iDo Wedding Software Review

As a lot of you may know — although I’ve yet to mention it on this blog due to lack of updating — I recently became engaged last December. It was a truly wonderful time and I have the absolute greatest fiancee anyone could ever ask for, but I’ll save that for another post.

As Carin and I started to plan for our wedding we knew from the start that we’d need a tool to track everything: guestlist, invitations, budgets, etc., the list goes on and on for a wedding. Initially, we started out by using Microsoft Excel. We both use it pretty frequently at our day jobs and it seemed like the logical place to start keeping track of everything.

Excel worked fine for a few weeks, we started to manage our guestlist, starting off with about 4 fields of info per person, then finding ourselves adding new fields on a regular basis. We also started to keep track of expenses, which anyone who knows Excel reasonably well knows it is fabulous for working with numbers. Everything was working out OK until it came time to send out Save The Date notices to our potential guests. We quickly realized that the way we had been managing contacts, although useful for informational purposes, was useless when it came to taking action on the information such as compiling mailers, being able to track responses by type (yes, no, maybe). It finally hit us that we need something that was geared specifically to manage weddings. So I did what most people would do nowadays, consulted the Google.

After a bit of searching and reading through reviews of what other couples had gone through I settled on a program called iDo Wedding Couple Edition (there is also a professional version available for wedding planners at a significantly greater cost). I didn’t know what to expect from it and I wasn’t going to pay $30 for a license to use something I’d never tried before, so I took to Bit Torrent and stumbled upon a copy of it.

Once I got the software and installed it I was instantly amazed at how much easier it was to do everything in this program as opposed to Excel. Whereas in Excel Carin and I were constantly having to think of new ways to handle our wedding planning demands, it’s evident that the iDo developers have clearly thought through every last intricate detail of a wedding and have built a way to manage it into the software.

Some of the functionality built into the programs is the following:

• Contacts – manage your guestlist
• Invitations – manage invitations and the contacts they’re sent to
• RSVPs – track responses from returned invitations
• Attendees – gather additional information about people who will be attending your wedding: flight info, hotel info, seating chart, etc.
• Gifts – keep track of who got you what when it comes time to send thank yous
• Checklist – pre-loaded with 100 wedding related tasks, ability to customize as desired
• Budget – manage and track all wedding related expenses
• Vendors – keep vendor information organized to ensure wedding logistics are handled smoothly
• Events – manage anything related to your wedding (bridal party, etc.)
• Timelines – your detailed wedding itinerary
• Widgets – extra add-ons to assist in wedding planning
• Reports and Labels – every section of iDo has a printable report (over 100 reports can be generated) and it will also print labels for your contacts

It’s pretty amazing all the functionality they’ve built into a single program. It really is a one-size-fits-all wedding planning application. We loved it so much that after the first use we went to the company’s Web site and purchased a license.

To end this post, here are some screen shots of the aforementioned features of the iDo Wedding Couple Edition.