Overall Reception Costs

How are you calculating your wedding costs? A wedding is probably one of the largest and most expensive parties you will ever throw. Most plan to only go down this road once so my philosophy is: if you’re going to do it, then do it right.

Occasionally I hear potential clients say something like “we have our venue, and our reception is going to cost x-amount of dollars.” More often than not they are equating their venue’, food and beverage cost to their overall reception cost. Which is not accurate but the reason some tend to confuse the two is because venues who have in-house catering tend to have a minimum spend to meet on food and beverage.

For example there is a local venue that I love working with that has a minimum spend of $17,000, before the tax and gratuity or service charge is added. What many don’t understand is the tax and gratuity charges can easily increase the bill by 27-30%. That would automatically take the $17,000 minimum spend to approximately $22,000 for just food and beverage.

There is so much more to the reception than food and beverage. Now don’t get me wrong, those two elements are very important parts of any event and for most of our clients, it is listed in their top 3 highest priorities.However, there are other costs like florals, decor, rentals, stationery, photography, entertainment, lighting, cake, etc.

With all of those variables it is impossible to equate the overall reception costs to just the cost of food, beverage and the venue.

So how do you calculate costs?

It all starts in the foundation of the planning process. With our full service planning experience we do a budget buildout where we complete a comprehensive analysis of your budget. Before anything we start with priorities. Because a budget is simply a list of those priorities with numbers attached to it. It’s more than just listing categories in order of what is most important to least important. It is truly digging deep and understanding you and your fiance as individuals and understand your love story, which in turn defines you as a couple.

We call that our development and research phase and that is is step one for us. We want to know what you like, love and ultimately hate. We want to know what makes your heart skip a beat because you are overjoyed, what brings a happy tear to your eye, what gives you anxiety and what makes you tick. Because what you like and don’t like are equally important to us. It is the only way we can confidently move forward in a way that makes sense and plan every details with you in mind.

We trust our advice is helpful. Please feel free to email us with questions or any suggestions you have that helped in navigating your overall wedding costs.