Your caterer does not want a list of names. They want a number for each dish, on a date they will name when you book them. The gap that ruins those numbers is this: dietary answers are given by guests, and food is cooked for heads. Forty vegetarian guests and forty vegetarian meals are not the same number.
A guest and a head are not the same number
Your guest list is a list of entries, not a list of people. One entry is your friend Nadia, who is one person. The next is your uncle, who has four seats against his name because his household is coming as a household. When your uncle answers “vegetarian”, you have learned one thing about one guest and nothing at all about the other three people arriving with him.
That is why the counts are shown two ways. For every option you offer, you see how many guests chose it and how many heads those guests are bringing. The guest number tells you how many people answered. The head number is the one the kitchen cooks to. They are almost never equal, and the moment you stop noticing which one you are reading is the moment you under-order.
Heads only add up where a guest has accepted and confirmed how many are coming. A guest who picked vegetarian but has not yet said yes counts in the guest column and adds nothing to the head column. That is correct: you do not know whether they are coming, let alone with how many.
What your caterer asks for, and when
Ask at booking, not in the last fortnight. Two dates matter and they are rarely the same day: the date the caterer wants a working estimate, and the date the number becomes final and billable. The second one is the one that hurts. It usually falls earlier than you expect, and after it your count tends to only move upwards, at a price.
When that day comes, most kitchens want the same short list:
- one total head count, not a guest count
- a count per dietary option, also in heads
- allergies written out in words, with the guest’s name attached
- any part of the number you are still guessing at, flagged as a guess
- a phone number for whoever is answering questions on the day
Hand over two hundred names instead and somebody in that kitchen has to do the counting for you, at the busiest point in their week. It is the same work. It has just moved to the person who is also cooking.
Ask it as a pick-one, not a paragraph
The single decision that determines whether you get a usable number is the shape of the question, and you make it months before anybody answers.
Ask “any dietary requirements?” as an open box and you will get back “veggie”, “no meat”, “vegetarian but I eat fish”, “nothing too spicy”, and one reply that is three sentences about a doctor. Every one of those is a real answer. None of them can be added to another. You will sort them by hand, at night, in the week you have the least of it.
Ask the same thing as a pick-one list and it totals itself, because there is a fixed set of options to count. It is worth choosing the shape of each question deliberately:
- Pick one, for the diet itself. Counted per option, in guests and in heads.
- Pick any, for things that stack, such as no pork and no shellfish on the same guest. Counted the same way.
- Yes or no, for a question with two answers. Transport to the venue is the usual one.
- Free text, for allergies. Listed guest by guest, never totalled.
Free-text answers are shown one per guest with the name beside them, and they stay that way. Nothing adds up a sentence. That is not a gap waiting to be closed - an allergy list is something to be read aloud in a kitchen, not summed.
So ask twice. A pick-one for the diet, which gives your caterer a number, and a free-text box for allergies, which gives them the names to be careful with. The two questions do different jobs and neither one substitutes for the other.
Who gets counted
If you have opened a public reply page, the kind anyone with the link can fill in, some answers will arrive from people you never added. Those replies wait for your approval. Until you approve them, their answers are visible to you but they do not move any total.
This matters more than it sounds. Someone who found the link forwarded in a group chat, or a guest who sent the form a second time because the first attempt looked like it had not saved, should not be able to add a plate to the order. The totals count approved guests only. Everything else is still there to look at, just not counted.
The blank rows, and what to do about them
Some people will never answer. There is always an aunt who will not open a link, and a cousin who tells you in person, four days late, that actually there will be six of them.
Two working assumptions, and assumptions is all they are - nobody has measured this. First, put the silent guests on the default menu, count them at the seats you set aside for them, and tell your caterer plainly which slice of the number is guesswork rather than a reply. Second, chase only the answers that would change the order: the household of six, the guest you already know is coeliac, the table of colleagues nobody has heard from. One silent guest vanishes into the kitchen’s margin. Six of them do not.
Chasing everybody with equal energy is how the last fortnight vanishes. Chase the answers that move the number.
When this is not the right tool
If your list is thirty people and you already know how most of them eat, do not build a form. Ask in the chat, write it on paper, hand the paper over. Counting is not the hard part at that size, and a question added to an invitation that nobody needed to answer is just another field between your guests and their reply.
If your caterer wants a per-table breakdown by course, four vegetarian on table six and one of them nut-free, you will end up in a spreadsheet whatever you do. The counts answer “how many of each”, not “where each one is sitting”.
If you are collecting replies over WhatsApp instead of through the reply form, the questions are switched off entirely: a WhatsApp message has nowhere to record an answer, so there is nothing to total. Counted dietary answers and WhatsApp replies are a choice between two, not a pair.
And if your ceremonies have genuinely different menus, know that the dietary answer is asked once per guest rather than once per event. Somebody attending both days gives you one answer. For most guests that is exactly right, because what they eat does not change between Saturday and Sunday. If your two events truly need different answers, collect the second one another way. You can see how the replies and the RSVP dashboard fit together before you decide.
Frequently asked questions
Should I ask about dietary requirements at all?
Ask if you are serving a plated meal or a set menu, where the kitchen cooks to a count and a missing vegetarian is a missing plate. A buffet with a proper vegetarian section forgives far more. Ask about allergies either way, whatever the service style, because that is a safety question rather than a catering one.
How many dietary options should I offer?
Few enough that the list still reads as a list. Offer the options your caterer can actually cook, add one for anything else, and pair the question with a free-text box for the details. Splitting hairs your kitchen does not split gives you precise numbers nobody can act on.
What if a guest answers after the caterer's deadline?
Tell the caterer anyway rather than assuming the answer is no. A kitchen would far rather hear about an allergy an hour before service than not hear about it. What you generally cannot do is add heads after the billing date without paying for them, which is why that date is the one worth writing down.
Related: RSVPs and replies