Four hundred attendees, forty tables, and a list that changes until the morning of. Build the room once, seat by team or table, and reprint when it moves.
Free for up to 20 guests and 4 tables. No credit card required.
The scale is the difficulty. Everything else follows from being able to see the whole room at once.
Lay out the banquet hall with the real table count and sizes, and put the stage, the screens and the AV where they are actually going. Sightlines decide which tables you can seat guests at.
At a dinner party you can hold the plan in your head. At forty tables you cannot, and the last-minute changes are the whole job.
Tag attendees by the groups that matter for this event and seat whole groups at once rather than name by name.
Add a late registrant by hand and seat them, without touching the tables you have already finished.
Fill the room by group and capacity in a single pass, which turns a day of work into a starting point you can correct.
Place the stage and AV on the plan so you can see which tables have a bad view before someone is sitting at one.
Record meal choices and dietary needs as registrations arrive, then export one spreadsheet with every attendee’s table for the caterer.
Keep the hosts, the speakers and the award finalists where they need to be, and hold those seats while the rest of the room moves.
Everyone running the event sees the current plan. No emailing a PDF that is out of date by the time it arrives.
Give the venue a floor plan they can set the room from, and a seating chart for the entrance, as a PDF.
Start with the constraints, not the people. The stage position, the tables with a restricted view, the ones the AV rig blocks, and the seats that have to stay free for the people going up to present. Those decisions cost nothing to make early and a great deal to make late.
Then seat in groups. A four hundred person dinner is not four hundred decisions, it is perhaps thirty: which team, which company or which category goes at which table. Auto-assign will do a competent first pass on that and leave you the exceptions.
Expect the list to keep moving. Registrations arrive, people drop out the week of, and someone senior is added on the day. The difference between an hour and a morning is whether changing one attendee means redoing the chart.
Hand the venue a floor plan rather than a list. A room set from a list gets set wrong, and it gets set wrong at six in the morning when nobody is there to ask.
The hall, the forty tables and four hundred attendees in one plan you can see at once.
When registration sends a new list on the Friday, you import it and keep the seating you already did.
Registration platforms handle tickets, badges, sessions and check-in, and they are built for that. Their seating feature, where there is one, is usually a table number typed against an attendee record.
PlanSeats takes the attendee list and puts it in the actual room, with the real tables and the real stage, so the plan the venue sets from is the plan you made.
Keep the registration platform. Export the list and seat it here.
Paid plans do not cap guests or tables, so a four hundred person dinner at forty tables is a normal size for a plan.
See pricingExport the attendee list from your registration system as a spreadsheet and import it. Names, a grouping such as company or team, and dietary requirements come in together, and late registrations can be added by hand.
Can I import my guest list from a spreadsheet?Tag attendees with the groups you care about for this event and seat by group. Auto-assign uses those groups and your table capacities for a first pass.
How do I seat a whole group together, like college friends?Move or remove one attendee and the counts follow. Reprint the chart and the table numbers if the change is big enough to matter.
Share a link. They see the current version and do not need an account.
How do I share my seating chart with someone who does not have an account?Yes. They sit on the attendee, and the exported spreadsheet carries each attendee’s table beside them, so the kitchen can plan from one file.
How do I record allergies and dietary restrictions?Saved venue layouts, and running more than one event, are part of PlanSeats Pro. On the Planner plan each year is its own plan.
The hall, the tables, the attendee list and every dietary note in one plan, ready to hand to the venue.
Free for up to 20 guests and 4 tables. No credit card required.