The Guest Handbook
The invitation is
the easy part.
Most of the work of an event is not the design. It is two hundred people, their addresses, their replies, their partners, what they eat and where they sit — and it is the part nobody writes about honestly. So we did.
- One record
- Six guides
- Three free tools
01
Why this exists.
There is a great deal written about choosing an invitation and almost nothing useful about the fortnight when a third of your guests have not replied and the caterer needs a number. That imbalance is not an accident — most companies in this category sell paper or registries, and neither business has much reason to write about guest logistics.
Evorrah does, because guest management is half of what we build. These pages are written from that side of the problem, and each one ends with something you can actually do rather than an encouragement to buy something.
02
One guest,
all the way through.
Sarah is a row in a spreadsheet in March and a name at the door in June. Everything that happens to her in between happens to the same record — which is why the card beside this keeps filling instead of being retyped.
-
March · the list
A name in row forty-seven.
She arrives the way everyone arrives: pasted in from somebody's spreadsheet, with a surname that appears twice and an address that may or may not be current.
- NameSarah Miller
-
March · the household
Two people, one envelope.
Daniel shares her surname and her address, so they are one household — one invitation, one reply link, one line on the seating plan. They keep separate answers, which is the part a spreadsheet cannot hold.
- HouseholdThe Millers · 2
-
April · the invitation
Her own file, not a copy.
The suite is designed once; the invitation is produced per household. Theirs carries their names, their language and a reply code that belongs to nobody else.
- InvitationPersonalised
- IdiomaEnglish
-
April · the reply
A reply, not an email.
She taps her own link and answers. It lands on the record itself — not in an inbox you will be searching through in October, and not in a form whose responses live somewhere else.
- Reply✓ Attending · 2
-
May · the questions after
What she eats. Where she sleeps.
The interesting questions come after “are you coming”. Each answer becomes a number somebody actually needs — the kitchen's, the hotel's, the driver's — rather than a sentence in a thread.
- MenuVegetariano
- AllergyShellfish
- Transport✓ Needs a car
-
May · the table
Seated from the same list.
The chart resolves against the live record, so the vegetarian count, the place card and the seat cannot disagree. A late decline moves one seat rather than the plan.
- TableTwelve
- BesideThe Reyes
-
June · the door
Arrived, six forty-two.
The credential on her phone is the same record again. On the night, the door list, the kitchen list and the seating chart are one list — the one she joined in March.
- CredentialQR issued
- Arrived✓ 6:42 pm
Sarah Miller
- NameSarah Miller
- HouseholdThe Millers · 2
- InvitationPersonalised
- IdiomaEnglish
- Reply✓ Attending · 2
- MenuVegetariano
- AllergyShellfish
- Transport✓ Needs a car
- TableTwelve
- BesideThe Reyes
- CredentialQR issued
- Arrived✓ 6:42 pm
One record, twelve facts. No second list, no reconciling, nothing to keep in step.
Sarah is an example, not a client. The stages are the ones the platform actually has — the guest platform in full.
03
An event is not a list of names.
It is the same few hundred people, known in twelve different ways, by everyone who needs to know them.
- 1
- list — from the first address to the door
- 12
- things the record holds about each guest
- 2,000
- guests it stays organised at
- 0
- spreadsheets to reconcile at the end
The twelve, in the order the record fills them: name, household, invitation, language, reply, menu, allergy, transport, table, beside, credential, arrived. They are the rows in the card above, and there are no others.
04
One invitation.
Two hundred and fourteen of them.
The design is decided once. The file is made per guest — the name, the seat, the meal, the reply link and the language all come from the record. Choose someone.
Eleanor & Thomas
Sarah & Daniel
request the pleasure of your company at their marriage, and at the dinner and dancing to follow.
Saturday the twelfth of June · Two thousand and twenty-seven
Table twelve — two seats held for you.
- Família2 convidados
- Reply✓ Attending
- Menu1 vegetarian
- IdiomaEnglish
Eleanor & Thomas
Olivia & James
request the pleasure of your company at their marriage, and at the dinner and dancing to follow.
Saturday the twelfth of June · Two thousand and twenty-seven
Table four — beside the Reyes, as you asked.
- Família2 convidados
- Reply✓ Attending
- MenuFish · Fish
- IdiomaEnglish
Eleanor & Thomas
Dr Sarah Cohen
request the pleasure of your company at their marriage, and at the dinner and dancing to follow.
Saturday the twelfth of June · Two thousand and twenty-seven
One seat held. Reply by the third of May.
- Household1 guest
- RespostaAguardando
- MenuNot yet answered
- IdiomaEnglish
Eleanor & Thomas
The Okafor family
request the pleasure of your company at their marriage, and at the dinner and dancing to follow.
Saturday the twelfth of June · Two thousand and twenty-seven
Table two — four seats, two of them small.
- Família4 convidados
- Reply✓ Attending
- Menu2 vegetarian
- IdiomaEnglish
Eleanor & Thomas
Beatriz Duarte
request the pleasure of your company at their marriage, and at the dinner and dancing to follow.
Saturday the twelfth of June · Two thousand and twenty-seven
Mesa seis — um lugar reservado para si.
- Agregado1 convidado
- Resposta✓ Vai comparecer
- MenuVegetariano
- IdiomaPortuguês
Not a mock-up: this is what per-guest personalisation produces — one file per household, addressed, seated and greeted in the language that guest reads.
05
Two hundred place cards,
each with one name on it.
Somebody has to know that Élise sits at table six, is vegetarian, and spells her name with an accent. On paper that is a stack of cards. In the record it is the same three facts, entered once.
On the table
Élise Moreau
Place cardTable six
In the record
Élise Moreau
MenuVegetariano
TableSix
Arrived✓ 7:38 pm
06
The guides.
Six problems, written from the side of the person holding the list.
How to get guests to RSVP
The three-reminder method, what to send at each stage, and why every reminder must go to non-repliers only.
Most readNobody is replying — what now?
Triage first: did it arrive, is replying easy, are replies landing somewhere you are not counting.
Organising a guest list by household
Why a guest list is a list of households that happens to contain names, and what that fixes.
How to collect guest addresses
One link instead of two hundred conversations, and the message that actually gets them back.
Plus-ones, without the awkwardness
Who gets one, how to say so on the invitation, and how to hold the number without insulting anybody.
Dietary requirements, properly
What to ask, when to ask it, and the difference a kitchen needs between a preference and an allergy.
07
Three tools you can use now.
Free, no account, and nothing you type leaves your browser — which matters here, because you are pasting real names.
Guest list organiser
Paste your list and see it grouped into households, with duplicates and ambiguous entries flagged.
Free toolHow many invitations do I need?
The number you actually order, counted per household rather than per guest.
Free toolRSVP deadline calculator
Works backwards from your venue's final-numbers date to the date you should print.
Free tool08
The one thing worth knowing early.
If you take a single idea from this handbook, take this: decide now which system holds the truth about who is coming. Not the addresses, not the design — the answer to "who is attending and where are they sitting".
Almost every painful story in event planning is a version of the same failure: replies in an inbox, addresses in a spreadsheet, seating in a document, and a fortnight before the day nobody can reconcile them. One list, from the beginning, prevents nearly all of it.
Stuck on something not covered here? Write to us. We answer guest-list questions whether or not you are a client — and the ones that come up more than once become pages in this handbook.
One list, from the first address to the seating plan.
Every Evorrah commission includes the guest platform — households, per-guest replies, dietary notes, communications and seating, up to 2,000 guests. It is included with the suite, not sold as a subscription.
See your guest experience How a commission runs