Wedding planning checklist

Every window above is measured from your wedding date, so “twelve months out” becomes a named month you can put in a diary instead of an abstraction. That matters more than it sounds. A generic checklist tells you to book the photographer a year ahead; a dated one tells you that a year ahead is next March, which is the week you are already looking at flights. Add the date and each heading picks up its calendar month. Leave it out and the tasks still work — you just do the arithmetic yourself.

The order is not decorative. Budget, headcount and date come before anything is booked, because the guest number decides which venues are possible and the venue decides almost everything after it. Photographers and videographers are the next constraint: they take one booking per date and are routinely gone twelve to eighteen months ahead, so they sit in the first window even while the day itself still feels far away. Catering, flowers, the band and the outfits follow at nine months, because a made-to-order dress or suit needs six to nine months before alterations even begin. Everything in the last two windows is confirmation, not decision.

If your wedding is closer than a year, enter the date anyway. The window that is open today is marked “you are here”, the ones behind it are marked as passed, and you work through those in order rather than pretending they are not there. Nothing in a passed window becomes optional; the sequence compresses instead, and what you give up first is choice rather than a task. A destination wedding uses the same windows with three things pulled earlier — save the dates, the legal paperwork for marrying abroad, and telling guests where to stay before flight prices move.

Two windows are the ones couples misjudge most often. Save the dates belong at twelve months when guests have to travel, and are an unnecessary postage bill when they do not. Invitations go out six to eight weeks before a local wedding, which is why they sit in the three-month window, and the reply-by date has to be on them: pick it before anything is printed or published, because a deadline agreed afterwards cannot be added to a card that is already in the post. Final numbers then go to the caterer on the caterer’s deadline and not a day earlier, because corrections keep arriving right up to it.

Use the list in passes rather than in one sitting. Ticks are kept in this browser, so it is where you left it when you come back on the same device — though a private window, a different phone or cleared site data will start it fresh, which is why the contracts, deposits and supplier contacts belong in the shared folder the first window asks you to make.