You need a real number,
not a show of hands.

A private invitation goes to a fixed set of people, and the list you write is more or less the list that turns up. A work invitation moves. Someone forwards it to a colleague who should really be there. A team lead passes it into a channel of thirty. A client cannot come but is sending two people from her team, neither of whom you have heard of. By the reply deadline your list holds names you never typed and is quietly missing people you assumed were coming.

Plus-ones are the second drift. The word partners is doing an enormous amount of work in most corporate invitations, and every reader resolves it in the direction they would prefer. If you do not give a number, you will get a range: some people bring nobody, some bring a spouse, one brings two friends who happened to be in town. Write the number down, even when the number is zero, and say it plainly rather than politely.

Then there are the replies that are not replies. Out-of-office messages land in the same inbox as real answers and look like activity. Staff read silence as attendance and turn up having said nothing; clients read silence as nothing at all and are surprised to be chased. Neither group is being difficult. It only means your number has to be built from positive confirmations, never from the absence of a no.

A private invitation can leave things understood between people who know each other. A work invitation is read at a desk in about thirty seconds by someone deciding whether this is worth an evening, a train fare or a babysitter, and everything you leave out is filled in with a guess. That is where a wrong headcount usually starts. Not in the reply form, but in the four lines the invitation never said.

Five things a company invitation has to state that a private one can skip. The finish time as well as the start, because people book trains and childcare around the end. Whether it sits inside or outside working hours, which is the question everybody has and nobody wants to ask out loud. What is provided, because a dinner and drinks with something to eat at eight are two entirely different plans for an evening. The dress, in words rather than a code nobody can decipher. And whether partners are included, with a number attached to the answer.

Say a message goes out reading drinks from six at a venue in town. Half the room assumes dinner and eats nothing beforehand; the other half assumes canapes and eats at home. Both halves reply yes. Some of the first half leave at eight to find food, the room empties an hour early, and you are explaining a catering bill for people who were not there to eat. The corporate invitation wording page has the actual lines for a client evening, a conference, a launch and an away-day, sender by sender. A link has one more advantage a printed card cannot match: when the finish time changes, you edit the page and everyone sees the new one, rather than sending a correction half the list never opens.

One date holds up the whole schedule and it is not yours: the final-count date in the catering contract, usually somewhere between a week and a fortnight before the event. Your reply-by date goes seven to ten days before that. The gap is not slack. It is the chasing week, and you will use all of it.

Then chase the people who have not answered, and only those. A reminder that lands on someone who replied three weeks ago reads as though nobody looked, and at work that costs you more than it would at a wedding. An online RSVP earns most of its keep here: the answers separate themselves into yes, no and silence, so the reminder has an audience of exactly the right size and the running total is never retyped into a spreadsheet on a Monday morning. Everyone who confirms gets a confirmation email with a calendar file attached, in their own language, which puts the event into the work diary it actually has to survive in.

The honest part is that a corporate list needs more chasing than a private one, not less. Nobody is being rude. Your invitation is the tenth thing in somebody's morning and there is no personal cost to ignoring it. Two rounds of reminders is normal, three is not a failure, and for the handful of people whose attendance genuinely matters, the client director, the speaker, the person giving the closing remarks, one phone call is worth four emails. The RSVP deadline guide has the arithmetic in full, including what to do about the people who miss it.

Left alone, dietary information arrives over six weeks through four channels: a reply to the invitation, a message to a colleague who forwards it on, a remark in a corridor, and one line at the bottom of an email about something else entirely. Somebody then has to turn that into a single answer for a kitchen, from memory, on a Friday.

Collect it with the reply instead. Vowly's RSVP form carries the meal choice, a dietary note and an allergen field, so the requirement arrives attached to a name at the moment that person confirms rather than three weeks later. The distinction between the two fields matters more than it looks: a preference can be summarised, an allergen cannot. Send the kitchen the words the guest used, not your paraphrase of them.

The caterer wants one document, not a thread. That means the totals per choice, then the named exceptions underneath, and agreement about who is responsible for those exceptions on the night. A buffet with unlabelled dishes quietly moves that responsibility onto the guest, which is the one place it should never sit.

Access is the same class of question as food and it belongs in the same place. Step-free entry, and a lift that is working on the day. An accessible toilet on the right floor. A hearing loop, or at least a microphone that is used even when the speaker says they do not need one. Somewhere quiet to sit for twenty minutes, which matters to more of your colleagues than will ever mention it.

Asking in the reply form is the entire point. If the only route is a personal email to the organiser, the person has to make a special case of themselves in front of their employer, and a good number will decide it is easier to skip the evening. One neutral line does the work: is there anything we should know to make the evening work for you, such as step-free access, hearing support or a quiet space. Vowly's reply carries a message to the host alongside the meal and dietary answers, so what comes back arrives with everything else rather than in its own thread.

Only ask if you intend to act. An access question with no follow-through is worse than no question at all, because it has collected a hope. When an answer comes in, check it with the venue yourself before you promise anything, then confirm privately to that person what you have arranged. Go and look if you can: a venue that says step-free sometimes means step-free through the kitchen and up in the goods lift.

A corporate guest list is a small pile of personal information about people who work for you or buy from you. Names, work emails, sometimes a mobile number, and in the dietary and access answers, details that sit close to somebody's health. That deserves more care than a party list usually gets, not because of any particular rule, but because nobody on the list chose to hand it to their employer for entertainment.

Three habits cover most of it. Collect only what the event needs: a badge wants a name and an organisation, not a date of birth or a home address. Say in the invitation what the details are for and who will see them, because the fact that dietary answers go to the caterer is exactly the sort of thing a person wants to know before typing an allergy into a form. And keep the answers in the place you collected them rather than spreading them across six inboxes, since every forwarded spreadsheet is another copy nobody will remember to delete.

Then delete it. Put a date in your own calendar for the week after the invoices are settled, and when it arrives, clear the list and the exports you made from it. This is the step everyone skips, and it is the one that decides whether a dietary note from a client dinner is still sitting on a shared drive three years from now.

Most corporate events are not one event. A conference has a day everyone attends and a dinner that forty of the two hundred are invited to. A client evening has clients, an account team who are working rather than attending, and two speakers who need to know when the room is available for a run-through. One list, several audiences, different information for each.

The clean way to handle it is to treat those as parts of the same event that guests answer separately. Somebody replies yes to the conference and no to the dinner, and both answers are real numbers rather than one blended figure you have to interpret. Vowly does this with programme parts: each part takes its own reply, and a part can be hidden from the guests who were not invited to it, so nobody is shown a dinner they are not on the list for. The calendar file follows the same logic and carries only the parts that person said yes to.

That structure also produces the numbers in the shape suppliers ask for them. The venue wants the room total for the day, the restaurant wants the dinner count, and the two are never the same. If the list is coming out of HR or a CRM export, Vowly reads .xlsx and .csv files up to five hundred rows, shows a preview, lets you map each column to the right field and flags duplicates by name or email, which is where an exported list is usually broken: the same client sitting in it twice under two spellings.

On the day you want one arrivals list a person on the door can genuinely read on a phone, sorted by surname, with the organisation next to each name. Print a copy as well. Venue wifi fails at precisely the moment two hundred people walk in, and a printed list with a pen beside it has never once failed to work.

Badges are printed the day before from the confirmed list, in the same order as the door list, plus twenty blanks and a marker. Which brings us to the twelve people who arrive having never replied. Decide before the day what happens, because the decision made at the door will always be to let them in. The useful move is to tell the caterer the real number at the start of service rather than after it, and to write the names down, because those twelve are next year's evidence that the internal list needs a different deadline from the client one.

Afterwards, finance wants four figures, and you will be asked for them again next year: how many were invited, how many replied, how many came, and the total divided by the number who came. Note the two soft things as well. Which parts of the evening people stayed for, and the gap between yes and attended. Next year those two lines are worth more than the invoice, because they turn a guess into a number before a single invitation has gone out.