A guest who says yes to your wedding has not said yes to your homecoming. If your celebration runs across two or three ceremonies and you collect a single reply for all of them, you are holding one number where you need three, and the two you are missing are the two your caterer will ask for. You can have each guest answer separately for each ceremony instead. It is a setting you switch on, it stays off unless you do, and if your wedding is one ceremony you should leave it off.
What a single yes is actually telling you
Picture the ordinary shape of it. A morning ceremony at the family house. A reception in a hotel that evening. A homecoming the following night in another town. One invitation, one reply button, and a guest taps yes.
Yes to what? Your aunt means the reception, because that is the part she thinks of as the wedding. Your cousin driving three hours means the reception and probably the homecoming, but not the morning. A colleague means the reception only, and would be surprised to hear there was a morning at all. Your father’s brother means all three and will arrive early to help.
Every one of those is a yes, and they all land in the same column. Your attending total is now the same figure for a small seated morning as it is for a two hundred person reception. At least two of those three numbers are wrong, and nothing on the screen tells you which. That is what catches people out. Nothing looks broken. You have a full list and a confident total, and what you actually have is three guesses sharing one number.
Where the wrong number turns into money
Catering is where it lands first. A caterer prices per head and asks for the final figure on an agreed date before the day, and after that date the figure is what you pay for whether or not those people arrive. Run three ceremonies off one reply and you hand the same figure over three times.
Over-count and you pay for food nobody eats, once per ceremony. Under-count on the small one and you are short of chairs at the ceremony where a shortage is most visible. Nobody has measured this for you, but it holds often enough to plan against: the smaller and more formal the ceremony, the more each wrong head costs. A plated lunch is priced differently from an evening buffet, and hired seating tends to come in fixed counts you pay for whole.
The knock-on is not only money. Seating plans, transport and favours all come off the same figure. Get it wrong once and it is wrong in five places.
What a reply per ceremony looks like to a guest
The guest opens their own link and finds a row for each ceremony they are invited to, with its title, its time and where it is. Each row takes yes or no on its own. If they say yes, they set how many are coming to that one, and that number stops at the seats you allowed them for that ceremony. Give a household four places at the reception and two at the morning, and the counter on the morning row refuses to climb past two. There is no maybe, because a maybe cannot be catered. Each answer saves as it is made, so a guest who is certain about the reception and not about the morning can leave that row and come back to it. That is the whole of a row: an answer, a number, and nothing to type.
When to leave it switched off
Often. This is machinery for one specific problem, and if you do not have that problem it is only friction.
- One ceremony. There is nothing to divide, a single reply is the right shape, and this setting has no work to do.
- Two events that are really one evening. A ceremony at six and dinner at eight in the same hall for the same people is one number asked twice.
- Everyone is invited to everything and you already know it. If the list is family and the family is coming to all of it, you have your figures.
- The smaller event is small enough to telephone. Twelve people at a lunch the next day is a phone call, not a form.
There is a cost to switching it on when you do not need it, and it falls on your guests. Every extra decision on a reply form is another chance for someone to put their phone down meaning to come back to it. Three rows where one would do turns a single tap into a small piece of admin. The test is short: if you cannot say right now, without checking anything, that the numbers for your ceremonies are genuinely different, they probably are not, and you do not need this.
Setting it up so the answers are worth having
Two decisions matter more than the toggle itself, and neither one is a design decision. Both are made on your guest list, before the links go out. Worth knowing before you start: the ceremony rows only appear on a guest’s own personal link, so anyone who arrives by the shared address instead never sees them.
The first is who is invited to which ceremony. A guest sees rows only for the ceremonies they are invited to, and a guest with nothing ticked sees all of them, which is what you want for most of your list. Doing that before you send is the difference between a form that asks every guest four questions and one that asks each guest the one or two that apply to them.
The second is the seat allowance, ceremony by ceremony, for the guests whose allowance changes between them. Set that in advance and every counter stops where you meant it to, rather than you editing numbers back down after the replies land.
Then the ordinary care with wording. Name each ceremony the way a guest would name it, not the way your family does. Avoid two names that differ by a single word, because someone reading quickly on a phone will answer the wrong row. And note that the reply deadline is one date for the whole invitation rather than one per ceremony, so set it against whichever ceremony needs its numbers first. That is usually not the biggest one.
Reading three sets of numbers instead of one
Your dashboard then breaks the replies down ceremony by ceremony: how many people are invited to it, how many have said yes, how many have said no, and how many have not answered yet. That is the shape your caterer asked for in the first place.
The quieter benefit is in the chasing. A guest who answered the reception and never touched the homecoming still counts as awaiting a reply, because they still owe you one. On a single reply that same guest shows as replied, drops out of your follow-up list, and you find out on the night. It also makes the follow-up message a better one. Not “have you replied”, which they believe they have, but “we have you down for the reception, could you let us know about Sunday”. You can see how the replies arrive on the RSVP dashboard.
Frequently asked questions
Can a guest accept one ceremony and decline another?
Yes, and that is the whole point of it. Each ceremony is answered on its own row, with its own head count for the ones they accept. The answers are kept separately rather than flattened into a single status for the wedding.
Can I switch it on after I have already sent the invitations?
The link does not change, so there is nothing to resend. Replies you already have do not split themselves up, though: a guest who has sent you one yes has not told you which ceremonies it covers, so you would have to ask them again. If you know you want a reply per ceremony, decide it before the links go out.
What if only one of my ceremonies has a number worth counting?
Then this is probably not for you. If the morning is thirty relatives you could name from memory and the reception is the only figure in doubt, one reply plus a few phone calls is less work for everybody, including you.
Related: RSVP dashboard · All features