How 1pm is shaking up the wedding planning process
The wedding you lost this month was not lost on the day. It was lost on a Tuesday.
An enquiry came in on Sunday night, which is when engaged couples do their research, because Sunday night is when the week has not started yet and the idea still feels fun. It sat in an inbox next to a supplier invoice and a newsletter. You saw it Monday, meant to reply properly rather than dash something off, and replied on Thursday with a warm and thoughtful email.
By Thursday they had two quotes and a favorite.
Nobody in this industry is bad at weddings. The work is extraordinary. What the work does not leave time for is the business wrapped around it: the reply, the quote, the follow-up, the deposit that never got chased, the insurance certificate that expired in March and nobody noticed, the invoice sitting in a spreadsheet marked "sent?" with a question mark.
1pm started as a live run of show, because that is the part of a wedding I could see failing from behind a camera. It is now the whole operation, and the run of show is the last thing it does, not the first. So let's go in that order.
The enquiry, and the four days that decide everything
Enquiries go into a Leads inbox, not an email account.
The form embeds on your own site, so a couple fills it in without leaving your page, and what they send lands as a lead with the date, the guest count, the venue if they know it, and their contact details already structured. No re-typing anything from an email body into a spreadsheet.
From there it is a thread you work inside 1pm. Reply templates cover the questions you answer forty times a year (what's included, do you travel, what happens if it rains) so a considered reply takes ninety seconds instead of being deferred to Thursday. Calls, texts, and site visits get logged on the lead, so when a couple comes back six weeks later you can see what you actually told them rather than guessing.
Leads that go quiet get chased automatically if you want them to. The pipeline has a conversion rate on it, filterable by capture form, so you can see which of your enquiry sources is actually producing bookings and which one is producing tire-kickers.
The quote, and the proposal wrapped around it
Pricing comes out of a catalog. Coordination packages, hourly rates, styling, travel, staffing, whatever you sell, defined once with a price and reused. Build a quote by picking lines rather than by copying last month's PDF and hoping you remembered to change the couple's names in all four places.
A quote goes out as a link, not an attachment. It has an expiry, it tracks whether it has been opened, and if the couple accepts, the acceptance is recorded against the lead.
When the pitch needs to be more than a number, you send a proposal instead. That is a branded web page you build once as a set of blocks and reuse: your words, your images, the packages, and the real details of that couple's day filled in automatically. Change a detail and the page they are looking at changes. There is no second version, no re-export, and no PDF sitting in a downloads folder slowly becoming untrue.
Getting the yes on the record
This is the boring part that saves you once every few years, spectacularly.
Terms live in a versioned library. When a couple confirms, they read the version that is current that day, tick to agree, and type their name. 1pm records who agreed, which version they agreed to, and when.
Eighteen months later, when there is a genuine disagreement about what was included, you have a record instead of a recollection. Electronic acceptance is a recognised signature nearly everywhere you are likely to work, and a drawn squiggle on a PDF adds nothing to it legally. What matters is the audit trail, and that is what gets kept.
Money, which is the part everyone puts off
Deposits and balances are invoices with dates on them.
Take the deposit by card online through Stripe, and the couple pays from the same link they read the invoice on. Or record the bank transfer by hand. Either way the balance owing is current, so "have they paid?" is a glance rather than an archaeology project through a bank feed.
Stage the payments how your contract actually works: deposit on booking, a second payment at some point in the middle, balance due before the day. Each one is its own invoice with its own due date, and the reminders can go out on their own. Service charges, gratuities, credit notes and a running statement per event are all in there too, because weddings change and the money has to be able to change with them.
It syncs one way to Xero, so your bookkeeper stops asking you for things.
Reports then tell you what the year actually looked like. What converted, what it was worth, what is still outstanding, where the enquiries came from. Every report exports to a spreadsheet.
The suppliers, and the paperwork nobody wants to chase
If you run weddings for a living, you are also running a small compliance operation, whether or not you have admitted that to yourself.
Requests handle it. You ask each supplier for what you need (public liability insurance, a signed agreement, a meal preference, a backup phone number, an arrival time) and they answer or upload on their phone through their own link. No login. Everything lands on the event where you can see it, rather than scattered across an inbox in a state you can only describe as archaeological.
Documents with expiry dates get tracked and chased as they lapse, which is the single most useful unglamorous thing in the product. The florist's certificate expiring three weeks before a wedding is a problem you want to hear about from software, not from a venue's compliance officer on the morning.
For onboarding that has nothing to do with a specific wedding, your regular contractor roster, your casual staff, your stallholders, there are Portals: the same machinery with the dates and the guest count stripped out. One link per person, a checklist of what you need, and a view of who has done it.
Contacts underneath all of this is a real address book. Tags, so "who does lighting?" is a one-second question. Private internal notes on payment terms and past issues, the kind of thing you would otherwise keep in a notebook you would be embarrassed to lose. A star rating only you can see, because you will not remember in fourteen months which of the two videographers was the one who was difficult.
The middle, where the day quietly gets built
Event templates mean you build your standard wedding once. Hair and makeup, first look, ceremony, family photos, cocktails, reception, speeches, first dance, cake, send-off, and the inevitable moment at the end where someone tries to extend the bar by half an hour. A new booking becomes two minutes of work.
Tasks sit alongside the events with steps and reusable workflows, so the fourteen things you do for every wedding are a saved workflow rather than a thing you are holding in your head at 11pm.
Automations run on triggers. A month out, invite the couple to book the final planning call. A week out, send the arrival and parking details. The day after, send the thank you. There is a review queue if you would rather read a client email before it goes out.
Menus live in a library and flow through to the brief, the confirmation, and the printed card on the table. Dietary requirements come in from the guests themselves through a request, and land where the kitchen will see them.
Spaces hold your venues, each with its own address, access instructions, and capacity, and 1pm hard-blocks a double booking of the same space unless you have said concurrent events are fine there.
And then the day
Everything above exists so that this part is calm.
The run of show is one live document. Every supplier gets their own link, no logins, filtered to their items, with the full timeline available when they need the context. The DJ does not read forty rows to find their three. The photographer, who is the one supplier who genuinely needs the whole thing, gets the whole thing.
Change something and it changes everywhere in seconds. No "FYI updated timeline attached". No reply-all chain. No florist working from v4 that arrived by screenshot.
On the day it runs itself. Countdowns on every item, so a glance at a phone in a dark reception room tells you where you are. One-tap Start and Finish, so you can stand outside the room and see that speeches are running ten minutes long without making eye contact with a man who should have put the microphone down four minutes ago. Notes each supplier sees first, at the top, in type large enough that they actually read them. A private brief per supplier, so the caterer's allergy note and the DJ's list of songs that must never be played stay with the people they belong to.
It works offline. When a venue's Wi-Fi stages a protest, the timeline is cached on your suppliers' phones, and their taps queue up and post when the signal comes back.
There is a public shareable version with a QR code on the page for the people you are never going to make records for. The venue's porter. The couple's family. Stick it on a wall backstage. Anyone who needs the schedule scans it.
The couple can have their own view, and that is where the real change is. Without a shared timeline, the couple becomes the routing layer: the DJ asks what time speeches finish, they answer; the caterer asks when the cake is cut, they answer; the photographer asks whether first look is still happening, they answer. Same three questions, six different suppliers, all day. A live run of show makes the timeline answerable by the timeline, and the couple gets to attend their own wedding instead of staffing the help desk for it.
A quick note about words
I use "run of show" through this post, and ROS for short. If you learned the trade in the UK or Australia you almost certainly call it a run sheet. Same document, same job. 1pm uses run of show inside the product, and you can rename it in your account settings if your team says something else, along with Events, Crew and Spaces.
Closing
The day is the part everyone photographs. The business is the part that decides whether you are still doing this in five years.
A wedding still works the way it always has: everyone knows what is happening next, what is happening now, and what is happening just after. What has changed is that the fourteen months leading up to it no longer have to run on an inbox, a spreadsheet, and the hope that you remembered to chase the deposit.
Geoff can still come. Please make sure he reads the notes.
Chris Founder, 1pm.app