The platform · 07
You describe the evening. You don’t fill in a grid.
Seating is the part everyone puts off, because the list keeps moving under it. Here the chart reads from the replies, so it is never a room built from a guest list that stopped being true three weeks ago.
The room, proposed.
It proposes the room
From the confirmed head count — never from your plan’s allowance — it proposes how many tables of how many seats, as one accept-or-adjust card. You press once. You do not name thirty-two tables.
You state wishes, not seats
Keep the Bianchi household together. Sit the university friends near the band. Keep those two apart. Put my grandmother away from the speakers. Plain words.
Some wishes are found for you
Households and groups your list already carries become “together” suggestions you accept or dismiss. It never guesses who should be kept apart — that is only ever yours to say.
The chart resolves
Households stay together by default. Tables fill to the sizes you set. It satisfies as many wishes as can be satisfied at once, and tells you plainly when two of them contradict each other.
It survives the week before.
Replies move it
As guests answer, the chart updates. New yeses are placed into the gaps; nobody already seated is moved for them.
Three declines at midnight
It re-resolves around the gap, keeping every wish you set, and you see exactly what moved.
It knows when the list moved under it
A chart made before the latest replies is marked as such, so you are never shown a room that is quietly out of date.
Every version kept
You can go back to Tuesday’s room, and see what changed between it and today’s.
Formal rooms, in order.
Some dinners are seated by precedence, not by who likes whom.
A board dinner, a state occasion, a company’s two-hundredth: the room is an order of rank the secretary signs, and a swap at seven and nine re-derives every seat below them.
The chart can be handed that order and hold it, with the pairings that must stand protected from anything that would “improve” them away. A rule an optimiser is free to change is a preference. These are not.
And then it becomes paper.
The chart is not the deliverable — the printed pieces are.
The seating chart that stands by the door is designed in your event’s own direction, not a spreadsheet printed large.
Place cards are generated from the same arrangement, each carrying its guest’s name and table. Table numbers come from it too. Nothing is transcribed by hand between the plan and the paper, which is where seating errors almost always come from.
If the arrangement changes after printing, you regenerate the affected pieces rather than the whole set.
As delivered.
The seating chart on four delivered events — a wedding, a PhD celebration, an anniversary and a bar mitzvah.
Rendered from the file each event ran as — its own guests, dates and colour. Open any one to see it full size.
What it will not do.
A room somebody spent an evening building must not be rearranged by a machine with nobody watching. These are standing rules, not settings.
- Move a guest you seated, on its own, overnight — it only ever adds a seat
- Build a room from your plan’s guest allowance instead of the people who said yes
- Guess who should be kept apart
- Split a household unless you say so
- Show you a chart that is quietly behind the replies
- Print a place card from a chart you have not approved
The room is yours. The arithmetic, the re-doing and the paper are ours.
The rest of the platform
Three more services,
reading from the same event.
Timeline & Deadlines
What is due next, always. Every milestone counted back from your date.
Explore → 09Arrival & Check-in
The door, on the night: each guest’s own code, a scanner that works with no signal, a live count.
Explore → 10Live Event-Day Support
Arrivals, timing, counts and every supplier’s part of the plan, coordinated in one place.
Explore →