Welcome to CTO Weddings & Events! We are so excited for the planning ahead and the countdown to your wedding day is officially on! We wanted to share a little more information about our process and how we use our online planning tools to plan and collaborate better together. The Checklist To ensure that nothing falls through the cracks, we've created a comprehensive planning process that's been translated into the super long checklist that you see in the checklist tab above. Yes - it is VERY long, but it's that way for a reason. Don't worry! We'll be walking you through each and every bit of it. We'll only assign things to you that are 100% your responsibility (chose your bridesmaids, purchase shoes for the wedding day or get a haircut are great examples of things we typically aren't involved in), everything else we'll work on together. For those items assigned to you, just mark them off once you've completed them, and we'll follow up on any outstanding items from time to time to see how things are going and if you need any extra assistance. When it comes to planning, we'll only assign a handful of items to you at a time, and once those items have been completed, we'll assign a fresh batch of tasks. On our end, we'll work through the checklist from top to bottom, and typically won't skip ahead, unless there's a good reason to - this helps us provide the best level of service possible. As far as due dates, the time frames shown are general guidelines. Often times, we'll complete things ahead of "schedule" while other times, we may lag just a bit - that is completely normal, and you can be assured that as your planner, we're keeping your best interest in mind throughout the planning process. For important items that have hard deadlines, we'll be sure to assign due dates - those are targets we won't want to miss! The Calendar To help keep us all on the same page, we like to use the shared calendar for all wedding related appointments. We'll be adding any meetings, site visits or tastings here once they've been confirmed (we'll run everything by you first, before confirming any appointments). Feel free to add your own wedding related appointments here, even if we won't be joining you (such as dress fittings) as it helps us stay in the loop on what's happening on your end. If you'd like to sync this calendar to your own calendar (such as google calendar, iCal or outlook) just holler - we can send along more info on how to do that. The Design Studio Thank you for sending us a link to your Pinterest boards! We'll be reviewing this together at our first meet up to chat about all the beautiful inspiration you've collected, so now is a good time to go back through and delete any images that no longer fit your vision for the wedding. We'll review your Pinterest boards together just once, from there we'll be moving all inspiration and design planning into our online Design Studio, where we'll help you curate the images that best defines your vision into a cohesive design for each aspect of your wedding. Stay tuned, this will be fun! The Guest List If you've already started your guest list, send us what you have and we'll help you import your guest list into our online guest manager. To better serve you and make it easier for us to work with our vendors on final details, we prefer that you use the guest manager to track responses, meal selections and assign seats for the reception. Communications To keep our communications organized and in one place, we'll be housing much of our back and forth in the comments area of each relevant checklist item as well as in each vendor record, and ask that if possible to do the same. You'll receive a notification email each time a comment is made. All you need to do is respond directly to that email (you don't even need to login, but if you do, you'll find the notification center towards the top right of your account a helpful guide of what's all happened in your account since you were last in.) So there you have it! We'll review all of this together and review all of the tools (including the ones that aren't mentioned here) in person at our first meeting, so not to worry. Now, let the planning begin! xo, Cereatha and the team at CTO Weddings & Events