To all you women braving the wedding planning process sans professional help - here's a basic list of what you should include in your wedding binder. If you have this organized and handy, you can delegate tasks to all your loving family and friends who have lent their hands to help, but won't need to commit every phone number to memory or try to explain things to your groomsmen via phone while having fake eyelashes glued on (you should not be stressed out and trying to explain decor to men with sharp objects and glue near your eyes).
- Hotel/resort or venue information
- include the address/directions, phone number and contact information for the venue manager or any of your on-site contacts
- Supplier contact information
- Compile a list of all your suppliers and their phone numbers (business and cellular)
- go the extra mile to input their email information and business address (especially if your items are being picked up from them and not delivered)
- Wedding Party contact information
- Names and numbers for all your wedding party members, important family members involved as well as your MC
- SCHEDULES
- You can format these how you like, but a delivery and pick-up schedule for all rentals, flowers, decor, equipment, etc is necessary
- There is no such thing as too much detail (think music, entrances, MC Announcements, speeches)
- Speeches
- A copy of your speeches
- A detailed outline of when your MC will be making announcements and a guideline of what they will be saying (depending on your MC, you can give them an outline of what is needed and they can take it from there, or they may want a word-for-word script from you)
- Decor/Set-up instructions
- Format this how you like, but my preference is to divide my decor checklists into sections such as:
- Ceremony
- Cocktail hour
- Center pieces
- Reception
- Miscellaneous
- Floor plans and seating arrangements
- Budget & invoices
- Assuming you've been inputting everything into a detailed budget, you should also have a payment schedule to keep track of which deposits have been paid, which suppliers require cheques on the day of or which will be processing charges on your credit card. Prepare your cheques the day prior and have them ready in envelopes so that on the day of your wedding, your suppliers don't need to chase anyone to get paid. If you're going to see them the days leading up to the wedding, you can even give them a post-dated cheque then and get it out of the way assuming none of the charges are up for revision after the wedding day.
