Every detail of an event on one sheet: client, times, guest count, menu, run of show, floor plan, staffing, billing. Open it in your browser, edit it, export a PDF. No email, no account, nothing to install.
Open a function sheetA function sheet is what turns a signed contract into something the floor, the kitchen and management can all work from. Leave one of these out and somebody improvises on the day.
Who the event is for, and who to call when something moves at short notice.
Setup, start, service, teardown. On most venue rentals the end time is a constraint, not a wish.
The guaranteed number, when it locks, and who is not counted in it.
Courses, drinks, allergens, and how many of each are actually going out.
The minute-by-minute timeline, with a name against every line.
Room layout, tables, staging, and where the power actually is.
Who does what, and the gear that has to be on site for it.
Amounts, payment terms, and what has already been paid.
Pick the one closest to your event and adapt it. Every block can be renamed, moved or deleted, and a blank sheet is one click away.
Not the theory. The places where the document exists, is correct, and still fails to reach the person who needed it.
French hospitality training draws a line most templates ignore. The sheet you fill in facing the client is not the sheet your services work from: one is a contact sheet, the other an execution sheet. What the client said and what the kitchen receives are two different documents. The handover between them is where detail evaporates, and a template that is only the first one is half a system.
Purchasing and rotas are planned from the sheet, not from the event. Caterers put the chef cutoff at 48 to 72 hours before service. A French trade reference puts full distribution at three weeks out, because that is when orders go in and staffing is built. A sheet finalised the day before is not a late sheet. It is a sheet that arrived after the decisions it was meant to inform.
The same reference is blunt about it: brief twice. Once with the team leads, once with the floor teams. Information dies between the two. If your whole distribution is emailing a PDF, you have done neither of them.
Once the count locks, commonly 72 hours to five working days out, it can rise but never fall. Everything is bought and staffed from it. If fewer guests turn up, the client still pays it. A sheet that shows a single number, with no lock date and no note on who sits outside it, hides the entire commercial logic of the event.
A head waiter verbally agreed that a client could leave equipment in the room overnight. Then he left the company. The week of the event, management said no. The information existed, but only in one head. This is the exact failure the sheet exists to prevent, and the one it most often fails at.
The same trade source names this one directly: there is almost never a debrief after the event. So the sheet never improves. What went wrong in March goes wrong again in June, because nothing wrote it down while anyone still remembered.
The usual term in catering and in UK venues. Sometimes written event function sheet.
The standard term in hotels, especially in the US. Same document, different desk.
Used by restaurants and smaller venues, often for a shorter version of the same thing.
The French term, and notably not BEO: French uses one name where English uses two.
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Open a function sheet