Working out the bar order

Size the bar from your own guest list, not from a number you read somewhere. Count the people who have actually accepted, sort them by what they drink, decide how long the bar is open, and add a margin. Everything below is the detail that goes wrong. Any figure here is trade habit, not measured data.

Why a per-head rule gets your wedding wrong

Per-head rules describe an average wedding, and yours is not the average one. Take two receptions of a hundred guests. One is a lunch that finishes at four with half the room driving home. The other starts at seven, has a band, and closes when the venue says so. No single per-head figure is right for both.

Then there is the part of your list that does not drink. Children, drivers, guests who are pregnant, guests who do not drink for religious reasons, relatives who accept one glass and leave it. On some lists that is a handful of people. On others it is a third of the room. A rule that ignores them over-orders every time, and you are the one carrying the crates back.

What actually moves the number

Work through the things that change how much gets drunk at your wedding, rather than at a wedding in general:

• How long the bar is open, and when. Three hours and seven hours are two different orders, and a day running from noon to midnight has both a lunch pattern and an evening one in it.
• Whether there is a sit-down meal. A served dinner slows the bar for an hour or two. A standing drinks reception with canapés does the opposite.
• The weather. In heat, beer, soft drinks and water go first and the spirits barely move.
• How many guests are not drinking, and how many are driving. This is the number most bar plans leave out.
• What your families actually drink. A room where the uncles drink whisky and the friends drink beer is not a room that drinks wine.

None of that is a formula. It is what you answer before you use one.

Build the count from the guest list you have

The drinks planner in your dashboard starts from your replies rather than an average. It reads the guests who have accepted and the heads each confirmed, and you split every party across beer, wine and spirits. Whatever is left of that party counts as not drinking, which is the figure a hand-written list loses.

You do not have to do that one guest at a time for a list of two hundred. A quick fill spreads a percentage mix across everyone currently on screen, so you can filter or search, set them in one go, then correct the dozen you know are different. Each event is counted separately, because the guests at the morning ceremony are not the ones who stayed until midnight. When the plan looks right, export it as a spreadsheet for whoever is buying, or copy the shopping list as plain text into a message.

If you would rather ask your guests than guess, the RSVP form can carry your own questions. They are opt-in and you write them yourself, so nothing appears unless you put it there. One single-choice question - beer, wine, spirits or none - is enough, and you read the answers against each guest before setting the tags.

Corkage, sale or return, and the glasses

The bottles are rarely the whole bill. Four questions decide whether buying your own saves anything:

• Corkage. Ask what the venue charges per bottle, and whether it applies to beer and soft drinks as well as wine. It can turn a cheaper case into a dearer one.
• Sale or return. Ask which supplier offers it and on what terms: labels intact, cases unopened, chilled stock usually excluded, a deadline for the return. It is what lets you order the generous number safely.
• Glassware. Ask whether glasses come by the glass or the crate, what the breakage charge is, and whether they go back washed. Bar staff tend to reckon on about two glasses per guest across an evening, because people put them down and lose them.
• Ice, fridge space and lifting. Chilling it and carrying it are people, not lines on the invoice.

When to place the order

Place it after your reply deadline. Your caterer will ask for final numbers at some point before the day; build the bar order from that same count, on the day you send it. Ordering earlier is guessing with money.

Expect the count to move even so. One cousin replies for four when you had them down for two. Ring the people who have not replied rather than waiting on them: a fortnight of silence is not a no, and the buffer in your order is for late arrivals, not for people you never chased. Ask the supplier how much notice they need, and whether you can top up in the week of the wedding.

When you should not be sizing a bar at all

Sometimes there is no order to work out. If the venue holds the licence and will not allow drink brought in, the decision has been made for you, and your job is to read their package and count heads against it. If yours is a dry wedding, or the drink is one toast, none of this applies. If you are thirty people in a restaurant on a fixed package, a planner is more work than the problem.

Counting becomes the hard part when a long list spreads across more than one event, and the answer depends on who accepted which invitation and how many heads they brought to each. For a short list at a single reception, a note on your phone is enough.

Related: How RSVPs and replies work