The handover: what to give away, and to whom

There is one task that separates a couple who enjoy their own event from a couple who work through it, and it takes ninety minutes about three days out. Almost nobody does it.

It is the handover: the deliberate transfer of everything you are holding to somebody who is not you.

Why it gets skipped

After a year of planning, you hold an enormous amount in your head that was never written down. Which supplier is paid and which is not. That the celebrant prefers to set up early. That your aunt cannot sit near the speakers. That the cake knife is in the second box.

None of that is documented, so handing it over feels harder than just doing it. Which is how you end up answering a florist's call while having your hair done.

What the person receiving it needs

• The run sheet, with decision points marked and their authority written down.
• The supplier list — every name, company, mobile number, arrival time and what they are delivering.
• The payments list — who is paid, who is owed what, and where the envelopes are.
• The layout — floor plan, table plan, where everything goes.
• The sensitivities — who must not sit together, what subjects are off limits, who needs looking after.
• The decisions they can make alone. This is the most important line.

The authority line

Write down, explicitly, what they can decide without calling you. Something like: any decision costing under $500, any timing change under twenty minutes, any seating change, and any call about weather. Anything larger, find you.

Without this, every small problem becomes an interruption, and the interrupt always arrives at the worst moment.

Choosing the person

They need to be calm, they need to be willing to tell people what to do, and they must not be in the wedding party or making a speech. A person who is both running the day and delivering a speech is doing neither well.

Your most organised friend is often the wrong choice if they are also your closest friend, because you are asking them to miss the event. Be honest that you are asking for a shift of work, and consider paying somebody.

Do it in person, with the documents open

Not over email. Sit down, walk through the sheet line by line, and let them ask questions. The questions are the point — they surface the twenty things in your head that are not on paper.

This is precisely what on-the-day coordination is, as a service. Whether you buy it or hand it to somebody who loves you, the job exists and somebody is doing it. The only question is whether that person is you, in your wedding clothes.