Digital Weddings | Sketch Out A Schedule

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Digital Weddings

5 min readFeb 9, 2020

A bullet journal is one way to write this down, but not required.

This guide is part of Digital Weddings, a series of essays to help you figure out catering for your wedding (or accompanying event!). Head to the introduction or click around the “Next Steps” at the bottom of this post to navigate.

Your caterer needs to know a rough schedule of your entire event. You might wonder, “They’re just in charge of the food, why do they need to know all of that?” Think of the day like it is a play, the actors need to know when to warm up and when to get on the stage.

I say “rough schedule” because you never know how the day might slide. Other vendors might call this the “day of” schedule, some events are multi-day and need an identifier. Maybe the weather is about to turn and you need to move everything up 30 minutes. Or a guest shuttle is delayed, so the food doesn’t have to be ready for another hour. Most people hire a day-of coordinator to communicate these changes to all vendors. If you won’t have a coordinator, a solid schedule will do wonders.

Say you wanted sips of champagne ready for guest arrival or a toast, the caterer needs to know what is happening before that so they can start pouring and not get caught with a line of unattended guests.

Parts of a schedule

When the venue is open for load-in — The caterer might not get there right at the start but this is helpful in case anything needs to be delivered.

Other vendor arrivals — Speaking of deliveries! Other vendors will be arriving throughout the day and sometimes parking is limited or load in of large items might cause a traffic jam. Knowing all the moving parts will help everyone adjust, if necessary.

Party arrival — When setting up, questions will inevitably come up. If the celebrants aren’t available to answer about their preference, we need either a coordinator or someone from the wedding party who would know the answer. When the couple is getting ready, it’s pretty much go time for the caterer, so make sure everything is settled before you go into make up and hair.

Guest arrival — We need to clean up any set up and ready some water for guests. Sometimes there are snacks or welcome drinks. It’s up to you.

Ceremony — Knowing how long the ceremony is will tell the caterer when to get the food ready.

Cocktail hour — After the ceremony, sometimes the couple gets whisked away to take photos with their family. While that is happening, the guests mingle with drinks and/or snacks. Some events are just a cocktail hour with no dinner or skip it altogether to get to the food.

The main meal — The type of meal you provide will affect timing, rentals and the amount of staffing you need. The most common are buffet, family-style, coursed.

Buffet: All the food is set out on a large table. The quickest meal to produce, the least staff, but guests will have to stand in line or be invited by table.
Family style: Large platters are provided for each table. Requires more servingware rentals and staffing to deliver them to each group.
Coursed: Each part of the meal is delivered individually on plates for each guest. Requires the most staffing, rentals per plate and takes longer to produce.

Speeches — Depending on the location of the kitchen, caterers need to know when to be quiet. Any clanking forks or plates can be distracting.

Dessert/cake cutting — Most weddings I cater are shying away from a traditional wedding cake but consider the timing because once the couple cuts the cake, it needs to be sliced and distributed.

Party end — We need to know when to cut off the bar and start cleaning up. Most of the main meal is cleaned up while people dance but caterers need to keep an eye on the time for the…

Hard out — This is a term for when all guests and vendors have to leave the premises. Most places have an hourly overage fee if you aren’t out on time. They have to pay a staff member to check everything and lock up at the end of the night.

How to document your schedule

It doesn’t really matter how you write it down, as long as it’s shareable between the coordinator and vendors.

Bullet journal/paper: Sometimes I think better when writing things down! But it isn’t shareable online, simply snap a photo of your pages and bring it to your catering consultation.

Google Docs: It’s definitely less paper and easy to share over email.

Dropbox Paper: It’s a prettier way to document and can use emoji to denote each item.

Online templates: Not everyone’s schedules will be the same but here are a few templates that I think are helpful. Maybe there are items or moments that you haven’t thought of including!

Excel template from Word Layouts (free)