Managing your guest list

One of the most daunting tasks of the whole wedding planning process is deciding on and organizing your guest list. For me personally, I booked my venue first before I even thought about my guest list. That way I knew I had a maximum capacity that I could absolutely NOT succeed and I stuck to it! It's really easy to caught up in adding a few extra people here and there, but if you have a maximum you can't exceed, it makes things a bit easier.

Once you have your guest list worked out, the next step is to collect, input and organize all those names and addresses! The Knot has a FABULOUS tool on their website that was my saving grace. You can use their wedding guest manager tool to:

• input all your guests' info. You can even enter info about if they belong to the groom's family, bride's family, mutual friends, etc. so that it makes it easier to filter
• sort guests by event type so that you can easily export the data into Excel to pass along to your bridesmaids for your bridal shower and stagette invite llist. T
• create an "A list" and a "B list" so that when you start receiving declined responses back from your A list guests, you can start sending invites to your B list.

In addition, you can:

• manage your RSVPs with a column that says "yes or no" next to your guest's names
• track meal choices
• track gifts so you know who gave what;
• track whether you have sent a thank you card after the wedding.

Finally, you can export your list to Excel, which makes it easy to do a mail merge if you're planning to print the addresses on the invitation envelopes.

Tip: I also suggest putting a tiny number on the back of each RSVP card and adding a column in your Excel sheet next to each guest that says "RSVP number" to track your RSVP cards. Sometimes, people forget to fill in their names on the RSVP card, so when it's returned to you, you don't know which guest is actually RSVPing! It will save you a lot of grief in the end, and your guests won't even notice it's on the back of the card.