Description
One walk in working daylight, with a tape measure, starting at the loading dock. One walk at the hour the event actually happens, when the light is what the guests will get and the room is doing what rooms do after dark. A venue that survives both is a venue. A venue that only survives the first is a photograph.
The problem this solves
You are shown a room with the blinds open, the house lights up, an empty car park and no neighbors home. Forty minutes later you remember the light and you have forgotten to ask who owns the folding chairs, what is already on the panel on a Saturday, and whether the accessible route is a route or a ramp in a cupboard. Then the contract is signed, and the building stops negotiating.
There is no shortage of venue checklists. There is a shortage of venue checklists written from the planner’s side of the table, with the arithmetic attached and a record at the end that somebody else can rely on.
What you get
The Field Forms — 14 pages, print and carry
Nine walks in the order the building gives them to you: approach and arrival, the accessible route, load-in, back of house, the room, power and rigging, services, constraints, contract and contingency — then the second walk, after dark. Plus a one-page on-site reference carrying the published occupant-load factors, the reuse test, the quantity formula and the flip chain, because you will not have a spreadsheet open while standing on a loading dock. Plus the ten questions that turn a sales tour into an interview. Plus the sign-off sheet: who confirmed each page, on what date, and whether you saw it yourself or were told.
The Workbook — 10 sheets, live formulas
- Capacity — occupant load against the published 5, 7 and 15 net square foot factors, and the gap between what code allows and what your evening actually needs. The dining plan is tested against the floor you measured, not the floor in the brochure.
- The Reuse Test — the four conditions that decide whether a chair can do two jobs: time, labor, route, condition. Fail any one and the quantity sheet stops counting it twice.
- Quantities — chairs, tables, linens, glassware and settings, built as simultaneous demand plus turnover gap plus a named reserve minus proven reuse. There is no blanket percentage anywhere on the sheet, because a buffer you cannot name is a buffer you are paying for by accident.
- Power — connected load by fixture, amperage, 25 per cent design headroom, and the shortfall against what the venue’s electrician actually confirms is free for you.
- Load-in and flip — the staging penalty in crew hours when the truck cannot reach the room, and a room flip modeled as a dependency chain rather than a pile of work divided by a crew.
- Comparison — twelve weighted criteria across four venues, weighted before you visit rather than after you have fallen for one.
- The Decision Record — the client-facing page: what was chosen, what the room truly costs once the fourteen hidden lines are counted, and what was knowingly accepted.
Venue Reality — the companion, sixteen sheets
The walk produces facts. The companion keeps each one with its unit, its source, its date and whether anybody checked it, and keeps two sources side by side when the brochure and the tape measure disagree. Then it runs the two versions of your event, the one the client wants and the one the room might force, against ten recorded limits and marks each check mismatch, contradiction, cannot confirm or within limit. A smaller plan that fits the numbers does not make an unknown power supply go away, and the sheet will not pretend it does. It ends in a dated decision brief you can issue before you commit.
It comes as a blank workbook and a worked example, an invented gallery supper for 110 or 88 guests, with a two-page quick start and the worked example’s printed brief. The evidence tab pastes straight into Nobody Told the Florist when it is time to brief the vendors.
Who it is for
Event planners and designers running site visits for clients. Production teams who need the load-in answer before the truck is booked. Florists and drapers who need to know what the ceiling will take. Venue teams who would rather be asked the real questions early than argue about them in production week.
It assumes you know your work. It does not explain what a bud vase is.
How it is delivered
The field set is a web edition, because a correction reaches your copy instead of sitting in a file you downloaded in March, and it is not tied to one laptop: the Find your purchase page sends a fresh link to any device. The print stylesheet does the rest — send it to your printer and it comes out as a proper field set, one form per sheet at Letter or A4, ruled to be written on with a pencil. Form 01 is free and complete on the public page, so you can print it and take it to your next site visit before deciding anything.
The workbook is a genuine file, because a spreadsheet that is not a file is not a spreadsheet. It downloads from your order and your receipt email, and opens in Google Sheets, Excel or Numbers.
Files, formats and license
The workbook is .xlsx and opens in Google Sheets, Excel and Numbers — no subscription, no add-on, no Canva account. Formulas are live and every input is yours to overtype. Formula cells are protected against a slip of the keyboard, not hidden and not passworded: Review, then Unprotect Sheet, when you want to change the arithmetic itself. Both workbooks print one page wide on US Letter, landscape. The field forms are a print-ready PDF set to US Letter, designed to be printed single-sided and written on with a pencil.
License: single practitioner or single studio. Use it on every event you plan, for as many clients as you like, and put your own name on the client-facing output. Do not resell or redistribute the files themselves.
My public Originality and inspiration standard applies to every World, product and supplied asset.
What it will not do
It will not tell you a room is beautiful; you can see that. It will not produce a code compliance determination — occupant load, egress capacity, accessibility and permitting are matters for the authority having jurisdiction and the venue’s own life-safety documentation. What it does is give you the arithmetic early enough to ask the right person the right question before the contract is signed.
The free reading underneath it
This system was built from the venue writing on this site, which stays free and complete: Read the Loading Dock Before You Read the Ballroom, Don’t Ask Whether the Venue Is Accessible. Walk the Route., Five, Seven and Fifteen Are Not Venue Capacity Shortcuts, How Many Chairs, Tables, Linens and Glasses Do You Actually Need? and How Long Does a Ceremony-to-Dinner Room Flip Actually Need? The articles explain the method. This is the instrument.
