Getting started as a couple

Wedding Computer is free for couples, permanently. You don’t set up a business account — you join a workspace that your vendors build and share with you, or create your own and invite them in.

Step 1 — Create your account

Go to wedding.computer and click Sign up. Enter your email address and you’ll receive a magic link — click it and you’re in. No password, no app to install.

Why: Your account is how you access the workspace. It doesn’t cost anything and takes about 30 seconds.

If a vendor has already sent you an invitation by email, click the link in that email instead. It takes you directly into the workspace they’ve created for your wedding.

Step 2 — Get to know your dashboard

Once you’re in, you land on your wedding dashboard. This is your home base for the whole planning process, and it brings together:

A countdown to your wedding day
A vendor overview — who you’re tracking privately, who you’ve contacted, and who’s fully booked and connected
A live running budget, with three figures side by side: what you’ve Expected across your vendor records, what’s actually been Invoiced by connected vendors, and what’s been Paid so far
Files, links, weather, and your run sheet, once you’ve started adding them

Why: Everything else in this guide — your wedding details, your vendors, your documents — feeds into this one page. Instead of checking a separate tool for “is the florist paid,” “what’s the ceremony time,” or “how many days are left,” you check one dashboard and see it all aggregated automatically. It’s not something you fill in separately; it’s a live summary of the data you enter in the rest of your workspace. If a vendor is on Wedding Computer, their invoices, booking-page updates and forms show up here too, so there’s no separate portal or login to juggle per vendor.

It will look sparse right now. The rest of these steps are what fill it in.

Step 3 — Add your wedding details

Next, go to your workspace settings and fill in:

Wedding date — or leave as date-to-be-confirmed if you haven’t locked it in yet
General location — the city, region, venue, or address that identifies the wedding overall
Guest count — an estimate is fine
Ceremony type — civil, religious, outdoor, elopement, etc.

Then open the Timeline and add separate rows for getting ready, the ceremony, portraits, the reception, and any other logistics. Each row holds its own time and location, so there is one clear source of truth rather than duplicate schedule fields in the wedding settings.

Why: When your celebrant looks at the ceremony row, they see its time and location; when your photographer looks at the portrait row, they see where and when to be. If no planner or venue manages the timeline, the couple is the timeline lead and can edit shared rows directly. If a managing planner or venue is present, your shared-row edits are sent to them as proposals to approve, adjust, or decline.

Step 4 — Invite your partner (if both want access)

If you both want to see the workspace, ask your vendor to invite your partner’s email address too — or go to Add people in the workspace and add them yourself.

Why: Some couples prefer one person managing everything; others want both partners to see invoices, accept contracts, and check the run sheet. Either approach works. If only one of you has an account, the other can always view a PDF export of the run sheet instead.

Step 5 — Add your vendors (privately, at first)

Wedding Computer tracks vendors in three stages, and only the last one is visible to the vendor:

Interested — add a vendor while you’re still comparing options. This stage is completely private: the vendor is never notified, so you can add every business you’re considering without anyone knowing you’re shopping around.
Enquiring — once you’ve actually reached out to them, move them along. Still your own private planning record.
Booked — mark them booked once they’re locked in. If they’re on Wedding Computer, this is what grants them full access to your shared workspace; if you’d only stored their email address, this is what sends their invitation.

To add a vendor, go to Add people → Add vendor. Search for their business if they’re already on Wedding Computer, or enter their name and email yourself if they’re not on the platform yet — they don’t need to be a Wedding Computer user for you to track them.

Work through your vendor list:

Celebrant or officiant
Photographer
Videographer
Florist
Hair and makeup
DJ or band
Venue (if they’re not the one who set up the workspace)
Caterer
Any other suppliers involved in the day

Why: Couples often don’t want a vendor to know they’re comparing options before a decision is made, or to look like a booking fell through when it was only ever a maybe. Because Interested and Enquiring are private stages, you can track every vendor you’re weighing up — including an expected price that feeds your dashboard’s budget figure — without any of it reaching their inbox. Nothing about a vendor’s status is visible to them until you book them.

Vendor visibility: Separately, you can choose whether the vendors on your wedding can see each other at all. Some couples want their whole team visible to one another for coordination; others prefer to keep that private. This is your call, set from your workspace, and it doesn’t affect what any vendor can see of your own information.

Vendors who join can see permitted rows, propose shared additions or changes, manage their private rows, upload documents, and help keep the schedule accurate. The more vendors are in the workspace, the less coordination happens over scattered email threads.

Vendors who don’t join, or who you’re not ready to book yet, can still have their contact details and your private notes kept on their record — see What to do if a vendor won’t join.

Step 6 — Upload documents you already have

Go to Documents and upload any files you’ve already received:

Contracts and booking confirmations from vendors
Quotes or proposals
Venue floor plans
Inspiration images or style references

Why: Everything in one place means you’re not searching through your email for “that contract from the photographer” three months later. Vendors can also see what you’ve uploaded (it’s a shared library), which can be useful for style references they might reference when planning.

Step 7 — Turn on the Guests app (optional)

If you want Wedding Computer to also handle your guest list, invitations, and seating, turn on the Guests app from your wedding workspace. It’s entirely optional — the rest of the workspace works fine without it, and plenty of couples run guest management elsewhere.

Once it’s on, you can:

Build your guest list by household, with allergies, dietary notes, song requests, and seating priority
Send private RSVP invitations by email — guests confirm attendance, pick a meal, and answer any custom questions you’ve set, with no account needed on their end
Build a seating chart with an auto-seat helper, and lay tables out on an uploaded image or PDF of your actual venue floorplan

Why: Guest management is heavier than a simple headcount, and not every wedding needs it run through here, so it’s a separate app you switch on rather than something added to every wedding by default. When it’s on, you also control who can see it — the couple only, the couple plus planners and venue, or the whole vendor team.

See Guests, RSVPs & seating for the full walkthrough.

You’re ready when:

Your core wedding details are filled in, and the day’s key times and locations are timeline rows
You and your partner both have access (if you both want it)
At least your planner, celebrant, and photographer are being tracked — booked if they’re locked in, Interested or Enquiring if you’re still deciding
Important documents are uploaded
You know where your dashboard is, and you’ve decided whether the Guests app is worth turning on

From here, your job is mostly reviewing what vendors add to the timeline, checking your budget on the dashboard, paying invoices through the workspace, and checking in as the day approaches.

What to do right now

If your planner or venue set up the workspace for you: open it, check the wedding details are correct, and invite any vendors who aren’t yet in the workspace.

If you’re starting from scratch: fill in your wedding details, then start adding your vendor list — privately, as Interested or Enquiring, if you’re still deciding — and move each one to Booked as you lock them in.

The couple guide covers everything you’ll encounter from here — paying invoices, accepting contracts, the wedding day timeline, and what happens if you need to remove a vendor.

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