does it and their phone number beside it. Suppliers work from it, the venue works from it, and the couple, ideally, never looks at it after breakfast. Here is a worked example and the rules that make one work.
A worked example: ceremony at 3 PM
An afternoon ceremony with an evening reception is the commonest shape of an Australian wedding day, and it is the shape our own venue runs, from 3 PM to 11 PM. Adjust the times, keep the spacing.
- 12:00 — suppliers arrive; florist dresses the ceremony spot, music sound-checks.
- 13:30 — photographer arrives where the couple is dressing.
- 14:30 — guests begin arriving; drinks on arrival if offered.
- 15:00 — ceremony.
- 15:30 — congratulations, confetti, family photographs.
- 16:00 — cocktail hour for guests; couple and wedding party away for photographs in the best light.
- 17:30 — guests seated; couple’s entrance.
- 18:00 — dinner service begins.
- 19:30 — speeches, between courses rather than after all of them.
- 20:30 — cake, then first dance, then the dancefloor opens.
- 22:30 — last drinks.
- 23:00 — guests depart; the couple’s exit the photographer stayed for.
The three buffers that save the day
Hair and makeup finish an hour before anyone believes they will, so the sheet says they end ninety minutes before the ceremony. Photographs take longer than the list of photographs suggests, so the cocktail hour is a real hour. And the ceremony starts fifteen minutes after the invitation says, because guests park, walk and settle. Every run sheet that fails, fails by believing its own optimism.
Build it backwards from the fixed points
Three times on the sheet are fixed before you start: the ceremony, the kitchen’s dinner service, and the finish time the venue holds. Everything else is spaced between them. This is why the venue belongs in the run-sheet conversation early; see what to ask a venue about set-up access and finish times before the sheet exists.
Who holds the sheet
Not you. The couple getting married is the one party on the sheet who cannot also run it. At venues where a coordinator comes with the package, the coordinator holds it, chases the florist, cues the speeches and absorbs the surprises; our packages include the coordinator for exactly this reason. Without one, the sheet goes to the most reliable person not in the wedding party, with every supplier’s number on it.
Send it out, then stop editing
A week before the day, the sheet goes to every supplier and the venue, and then it freezes. Late edits are how two versions end up in circulation, and two versions is how the cake arrives during the ceremony. One sheet, one holder, sent once: the whole craft of the thing.