Wedding planner bookkeeping: whose money is it — yours or the vendor’s?

Agent or principal — the answer lives in your contract

If your client contracts directly with the florist, caterer, and photographer and you arrange it on their behalf, you are an agent: the money that passes through you to vendors is not your revenue, and your books should show only your planning fee. If vendors contract with you and you resell the package — often with a markup — you are the principal: the full event price is your revenue and vendor invoices are your cost of sales. Planners drift between the two without noticing, and the books end up describing a business that does not match the paper.

The stakes are real: a planner billing $25,000 in fees but routing $200,000 of vendor money as principal is far past GST/HST registration and may not know it. We read the contracts first, then build the chart of accounts to match — and where the answer should change, we help fix the contract language, not just the coding.

Client deposits, deferred by wedding date

Retainers and milestone payments arrive months — sometimes eighteen months — before the event. Each one sits as a liability in a subledger keyed to the event date, and becomes revenue when the work is delivered or the milestone in the contract is met. That schedule is also your future-season workload report: it shows which months are overbooked, which deposits are aging toward events, and how much of your bank balance is spoken for. Postponements move the date, not the money — the ledger entry follows the new date so nothing is recognized early.

Vendor money needs its own lane

When clients fund vendor payments through you, that money should never blur into operating cash. We run a per-event clearing account: client funds in, vendor deposits and balances out, reconciled to zero when the event closes. Three things fall out of that discipline. Vendor deposits paid on a client’s behalf are visible and recoverable if a vendor fails. Referral commissions a vendor pays you are flagged as your income — they are taxable whether or not a slip arrives. And the final client statement for each event reconciles to the penny, which is worth more to a planner’s referral pipeline than any ad spend.

Seasonality, contractors, and the numbers worth watching

Wedding revenue lands from May to October while rent and software bill twelve months a year, so the deferred-revenue schedule doubles as the cash-flow plan for the quiet months. Day-of coordinators and assistants are usually contractors paid per event — T4A territory, with the employee-versus-contractor line worth respecting as the team grows. The monthly numbers we watch: revenue per event against the package sold, fee revenue versus pass-through volume, deposits aged by event date, and margin after event-specific costs. For destination work — a Muskoka client marrying in Arizona, US vendors to pay, withholding questions on both sides — the border file lives on our wedding planner cross-border tax page.

What we set up in the first month

QuickBooks Online with projects per event, Dext for vendor receipts, a deposit subledger tied to the contract schedule, and a clearing account for client-funded vendor payments. From there the monthly close runs the way it does for every client — reconciled, answer-first, and readable in ten minutes; our bookkeeping services page shows the full rhythm. The planner-specific part is simply that every number carries an event name.

Receipts follow the same rule as revenue: venue walk-through mileage, sample florals, styled-shoot costs, and software subscriptions are the planner’s own expenses — deductible against fee income on the T2125 or the corporate T2 — while anything bought with client money belongs to the event file, not the expense ledger. Keeping those two piles separate is what makes the final client statement and the tax return defensible at the same time.