5 Systems Every Wedding Business Needs
Running a wedding business is no small feat! You’ve got a lot on your plate, from coordinating with couples to managing vendors, and everything in between. If you’re anything like our wedding pro clients, you probably dream of a magical world where everything runs smoothly without constantly being glued to your computer. We’re here to tell you that a world like this is 100% possible: When you work with our team, we can start achieving this for you within our first 2 weeks of working together!
But how do we make that happen? Part of the equation involves our team’s years of wedding experience. We leverage our vast industry expertise to dive straight into your wedding business, identify what needs to be done, and take care of it all, allowing you to be hands-off!
The other part of the equation is having the right systems in place! As virtual assistants for wedding creatives, we have seen firsthand how the right tools can totally transform the way you work—and keep your sanity intact!
So no matter what type of wedding business you have, we’re confident that the following five systems will help you stay organized and best manage your backend!
1. HoneyBook or Dubsado
A customer relationship management, or CRM, is the most important system in any wedding business’ tech stack! For wedding pros, we highly recommend Dubsado or Honeybook.
Designed with wedding business owners in mind, these systems allow you to easily keep track of all your leads and booked clients in one place. This includes all your client emails, proposals, contracts, invoices, mood boards, meeting notes etc.
Why is this essential? When you're juggling multiple weddings at once (especially during busy season!), things can get out of hand fast. You need a place where all your client details live, so you don’t have to waste time searching through emails to find that one contract you signed 6 months ago.
These systems can also help you organize every step of your process and workflow! You’re able to customize your sales and booked client pipelines exactly as you want them, taking clients from their initial inquiry and consult all the way to wedding day. With automated emails, form templates and tasks, your process will be smoother than ever, ensuring that you never miss a step, no matter how busy you get!
Plus, these wedding business platforms allow you to send automated reminders for upcoming payments, meetings, or deadlines—meaning you’ll never forget a follow-up. Trust us, your couples will appreciate the professionalism, and you’ll feel like you have your wedding business under control.
TL;DR: Both Dubsado and Honeybook allow you to:
Create templates for contracts, invoices, and proposals
Automate your workflows
Keep track of payments and due dates
Stay on top of communication with clients and vendors
2. Google Suite
Next on the list is something that’s probably already a staple in your personal life: the Google Suite. Sometimes, especially when it comes to technology, the simpler, the better! Google tools are comprehensive, all-encompassing, and best of all, easy to use! So if you’re admittedly not the most comfortable with new tech, the Google Suite is the perfect place to get started.
Google Docs, Sheets, and Drive are a total game-changer for collaboration and organization in your wedding business. All files are stored in the cloud, so anyone on your team can access them anywhere at anytime, and multiple team members can work on the same document or spreadsheet at once.
Here’s how we use the Google Suite to smoothly manage our clients’ wedding businesses:
Google Sheets: Manage wedding budgets, guest lists, associate photographer/planner assignments, blogging schedule. If you’re the detail-oriented type like we are, Sheets will quickly become your best friend.
Google Drive (& Photos): Store wedding galleries, contracts, timelines, and any other important documents. You can organize everything into folders (and subfolders… and sub-subfolders, if you’re feeling really organized) for easy access.
Google Docs: Create vendor credit lists, shot lists, meeting notes. You can share them in real time with clients or team members.
3. Timeline Genius
This one is for our wedding planner friendors! We know that your wedding day timelines are your bread and butter; the master playbook for each and every event. With upwards of a dozen vendors per wedding and sometimes multiple event days, you need an easy way to stay organized and streamline your timeline creation process. That’s where Timeline Genius comes into your wedding business!
Timeline Genius is a super intuitive tool designed specifically for wedding businesses to create detailed and customizable timelines. It ensures you’re covering every tiny detail, from vendor arrivals to the layout to ceremony processional order to all song selections. You can also share timelines with your team, clients, and vendors, so everyone is on the same page.
Here’s how Timeline Genius can save you tons of time!
Pre-built templates: You don’t have to start from scratch with each timeline! They have templates for different types of weddings and you can customize them to fit your needs. You can also recycle past wedding timelines you’ve created, saving them as templates, so you don’t waste time formatting and entering in info that can be pre-populated.
Automatic timing feature: One of our favorite features of Timeline Genius is that it can shift ALL the timing of your timeline automatically! If your couple wants to push their ceremony time back 15 minutes, you no longer have to manually adjust each and every event on the timeline – The system will do this for you!
Vendor directory: Timeline Genius comes with a saved directory, so you can easily and automatically pop in your vendors’ information. No more rummaging through emails and texts to find their contact info! This is also great for including social media vendor tag lists.
4. Later
We often hear from our clients that social media is one of the biggest burdens in their wedding business! As virtual assistants for wedding creatives, we love being able to take this off your plate and free up your mental space and schedule to focus on the things you actually enjoy doing.
When we take care of your social media, we highly recommend using a social media planning tool, like Later! This platform makes it easy to plan, schedule, and automatically publish posts. Our social media package includes image selection, caption creation, keyword and hashtag research, vendor list formation, and scheduling. We handle all of these activities through a system like Later!
There, we can visually plan your feed, drag-and-drop photos, and even see the best times of the day to post. When we’re finished creating your wedding business’ monthly content calendar, all you have to do is log in and you’ll be able to see every post we created. That’s when we ask for your feedback and any edit requests before each post officially publishes.
Later truly is a game changer when it comes to social media planning and collaboration! Learn more about our Marketing Content Creation package here:
5. Canva
Last but not least, let’s talk about the creative side of your wedding business! Not every wedding pro is a graphic designer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create beautiful, on-brand visuals. Canva is our go-to for any design-related activities, like creating graphics for social media graphics, your website, and client guides.
With loads of templates, stock photos and videos, drag-and-drop features, it’s intuitive to navigate and allows for plenty of creative license. This means that you don’t need any design experience to get started – Just a creative eye! You can even invite and collaborate with team members and other vendors in real time, enabling everyone’s creative juices to power together.
A top feature in Canva that we love is the ability to save your branding kit! The system saves your logo, brand fonts, and brand colors, so you can quickly reference and utilize them when creating a design. This ensures every graphic you generate stays on brand and saves you time in the long run, especially when you’re color matching!
Your Wedding Business’ Next Superpower? A Virtual Assistant!
Hi, we’re Jessica Hetu and Co, a team of virtual assistants for wedding creatives! We are on a mission to help wedding pros avoid burnout and have the freedom to focus on what matters most, no matter what that looks like for you.
Whether you’re striving to grow your wedding business, have more flexibility in your lifestyle or simply prioritize the work you love to do, we’re here to help! Uniquely equipped with 10+ years of wedding industry experience, we take your biggest business burdens off your plate, including client care, blogging, social media, and email newsletter creation.
We ultimately marry our industry experience with our hearts for service to be a second “you” in your business! Connect with us by hitting the button below. We can’t wait to meet you!
