A seating chart maker that decides the seats, not just the sign.
Search for a seating chart maker and almost everything you find is a design tool. It gives you a pretty board and a font. It still expects you to know that Aunt Rosa cannot sit near her ex-husband, that the college friends want one table, and that table nine has two seats left with nobody sensible to fill them. That part, the hard part, is left to you.
What making a seating chart actually involves
The layout is the visible part and the smallest part. The real work is constraint solving, even if nobody calls it that:
- Groups that belong together. Families, university friends, colleagues. Split one across two tables and somebody notices.
- People who must be kept apart. Divorced parents, a fired business partner, an ex. This is the constraint people are most anxious about and least willing to write down in a spreadsheet.
- Tables that have to come out even. Ten seats, a group of seven and a couple. The arithmetic only works from certain starting points.
- The list changing. Three declines a fortnight out can undo an arrangement you spent an evening on.
A design tool cannot help with any of that, because it does not know who anybody is. It is why so many couples end up doing the arranging on paper first, then rebuilding it in a maker afterwards.
How Tablecharm is different
You paste your guest list, say how many tables you have and how many seats each, and write down the rules in plain language. Tablecharm assigns every guest, respects the rules it can, and tells you plainly when two rules cannot both be satisfied instead of quietly picking one. Then it prints: a poster, place cards, and an escort list.
It is $29 for one wedding, and you can paste your list and see a solved chart before paying anything. If you would rather not touch it at all, we will do the whole thing for you for $45.