Wedding Budget Template
A wedding budget has two jobs most templates skip: telling you how to split the total before you've booked anything, and tracking the deposits after you have. This sheet does both \u2014 every category carries the share planners typically see (venue and catering alone eat 40\u201350%), and every row tracks your budget, the real estimate, what's been paid, and the balance still due. The totals reconcile against your overall number, and the cost-per-guest figure updates as the list grows.
One sheet, every format.
Log the deposit the day you pay it.
Wedding budgets rarely die from one big overspend — they die from balance-due amnesia. Every vendor takes a deposit months ahead, and by booking season a couple has paid eight deposits against eight remaining balances that nobody has summed. The Paid so far column exists for a ritual: the day any money moves, it gets logged, and TOTAL STILL TO PAY answers the only question that matters in the final month — what does the rest of this wedding actually cost from here?
On the shares: they’re a starting split, not a scorecard. The typical ranges reflect what planners commonly see — venue and catering dominating, photography around a tenth — but every real wedding rebalances around two or three priorities. The couple who cares about photography books the photographer at 15% and pulls flowers to 5% on purpose. The buffer row is the only one worth defending to the end: 5–10% unassigned until late is what turns surprises into line items.