Guests, seats and headcount: how the numbers are counted

This is the part of a guest list that most often goes wrong, and it is worth five minutes now rather than an argument with a caterer later.

Two different things

• A guest is one row on your list. It is an invitation — one person, or one household you invited together.
• A seat is one chair at the reception, and one plate of food.

They are the same number right up until someone brings a companion, and then they are not. Every field on your guest list is labelled with the unit it carries, so you never have to guess which one you are reading.

Companions

When a guest says they are bringing someone, that person is one human being who needs one chair and one meal. So they are recorded one way, never both:

• as an extra seat on the guest's own reply, or
• as their own row on your guest list, once you know their name.

Not both. If you name a companion and give them a row, the seat moves off the original guest's reply so the total does not double. Anyone who has somehow ended up counted twice is flagged for you.

If you added them by hand instead

Adding those people as their own rows without going through Name them leaves the original reply holding the seats it claimed, so your total counts them twice.

Correct it where the number is: on your guest list, tap the seat count beside an attending guest and type how many are actually coming.

That number is the reply. It is not the same as Extra seats in Edit Guest, which is the allowance — how many unnamed chairs that invitation is permitted to bring. Lowering an allowance cannot take back seats a guest has already claimed, which is why the total does not move when you change it.

Children

Children are marked on the guest list, and a child is an ordinary guest — a chair and a meal. They are already inside your totals.

The child figures shown alongside are a description of that group, not an addition to it. Adding them to your total would hand the caterer two people for one child.

You can record which parent a child belongs to, which is what the seating chart and the coordinator's sheet use to keep families together.

Seating guests at tables

A seating chart is built a family or a group at a time, so the guest list lets you seat people the same way:

1. Narrow the list to the people who belong together — search a surname, or filter by group.
2. Tick Select all (or tick guests one by one).
3. In the bar that appears, choose a table, or + New table to name one.

Everyone selected is seated at once. Guests already at that table are left alone, and the same bar can take people off their tables again. On a phone, each guest card also has its own Table picker for one-off changes.

From a spreadsheet

If you would rather work in a spreadsheet, Export CSV, fill in the Table and Role columns, and import the same file again. Guests already on your list are matched by name and updated rather than added twice. A blank cell leaves that guest's current value as it is, so an import never erases a table you set in the app.

Meals

Meal choices are counted per person, not per reply. A family of four who all chose the vegetarian option reaches your caterer as four vegetarian meals, not one.

The number to give your caterer

Use the seat count, not the guest count. It is the one that includes companions and children, and it is the number of plates.

Removed guests do not leave their seats behind: if you delete someone from your list, the seats from their reply come out of the total with them.