What’s on a BEO
Most venues print a one-page brief and hand it to every department on the morning of an event: chef, AV, banqueting, duty manager. In North American hotels and conference venues it's called the BEO, the Banquet Event Order. In the UK and Australasia the same document is the Function Sheet.
Whichever name you use, it's the venue-ops layer that sits above the run of show: what's being served, how the room is set, how many guests you're billing for, when you can get in, when you have to be out.
1pm now captures all of that on the event itself, so the BEO is part of the run sheet rather than a separate document floating around in someone's inbox. This article covers the fields, where they show up, how they print, and how they fit alongside the existing event briefing.
What's on a BEO
The fields in 1pm follow the structure of a typical hotel or conference-centre BEO. All of them are optional. You can fill in only the rows that apply, leave the rest blank, and the empty rows simply don't render anywhere downstream.
Service style. The short label for how food is delivered. Examples: Plated, Alternative drop, Buffet, Cocktail, Family-style, Grazing. A short autocompleted string up to 200 characters. The first time you type it on an event the value is saved; the next time you start typing the same word on a different event, your previous values come up as suggestions.
Setup style. The short label for how the room is laid out. Examples: Banquet rounds, Rounds of 10, Theatre, Classroom, Cabaret, U-shape, Cocktail. Same per-owner autocomplete as Service style.
Bar package. The short label for the drinks arrangement. Examples: Open bar, Beer + wine only, Cash bar, Standard package, Premium package. Same per-owner autocomplete.
PAX guaranteed. The contractually-minimum guest count the venue charges against. This sits alongside the existing PAX field. PAX is the working or expected number that moves as RSVPs come in. PAX guaranteed is the floor that the venue prices the event on, the number the kitchen preps to, the number that doesn't change once the cut-off date passes. Showing both on the BEO is deliberate: catering reads the guaranteed number, the planner watches the working number, and any gap between them is where the conversation happens.
Access from. The time the planner, crew, and suppliers can start loading in. A time of day, second precision isn't relevant. This replaces the AU "bump-in" term across 1pm; same meaning, neutral phrasing.
Vacate by. The time by which the space must be cleared and handed back to the venue. Same standalone time format. Replaces "bump-out". Access from and Vacate by are the two markers most BEOs lead with, because they bracket the entire event for every supplier on site.
Dietary requirements. A free-text paragraph for the kitchen. Up to 2000 characters. Typical content: "4 vegan, 2 gluten-free, 1 nut allergy (anaphylactic), 1 kosher". The kitchen reads this first, before they look at the menu.
Menu. A free-text block for the menu itself. Up to 4000 characters, which is enough headroom for canapés, entrée, main, dessert, and late-night each as their own paragraph. Most venue planners paste this in from the catering brief email rather than retyping it.
Audio Visual and Technology. A free-text paragraph for AV crew. Up to 2000 characters. Typical content: mics, screens, lectern, in-house vs supplier equipment, anything the AV team needs to know to walk in ready.
Where the fields live in the planner
Open an event in the planner. Click the pencil icon next to the event name to open the event edit form.
The form is grouped into sections. The top section is the event itself: name, date, status, PAX, the briefing fields you already know. Below that is a section labelled BEO (Banquet Event Order) / Function Sheet. That's where the new fields sit, in this order: Service style, Setup style, Bar package across one row; Access from and Vacate by across the next; then Dietary requirements, Menu, and Audio Visual and Technology stacked vertically as full-width text areas.
The legend on the section carries both region names so a planner from a UK function venue and a planner from a US hotel both recognise the section as the one they fill in every event. The terminology in the rest of the form (Access from, Vacate by, PAX guaranteed) is the same regardless of region.
Saving the form persists the BEO data to the event. Every field is editable at any time after that; nothing locks down once a status moves to Confirmed.
What the crew see
When any BEO field is filled in, that information shows on the crew member's live link, on the same event briefing card that already shows PAX, the location, the client, and the organizer.
Service style, Setup style, and Bar package appear as labelled rows on the briefing card.
PAX guaranteed appears next to PAX with a "guaranteed" tag when both are filled. If only one is filled, only that one shows.
Access from and Vacate by appear as their own labelled time row. Crew can see the load-in window without having to ask the planner.
Dietary requirements, Menu, and Audio Visual and Technology render as their own sections below the briefing card. They're labelled clearly so a caterer scrolling past Menu doesn't have to read it, and an AV person scrolling past Dietary doesn't have to read it either.
If the event has no BEO data at all, none of these blocks render. The crew briefing card behaves exactly as it did before BEO fields existed.
How it prints
The Print button on the planner header opens a printable version of the event. Article 53 covers the printable run of show in detail. The BEO fields integrate cleanly into the printable document.
When the event has both timeline items and BEO data, the printable document is labelled Run of show · BEO and carries the BEO sections at the top, followed by the timeline below. This is the venue-shaped hybrid: the morning brief and the running order in one document, the format most venue ops teams already work with.
When the event has BEO data but no timeline items yet — common in the lead-up, when the venue has confirmed catering and AV but the run of show hasn't been built — the printable document is labelled BEO and prints just the BEO content. Useful for handing a one-page brief to the kitchen before the run of show is finished.
When the event has timeline items but no BEO data, the printable document is the clean run of show as before. The BEO sections simply don't appear.
The Access from and Vacate by times print on a single inline row near the top of the BEO block, the way most BEOs lead with them.
Per-owner autocomplete on the short labels
Service style, Setup style, and Bar package use the same autocomplete pattern as the existing Space field.
The first time you type "Plated" into Service style on any event, that value is saved. The next time you start typing "Pl" into Service style on a different event, "Plated" appears as a suggestion. The list is per planner account, not shared across the whole 1pm user base, so the suggestions are always your own labels rather than someone else's.
This is why the fields don't accept a long paragraph: they're short labels designed to autocomplete consistently. A venue running a hundred plated weddings a year shouldn't have "Plated", "plated", and "Plated dinner" floating around as three different values. Pick a label, use it consistently, let the autocomplete do the work.
When to fill in which fields
The BEO is a venue-ops document. The detail goes onto the BEO when the detail exists, not before. A typical enquiry workflow:
Enquiry comes in. Event is created with name, date, status Enquiry, and the client. No BEO data yet.
Venue tour completed, catering quote received. Service style, Setup style, PAX guaranteed, and the menu paragraph land on the event. Status moves to Tentative.
Contract signed. Bar package, Dietary requirements, Audio Visual and Technology are filled in. Access from and Vacate by are locked from the venue's run sheet. Status moves to Confirmed.
Day of. Crew open the live link. The briefing card now shows the full BEO; the timeline shows the run of show; the AV team reads the AV block; the kitchen reads Dietary and Menu.
The fields are designed to fill in over time, not in one sitting. There's no "BEO complete" toggle, no required-fields check, no warning if you leave something blank. Whatever's filled in shows; whatever's not, doesn't.
When you don't need any of this
If you run events that aren't venue-shaped — outdoor productions, festivals, corporate offsites that aren't catered, anything where the "BEO" concept doesn't apply — leave the entire BEO section blank. The fieldset is fully optional. The crew briefing card and the printable run sheet both render exactly as they did before BEO fields existed.
The BEO section is there for the events that benefit from it: hotels, conference centres, wedding venues, banqueting operations, corporate F&B. For everything else, it stays out of the way.
How this fits with what's already on the event
The event still carries the briefing fields you already know: PAX (working number), Space, Zone, Client, Organizer, Location. The BEO fields sit alongside those, not in place of them.
A simple mental model:
Briefing fields answer who and where: who's the client, who's the organizer, where is the event, how big is it.
BEO fields answer what and when: what's the service style, what's on the menu, what AV is needed, when can crew get in, when do they have to leave.
Timeline answers the running order: who does what, in what sequence, at what time.
The three layers together give a crew member everything they need before, during, and after the event, on one link, with no need to chase the venue for a separate function sheet.
