What belongs in your event planning spreadsheet
Table of Contents
There's a version of event week where you arrive rested. You slept the night before, not perfectly, since it's still an event, but you slept. You get there early, and the room is coming together without you standing over it.
Somebody asks your setup crew a question, and they answer it, because they already know. Your phone is still in your hand, since it always is, and it isn't lighting up every five seconds with questions only you can answer. When your first guests walk in, you get to watch their faces as they see the room you built.
The hosts who get that week didn't get lucky. Ready has a definition, and it's short enough to check your own event against in about five minutes.
Prefer to watch? The full breakdown is in the video below. Otherwise, let’s dive in.
Ready has a definition
Your event is ready when it can be handled without every single little piece needing to come through you.
That's it. Your team has what they need. Your vendors have what they need. The day can move without you holding every piece of it.
Notice what that doesn't say. It doesn't say finished. Things will still change after you're ready, right through doors open, and a change arriving is not evidence that you weren't. It doesn't say you've stopped working either. You'll be working hard on the day itself, the same as everyone else who runs events at this level.
The reason the definition matters is that the feeling version tracks how tired you are rather than how your event is doing. Sleep badly the week before, and you'll feel behind on an event that's in good shape. Get a clear week, and you'll feel on top of one that's held together entirely by what you're carrying around in your head. Neither feeling tells you anything you can use.
So ready becomes something you can check rather than something you hope shows up by the final week. And a thing you can check a month out is a thing you can still do something about.
How do you know if your event is ready?
Run this test: list the questions your event will get asked by day one, then check whether each answer exists somewhere another person could reach without calling you.
Your guests are going to want parking and start times. Your vendors are going to want counts and load-in windows. Your team is going to want to know who's covering check-in.
For each one, the question is whether the answer sits somewhere another person could reach. You already know it, so that part isn't in doubt. If you were unreachable for an hour, could they find it without calling you? Not guess at it. Find it.
“Every no you hit is something you get to fix now, instead of discovering it during event week.”
Want the guided version of that test?
The Event Pulse Check is free, takes about five minutes, and walks through every area of your event to show you what's handled, what's thin, and where to put your attention next.
You already have the answers, and they're scattered
When you run that test, here's what you find, and it usually isn't what people expect. You have almost all the answers already. They're just not in the same place.
The parking information is in an email from the venue. The arrival times are in a text thread. Your final counts are in a spreadsheet you made in June. Some of it is genuinely just in your memory, which is the version that costs the most, since it means every question has to come through you to get answered.
So the work left isn't figuring things out. You've done that part, over months. The work left is putting it in one place, and that's a smaller job than it sounds, with one exception.
Starting from a blank spreadsheet is its own project. Before you enter a single fact, you're deciding what the tabs are, what columns each tab needs, whether travel goes with speakers or with logistics, and what to do about the things that don't fit anywhere. Every one of those is a decision, and you're making them in the weeks you can least afford to be making decisions.
You can lose an entire Saturday deciding on tabs. An entire Saturday, and not one actual answer entered.
The five things the document has to hold
Five things, and that's the whole document. Anything you add beyond these is preference. Anything missing from them is a question that comes back to you.
1: The timeline
What happens when, across every day of your event, including setup and teardown. Not the guest agenda. Your working version, with the hours nobody sees.
Those hours are most of what the timeline is for. Load-in. The room turns between sessions. When each vendor arrives and where they go when they get there. The teardown at the end, which always takes longer than anyone plans for. Your guests never see a minute of it, and everyone working your event needs all of it.
2: Contacts
Every person attached to your event and how to reach them on the day. Vendors, venue, speakers, your team, with backups where a backup exists.
Mobile numbers rather than office lines, since nobody is at a desk on a Saturday. And where a vendor has given you one name, it's worth asking who covers for them if that person is travelling. That's the question you'll be asking at seven in the morning if somebody doesn't show, and it's much easier to answer in July.
3: The day-of plan
Who's doing what, hour by hour, on event day. This is the one your team reads instead of asking you, which is the whole reason it's worth writing down properly rather than keeping it in your head where it currently lives.
4: The numbers
Headcounts, meal counts, room sets, quantities, anything a vendor is going to hold you to. With the deadlines attached, so you know what's due before it's due.
The deadline beside each number is what makes this section useful rather than decorative. A count sitting on its own is a number you'll revisit forty times without ever settling. The same count with your caterer's guarantee date next to it tells you exactly when it stops being an estimate and becomes what you're paying for.
5: The current version, and everyone knows it
This is the one people skip. It has to be the current version, and everyone has to know it's the current version.
“A document nobody trusts is worse than no document, because now your team double-checks everything with you anyway, which is the exact thing you built it to stop.”
Two things that decide whether it works
A document that exists and a document that works are different things, and the difference comes down to two habits.
The first is that it has to be shared before you think you need it. It's tempting to build this and keep it to yourself until event week, because it isn't finished. It's never going to be finished, and it doesn't have to be to start earning its keep. Share it half-built, because your team seeing a half-built document beats your team asking you a question.
There's a second benefit to sharing early, which is that people start putting things into it. Somebody adds a phone number you didn't have. Somebody corrects a time. Now it belongs to the whole team, which is the entire point.
The second habit: whatever changes, the document changes with it. Sometimes you'll update it first and then tell people. Sometimes you're on the go, you tell somebody in the moment, and you update it right after. That part's a judgment call. What can't happen is the version where people got told and the document never caught up, because now there are two versions of the truth and nobody knows which one to trust.
Build that, and the day stops needing to run through you. If you want the fuller argument for why this single document matters more than any other tool in event work, pro hosts never start without this document covers it.
What running the test on one question looks like
Take what each session needs, since that's the one that gets asked while you're mid-conversation with somebody else.
Say session three is a workshop. The speaker wants a lapel mic rather than the handheld. There are worksheets that go on every table. Her slides have to be loaded and tested before anyone walks in. You know all of it, and most of it came out of an email thread with her back in June.
Now check where it lives. Some of it is in that thread, some of it is in your head, and none of it is anywhere your A/V person or the people setting the room can get to. So at two o'clock, when they need to know what that room takes, the answer comes from you, twice, while you're doing something else.
Making it a yes takes about ten minutes a session. One line each for what the speaker needs, what goes on the tables, and what has to be loaded or tested before doors. It goes wherever your team already looks, and you tell your A/V person and whoever is setting rooms that it's there.
What changes is small and it adds up. Setup questions stop arriving during the session before. Your speaker's requirements stop living in a June email thread. And if that workshop moves rooms on the day, one place has to change instead of four people having to be told.
Then you do the next one. Parking. The final count. Who's covering check-in. Each one is minutes rather than hours, and the list runs out.
When it doesn't go the way it should
The five pieces are the same for everyone. What changes is who you have around you, how settled your answers are, and how much time you can give it in one sitting. These three come up more than anything else.
What if my team is just me and a VA?
Then the document matters more rather than less, since your VA is the only person who can absorb anything and she can only absorb what she can reach.
Start with the questions she asks you most. Those are the answers doing the most damage by living with you, and there are usually fewer than ten of them.
What if the answers keep changing?
They will, straight through doors open, at every event and at every level.
Changing answers is the reason to have one place rather than an argument against it. What breaks an event isn't a change. It's a change that reached three people and never reached the fourth, so if the answer moves, it moves in the document first, and you tell whoever it affects directly.
What if I start and it turns into another lost Saturday?
That happens when you start with the structure instead of the answers.
So don't design anything on day one. Open one page, write the five headings above, and put in the answers you already know without stopping to make it tidy. Tidy is a job for a Tuesday when nothing is urgent. The structure only has to be good enough that somebody else can find things in it.
If you'd rather not build it from scratch
I built the document version of everything above. It's called the Event Logistics Master Sheet, and it's a multi-day Google Sheets template.
You fill in your event details and the structure is already built. The daily pages exist, and there are separate views for catering, for A/V, and for the venue, so when you need to hand one piece of it to somebody, it's already pulled together. It comes with a filled-in demo version so you can see how it's meant to work, and a blank one to use. What it saves you is the blank-page weekend: the tab decisions and the column decisions, already made by somebody who has run these events. The Event Logistics Master Sheet is here.
If you'd rather build your own from what's above, genuinely do that. The five pieces are the five pieces. What matters is that it exists somewhere your team can reach.
What to look at this week
When everything lives in one place, your last few weeks change shape. You stop setting things up and start filling things in, which is a completely different kind of tired. A question comes in, and you look the answer up instead of going digging for it, and sometimes it doesn't even reach you. Something changes on a Wednesday, and it lands in one place and reaches everybody at once.
The week before your event stops being the week you dig out. It's just the week before your event.
So here's what I'd do next. Go look at your event and ask what's actually locked in writing, and what just feels handled. Those two categories look identical from where you're sitting right now, and the difference between them is what your event week is going to feel like. Start with the five questions from the test above, and write down the ones where the honest answer is that it only exists with you.
“When it’s over, the first thing you feel is pride. Not relief. That difference gets decided before you ever walk in the room.”
If you'd like the guided version of that audit first, the free Event Pulse Check takes about five minutes.
