Replies, menus and dietary needs

Building a menu, in the order the Menu screen expects it.

1. Decide who is asked, under Who chooses a meal. Everyone is the default; pick groups instead where only some of the day is a sit-down — evening guests should not be choosing a starter.
2. Add your dishes. There are three courses — Starter, Main and Dessert — and each opens to a box that says “Add a starter”, with an optional description underneath for what is in it.
3. Leave a course empty if you are not offering it, and give a course one option if there is no choice to make. A course with one dish says so on its own row — “1 option, so nobody chooses”.
4. Press Open menu choices when the menu is settled. Until you do, a guest's link collects a yes or a no and says food is coming.
5. Tell everyone it is ready. The same link they already have starts asking about food — there is no second link and no second page.
6. Press Close menu choices once your numbers have gone to the kitchen. Nobody can change a meal after that, and they can still tell you they are no longer coming.

Menu choices start closed, and that is deliberate — a caterer's menu is usually settled months after the invitations go out. The button is greyed until there is at least one dish to choose from.

What a guest does

A guest opens their link, says who is coming, and — once you have opened your menu — chooses a meal for each person and writes down anything they cannot eat. It takes about a minute and there is no account to make.

One reply updates your numbers, your menu choices, your dietary list and your seating plan at the same moment. You count your guests once.

The menu

Add your courses and the options at each under Menu, and set which guests are asked — evening guests should not be choosing a starter.

Menu choices start closed, because a caterer's menu is usually settled long after the invitations go out. Until you open them a guest's link collects a yes or a no and says food is coming; open them and the same link starts asking about food. There is no second link and no second page.

Close them again once your numbers have gone to the kitchen, and nobody can change a meal afterwards. It does not close the replies themselves — somebody can still tell you they can no longer come, which is the one thing you always want to hear.

Dietary requirements

These are kept separately from the rest of the guest record, with tighter rules about who can read them. Under UK law an allergy is health information and some diets say something about a person's religion, so they are treated as more sensitive than a name and an answer.

• Only you and any planner you have invited can read them.
• Other guests cannot — including others in the same household.
• They are never used to work out a seating plan.
• They are used for one thing: telling you, and through you your caterer, what somebody cannot eat.

If you are a guest: be specific. “Severe nut allergy, including traces” is more use to a kitchen than “no nuts”.

Replying on somebody's behalf

Not everybody replies online. You can set anybody's answer, meal and dietary note yourself from the guest list, for the relative who telephones instead.