Nothing is booked or committed automatically.
A woman running corporate conferences, a two-person team doing weddings, and someone who organises a recurring 400-person community festival. Their work is 80% chasing and 20% taste, and the chasing is drowning the taste.
The supplier follow-up. Fourteen vendors, each at a different stage — quoted, booked, deposit paid, final numbers pending, dietary requirements outstanding — all tracked in a spreadsheet that is out of date, plus a mailbox, plus WhatsApp. Every day begins by reconstructing who owes what. Then the run-of-show, rebuilt from scratch per event, and the post-event follow-ups that never get sent because by then the organiser is asleep.
- One tracker per event covering every supplier, stage, deadline and amount
- Chasing suppliers who have not replied, on schedule
- Normalising quotes into a comparable structure
- Building the run-of-show and producing per-role versions — caterer, AV, client
- RSVP handling, dietary and access requirements, seating and name badges
- Drafting briefing packs per supplier from the master plan
- Budget tracking against quotes, with variance flagged
- Post-event: thank-yous, feedback requests, and the assembled feedback report
- Whether the room will feel right
- Which supplier to trust — not which is cheapest
- What to cut when the budget moves
- The client relationship
- The event spine
- One record per event that everything else derives from: every supplier, contact, stage, deadline, amount and document. The run-of-show, the briefings and the budget are all views onto it, so nothing is ever updated in two places — which is where every event spreadsheet eventually dies.
- The chaser
- Outstanding items chased before they become urgent, drafted in your register, sent by you. Supplier chasing is the largest single time sink and the most mechanical.
- The run-of-show generator
- Master timeline, then per-role extracts. The caterer gets the four lines that concern them, not sixteen pages. This visibly reduces questions on the day, which is the real payoff — every question on the day costs you attention at the moment you have least of it.
- The RSVP handler
- Responses, dietary and access requirements collected and collated automatically into the caterer’s and venue’s formats.
- The post-event pack
- Thank-yous drafted, feedback requested, results assembled into a report the client actually receives. Two of the three had never once sent this, purely from exhaustion, and it turns out to be where repeat bookings come from.
Everything that creates an obligation is a human click.
No auto-confirmation, no auto-payment, no automatic acceptance of a quote. An event has a fixed date and irreversible commitments — a wrongly confirmed booking cannot be undone by an apology.
Supplier choice is judgement dressed as comparison. The normaliser puts the quotes side by side and flags what is missing from each. It never ranks, because you are choosing on reliability and history that exist nowhere in the quote. Guest data stays minimal and is deleted after the event: dietary and access requirements are health data under DSGVO, and no event needs to keep them.
Hours per event on admin. Suppliers still unconfirmed one week out — should be zero. Questions from suppliers on the day. Whether the post-event pack goes out at all. Repeat bookings, eventually.
For someone running one or two events a year, this does not pay back. The spine is worth building for six-plus events annually; below that a good template and a shared calendar is the honest answer.
Keeping the spine current, which replaces keeping four things current.
Every morning began by reconstructing who owed me what across a spreadsheet, a mailbox and WhatsApp. There is now one record per event and the run-of-show, the briefings and the budget are all views onto it, so nothing is ever updated twice. The caterer gets their four lines instead of sixteen pages, and the number of questions on the day dropped noticeably, which matters because that is when I have the least attention to spare. Nothing gets booked or confirmed without me clicking.
We had never once sent a post-event pack, purely from exhaustion, and it turns out that is where repeat bookings come from. Thank-yous drafted, feedback collected, a report the client actually receives. He also insisted the dietary and access requirements get deleted after the event, which I had not thought about as health data and now cannot un-see.
Tell me what your week looks like.
I'll tell you honestly which parts you can hand over — and which you can't.