It’s no secret that weddings are expensive. It’s one of the largest parties you’ll ever throw and things can add up quickly. The larger the guest list, the larger the $$$ you’ll be handing over for this once in a lifetime event. I can speak from personal experience that it’s SO hard to keep track of it all. Whenever Matt and I got engaged, we started emailing vendors and trying to add up how much everything would potentially be. We quickly felt overwhelmed with no place to keep track of it all so we created a spreadsheet. We HAD to keep track of our wedding expenses because we could see things quickly getting out of hand. To me, it also helped me see what I’d prefer to prioritize. You can imagine that most of our budget, aside from food/alcohol, went towards photography and videography 😉
To be honest, I’ve also never been GREAT at math so in general, I have to keep track of things in spreadsheet form in order to see how much I’ve spent or intend to spend. Going to be honest, some of our home decor project ideas started in Excel format. Our daughter’s nursery being one of them. It’s FAR easier to manage this way for me. While other people can add up things in their head easily, I’m not that girl.
The year that Matt and I met, I worked in paid search marketing. A lot of my role in that job was spent creating and analyzing Excel spreadsheets. It’s where my LOVE for Excel started. Once Matt and I got married, I created a robust budget spreadsheet for us to track our monthly expenses and he finally said.. “I don’t know how to use this.” We’ve since simplified things 🙂
Last month I was looking for an old document in my Google Drive and I found our old budget spreadsheet. I figured it would be helpful to share the same format with couples getting married because we benefited greatly from doing this. It also helped to visually see things whenever we would sit down and talk about when our next round of deposits were due.
The below spreadsheet was based on ours, however the numbers are completely arbitrary. The estimated column is used to fill in what you estimate you’ll spend based on your own research and knowledge. You should know that you typically always spend more than you think based on taxes, gratuities, etc. Do your best to estimate that number and maybe add 10% or so to account for potential overspend. For some of the numbers, I think you’ll get a better idea once you start reaching out to vendors, like photographers, florists, etc. Once you chat with them and get their price lists or talk budget – you can fill in that number there.
So how this is designed is to start by filling in your estimates for everything OR what you want to keep your spend at. So for example, Matt and I splurged on photography and videography. I knew that that meant we couldn’t splurge on flowers. I had to chat with my florist about what I could get for $1,500. So our set budget was $1,500 and we had to keep things below that.
Once purchases are made, fill those numbers into the actual column. That will track what you’ve spent on your wedding so far. The top section will automatically total all of these numbers by category. The percentage of the total section will then show you the percentage breakdown of how much of your money is going towards a certain category. For example, in the spreadsheet, it shows that 62% of what has been spent so far has been spent on photography and videography.
If you have any questions on the spreadsheet or want to show other things, talk to me! I’m happy to help out.
