Wedding Timeline Template Wedding Day Timeline Sunset Golden Hour Calculator Vendor Call Sheet Run of Show Excel Google Sheets

WEDDING DAY TIMELINE & VENDOR SCHEDULE — the only timeline that knows when the sun goes down.

Every wedding timeline on Etsy is a list of times somebody typed. This one computes: the light from your own venue coordinates, the schedule as a chain where one slip moves everything below it, and what those extra minutes will cost you before you are standing in them.

WHAT IT DOES THAT THE OTHERS DO NOT

1. IT COMPUTES YOUR GOLDEN HOUR, IN THE SHEET. Type the date, the venue's latitude and longitude, and the UTC offset in effect that day. The Sun & Light tab returns sunrise, solar noon, sunset, golden hour and civil twilight using the solar equations published by NOAA — no add-on, no lookup, no internet. It was validated against the US Naval Observatory across twelve locations from 21 to 65 degrees north and all four seasons, and no time was out by more than one minute.

2. IT CORRECTS THE RULE EVERYBODY REPEATS. Golden hour is not the last hour before sunset. The accepted top of it is the sun six degrees above the horizon, and across the continental US that is 32 to 48 minutes before sunset, not 60. In the shipped sample the photographer blocked 5:59 to 6:59 PM; sunset is 6:59 and golden hour opens at 6:27, so the first 28 minutes of that block are dull light and 15 minutes of the good light fall after sunset, when most couples have already gone inside. A studio publishing from more than 2,500 weddings schedules sunset portraits 30 to 45 minutes before sunset — the working professionals and the arithmetic agree, and the folklore does not.

3. IT PRICES THE OVERRUN BEFORE IT HAPPENS. The Run of Show is a chain: an unpinned block starts when the one above it releases, so a single long block moves every block below it until it hits a buffer or the venue's hard stop. In the sample that lands the day 14 minutes past a 10:00 PM sound cut-off, and 14 minutes is billed three times over — $350 to a seven-piece band charging by the half hour or fraction thereof, $200 to the venue charging for any part of an hour, $200 to a photographer whose contracted eight hours ended at ten. $750. And because every one of those is rounded up, one minute over costs exactly the same $750 as twenty-nine.

THE 12 TABS
Start Here · Setup · Sun & Light · Dashboard · Run of Show · Getting Ready · Photo Plan · Vendor Call Sheet · Overtime · Reception Detail · Contacts · Print Call Sheets

- START HERE: the one rule, the order that works, and where every constant in the file came from
- SETUP: the date, the ceremony time, the coordinates, the UTC offset and the two end-of-night clocks
- SUN & LIGHT: sunrise, sunset, golden hour and twilight, plus what a date change does to all of it
- DASHBOARD: the cascade slip, the hard-stop margin, the overtime exposure and every clash, named
- RUN OF SHOW: 18 blocks, each pinned to the clock, to golden hour, to the hair start, or to nothing
- GETTING READY: chair time divided across your artists, backsolving what time the first person sits
- PHOTO PLAN: the shot list priced in minutes, at three minutes a family grouping
- VENDOR CALL SHEET: arrival, contracted hours, actual departure, and the difference
- OVERTIME: the overrun billed vendor by vendor, every rounding a whole increment
- RECEPTION DETAIL: service timing scaled to your own guest count, and how many servers the room needs
- CONTACTS: vendor contacts, load-in and load-out, and the clause that catches people
- PRINT CALL SHEETS: one page per person, pulled out of the Run of Show, print area already set

WHAT YOU GET
- The workbook in four color editions (Colorful, Light, Dark and an Editorial edition)
- A .zip of the three color editions
- A full narrated video walkthrough (link in the file and below)
- Free updates

WORKS IN
Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets and Apple Numbers. Portable formulas only — no macros, no add-ons, no account, nothing to log into, nothing to cancel. The solar engine is written so it works in all three, including Apple Numbers, and it does not depend on any spreadsheet's date epoch.

THE SAMPLE
The file ships with a worked sample so every tab has something in it: a Saturday wedding at a hall outside Austin, Texas, 132 guests, 13 vendors, sunset at 6:59 PM, hair starting at 6:45 in the morning because eight people are in the chair and two artists are doing them, and a day that ends 14 minutes past the cut-off. Delete the sample rows and type your own.

ONE SETTING PEOPLE GET WRONG
The UTC offset on Setup is a number of hours, not the name of a time zone, and it is the offset in effect on the wedding date. Austin is UTC-5 in October because daylight saving is still running, and UTC-6 in December. Get it wrong and every sunrise and sunset in the workbook is out by exactly one hour, and nothing on the page will look wrong. The Start Here tab says so twice.

HONESTY
Every figure in the listing images and in the video was recalculated in LibreOffice and then recomputed independently before publishing: 1,262 formulas, 30,850 workbook checks, 947 solar checks against an independent Python implementation, and 16 negative controls proving each gate actually fires. Zero failures. Overtime rates, increments and cut-off times are yours to type — the ones in the sample come from published union scale, filed venue contracts and a city sound ordinance, and your own contracts are what govern.

INSTANT DOWNLOAD — nothing is shipped.

🎥 WATCH THE FULL VIDEO TUTORIAL
A narrated walkthrough of every tab, with every figure recalculated before filming:
https://youtu.be/zMOytO3HhEk