The seating chart when the family is split

A seating chart looks like a list and behaves like a room. That is the whole difficulty. A list can be sorted; a room has a stage at one end, a bar at the other, a table by the kitchen door nobody wants to sit at, and a set of relationships that cannot survive being within earshot of each other.

Almost every couple we have spoken to starts in a spreadsheet and gives up there. Not because the spreadsheet is bad, but because it answers the wrong question: it can tell you who is sitting at table four, and never who is sitting with their back to their father.

Start with the impossible ones, not the easy ones

The most common mistake is to seat the easy guests first. The friends are easy, the colleagues are easy, and after twenty minutes half the room is full — and then only the difficult ones are left, with nowhere to put them. Do the opposite. Write down the three or four placements that cannot go wrong, seat them first, and lock their tables.

• The parents, separately, with at least one table between them if that is what it takes.
• The one guest who needs a wheelchair space, at an end and near a door.
• Grandparents far enough from the speakers to hear what is being said at their own table.
• The couple who have just separated, and who were both invited before that happened.

In Kuvert these are two different locks, and the difference is worth knowing. One locks where the table stands and what shape it is, so nobody nudges it out of position later in the evening when the chart gets busy. The other locks who sits there. That is the one you want on a parents' table: an attempt to move a guest to or from it is refused, not merely warned about.

A group is a movement, not a category

Eight colleagues who should sit together is one decision, not eight. Put them in a group, and move the group. What makes this more than a shortcut is that the group stays a group when the chart changes: when the venue suddenly has six long tables instead of eight round ones, you move eight people in one movement rather than remembering who belonged together.

One thing is worth saying about sides. A group has no “side” in Kuvert, and that is deliberate: “Work” is a group that spans both, and so is “The university friends from Bergen”. The side is worked out from who is actually in the group, and a group split between the bride's people and the groom's is shown as split — because that is a fact you want, not an error to be hidden.

Ten round tables means ten round tables

The most awkward discovery in wedding planning is that the chart you have drawn needs eleven tables and the venue has ten. It gets discovered late, because nothing in a spreadsheet objects. Enter the table stock — how many round, how many long, how many chairs each takes — and an attempt to make table number eleven is refused, with a reason.

Expect to redraw it, and make redrawing cheap

A seating chart is not finished once. It is finished roughly four times: when most people have replied, when the venue tells you how the room is actually furnished, when an aunt cancels twelve days out, and on the morning itself. What decides whether that is an evening or a week is how expensive it is to move something.

That is why undo and redo matter more than they look, and why it is worth sitting in the chart together. Two people in the same seating chart at once, seeing who is working on which table, have in one conversation the discussion that otherwise runs over two days in a group chat full of screenshots.

A seating chart is not an optimisation problem. It is a series of small considerations, and the job is to make changing your mind fast.

And once it stands: the guests are not going to read the chart. They are going to scan the code by the door, search for their name, and find out which table they are at and who is sitting there. All the work above is for you. For the guest, the answer is one sentence.