Wedding planner CFO services: price the package, plan the season

Capacity math: the ceiling is set before the season starts

A lead planner can run one full wedding per weekend, and only so many full-planning files in parallel through the months each one takes — which means annual revenue has a hard ceiling: bookable peak weekends, times planners who can lead, times average package price. We compute that ceiling explicitly, because every growth conversation depends on it. Raising the average package beats adding files once a planner is full; adding an associate only pays if the files exist to load them; and taking one more month-of coordination in peak season can cost more in a lead planner's attention than it bills.

The same arithmetic disciplines the sales calendar. Bookings for next season arrive this season, so a pace view — contracts signed for next year versus the same point last year — is the earliest signal worth acting on, while there is still time to adjust pricing or marketing rather than merely absorb the result. Corporate events, styled shoots, and content days can fill non-peak weekends, but they get priced as incremental work and never displace a peak slot that could still sell.

Package pricing: the effective hourly rate tells the truth

Most planners price packages once and then never measure them again. The fix is a per-file log of hours against the fee, which produces one number — the effective hourly rate by package — and that number reliably reveals which offer is subsidizing the others. Full planning tends to look rich until venue-search weeks and family diplomacy are counted; month-of coordination looks modest until you notice how contained its hours really are. Each model puts risk in a different place:

Whatever the model, the contract needs a scope boundary with a priced change mechanism — extra design rounds, added events, guest-count jumps — because in this business scope creep arrives wearing a wedding dress, and nobody wants the awkward conversation in the week of the event.

Vendor money: agent or principal, decided in the contract

How vendor payments flow changes your revenue, your HST, and your risk. Acting as agent — the couple contracts and pays the florist, caterer, and photographer directly, and you coordinate — keeps pass-throughs out of your revenue entirely. Acting as principal — vendors invoice you, and you re-bill the client, with or without markup — grosses up your top line, puts HST on the full re-billed amount, and leaves you holding vendor risk if the client stalls. Both models are workable; the defect is drifting between them file by file, which is how planners end up fronting five figures of vendor deposits on a fee that never priced that financing. We fix the model in the contract template once, and the bookkeeping on our wedding planner bookkeeping page follows it cleanly.

Destination files add a border: paying US venues and vendors, or planning events stateside, raises withholding and reporting questions we cover on our cross-border tax page for event planners.

Seasonal cash: the busy season must carry the quiet one

Deposits arrive at booking, balances arrive near event dates, and expenses peak in the same months the work does — which leaves November through March living on what the season banked. The monthly CFO package runs a rolling thirteen-week cash view built on the contract schedule, sets an off-season reserve target as a number rather than a hope, and prices the winter decisions — associate retainers, workshop revenue, styled-shoot spending — against it. The growth question gets the same treatment: an associate planner is modelled on loaded cost against the files and package tier they can realistically carry, not on the fear of saying no. HST filings and instalments get scheduled against the same deposit calendar, so the quiet months never meet a tax bill unprepared. Fixed fees, quoted after a discovery call.