Full, partial or day-of: pricing coordination

More coordinator-client disputes start in the proposal than on the event day. Not because the day goes badly — most don't — but because "coordination" meant something different to the client than it meant to the coordinator, and nobody wrote down which one they'd actually agreed to.

TL;DR: Sell three distinct service levels — full planning, partial planning, and day-of coordination — and define each precisely in the proposal: how many meetings, how many site visits, and exactly where your responsibility begins and ends. State plainly that you coordinate vendors but don't contract them, unless you do, and say that too. The service level is the product; price it as one.

What's the actual difference between the three levels?

Full planning starts near the beginning: you help select vendors, build the design direction, and manage the budget from day one. Partial planning starts once the client already has most vendors booked and needs help pulling it together — design refinement, logistics, and the final stretch. Day-of coordination (often, more honestly, "month-of") starts a few weeks out: you take over an already-planned event so the client isn't running their own timeline on the day. They're different products, doing different amounts of work, and pricing them identically is how full-planning-sized work gets sold at a day-of price.

Where do scope disputes actually start?

At the inquiry, before a proposal even exists — specifically, in not asking which vendors are already booked. A client who has booked nothing needs full planning whether or not that's the phrase they used when they inquired; a client with every vendor already signed needs day-of coordination even if they call it "planning" out of habit. Ask this in the very first reply, not the consultation call, so the proposal you send matches the actual work rather than the label the client happened to use.

What needs to be precise in the proposal itself?

The number of meetings and site visits included — not "regular check-ins," an actual count. Vague inclusions are exactly where a client and coordinator end up disagreeing about whether a fourth site visit was already paid for. State the count. It protects you from doing unpriced extra work and protects the client from feeling nickel-and-dimed for something they reasonably assumed was included.

Why does "I coordinate vendors, I don't contract them" need to be in writing?

Because clients frequently assume a coordinator has replaced them as the contracting party — and when a vendor issue arises weeks before the event, a client who thought you were on the hook for that vendor's contract is a client with a much worse problem than a scheduling conflict. State the boundary plainly: you manage the relationship, the timeline, and the day-of execution; the client (or their planner-of-record, if that's a different arrangement) holds the contracts and pays the vendors directly. If your business model is different — if you do contract vendors on the client's behalf — say that instead, just as plainly. Either is fine. Ambiguity is the only version that isn't.

What actually needs a decision log, and why?

Design and vendor decisions, kept in one place, visible to the client. Wedding and event planning revisits the same decisions — a color, a vendor choice, a floor plan detail — more than any other part of the job, usually because nobody wrote down that it was already settled. A single running log that both of you can see turns "didn't we already decide this?" from a memory contest into a two-second lookup.

What has to be locked before event week, not during it?

The final guest count with the venue and caterer, the floor plan walked in the actual room rather than on paper, rentals confirmed against that floor plan item by item, and a run-of-show with a named person against every responsibility — not "someone will handle it," an actual name. Event week is for reconfirming what's already locked, not for locking it.

How Booksui handles this

Booksui's pipeline for event coordinators asks which service level a client needs — full, partial, or day-of — during the very first inquiry phase, and the checklist through Design & planning, Vendor contracting, and Final details reflects the scope that follows from that answer. The Proposal phase checklist includes stating the meeting and site-visit count and clarifying the vendor-contracting boundary explicitly, so it's decided once rather than relitigated mid-event. A shared budget tracker and decision log live in the same workspace the client sees. Plans and limits are on the pricing page; the FAQ covers what's included at each tier.