So you have been given the job of party event planning, or perhaps someone has volunteered you, but where do you start? Well you can’t really begin to plan anything until you have a venue and a date for the party but first you must decide on a budget. You can’t seriously consider any venue without having a budget so the priority before you can do any party event planning is your budget – how much you are happy to spend! You really need to give this some thought though because once you have decided on it you need to stick to it.

Now that you have your budget this will help you to decide on the next most important thing which is the venue but before you go rushing off to book it just take a bit of time to think about what else you want to include. There is no point spending most of your budget on a hotel only to find that you can no longer afford the videographer that you had set your heart on, so write yourself a list of things that are important to you for your party.

If your party doesn’t have to take place at the weekend it can be very worthwhile asking the venue if they do any week day offers as many venues have been known to give a big discount if you book your event at quieter times. Obviously this is not always something that is feasible as some friends and family that you want to attend may have to travel long distances, have work commitments or have children who are attending school but clearly you will know if this would work for you or not and if it could work it will allow you to spend more of your budget on other things.

It’s often all the little extras that you haven’t accounted for that put you at risk of breaking your budget so an important part of your party event planning is to keep track of what you expect to pay for each item, then try to save money without losing quality. It’s best to spend a little time writing down everything you would like to do or include and put a rough price against them. You can soon get a ball park figure of what each thing will cost by spending a bit of time browsing the internet.

If you have decided on a hotel for your venue then they will provide the food to feed your guests. Most hotels will offer a selection of menus and a choice of a finger buffet, sit down buffet or a cooked meal which they can adapt to fit your budget. You might also be looking to include some wine with the meal especially if there is to be a toast and this can work out quite expensive with hotel prices as they are so it might be worth asking them if you can supply the wine yourself. Most won't be agreeable but some could be. They will however almost definitely charge you a corkage fee, but even so it should still save you quite a bit of money and it all helps your overall budget.

Your party event planning should now be taking some shape, you have your budget, your venue is booked and you know what else you need to organise and how much you have left to spend. I know that I have mentioned this already but it is very important that you now stick to the budget that you had agreed with yourself.

One of the easiest way to keep to budget is to treat it as someone else’s money. Thinking of it this way will keep your party event planning budget on track, after all if your boss authorised you to spend £100 on something you wouldn’t go ahead and spend £105 would you? If you go over budget on one item you need to cut back on something else or strike something off of your list, this way you will ensure that you enjoy your event as much as you want everyone else to.