Marrily: Planning Your Wedding Online Happily - A Close-Up Review

I stumbled upon this website too late for my wedding preparations but nay, it is never too late to share the good stuff.

Marrily is a website tool that helps in wedding planning. If you think that it is "another one of those website huh", then I suggest taking a closer look. I actually signed up for the trial to take a look and I'd thought it is so good that I should write a review on it.

Once you have signed in, you would see a dashboard with the following:

1. Upcoming Tasks
2. Wedding checklists
3. Guestlist
4. Budget

And of course the top right hand corner shows what you can do in the setting of your account. (we will get to that later).

Tasks

At first, I was a little confused between this and the checklist. But it did not take me long to understand that the Checklist section was meant for a general overview of how things are progressing (BIG PICTURE!) and the Task was for the teeny daily action items. 

The Tasks section tracks Upcoming, Pending, All Pending (further in the timeline) and Completed Tasks.

Adding tasks are fairly simple with all the details you need captured - date, time, details, category and a small part that says "Vendors".

The vendors part is interesting because it links to another section of Marrily where you can keep a list of your vendors and details. It also tracks any associated tasks and expenses with these vendors as well! 

 

Checklist

You can have several checklists which can be named to your prefence. They can be also be subdivided into sections.

The lovely thing is that Marrily has come up with a template checklist for "Ceremony and Reception" that gives a guide on what to do across a timeline till the wedding date. This is extremely useful as from past experience, one needs to wreck one's brains to come up with a complete set of checklist of To-Do's which may not be totally encompassing.

The beauty of it is that you can add to that list as well, fitting into your own context. For eg, being a Chinese Singaporean, I need to add portions for the customary rites. And being a Catholic, I need to add parts for arrangements for the Mass etc. Well, depending on you, you can even create another checklist for different segments. But I suggest keeping to the timeline thing that Marrily has done would be the cleanest!

Expenses

The Expenses segment is simple to use and tracks total cost of the wedding. A great thing that it does is that you can associate the expense with a listed vendor. This vendor will auto-populate if you have already included in the details before. If not, you can add Vendor for tracking of expenses under that same Vendor.

Guests

This section is exceptionally well thought out. 

Users can import guests contacts into the list, track gifts from each person and even assign seating arrangements!! The seating arrangements can be formatted into tables of varying sizes and can be colour coded for ease of tracking groups of people from different parts of your social circle. 

Of course, the all important RSVP tracking is also there and whether a Thank-You note is sent.

Account Settings

This is where you can change your user info, timezones and manage your categories in the various dropdown lists of the site.

Also the amazing thing is that you can add users to the account! This is important for couples to plan the wedding together. Closer to the day of the wedding, you may give access to your wedding helpers so that they know what is going on. You may even have an actual day checklist for them to refer too.

Wedding planners can be also invited in to work on the wedding. In this case, you can even ask them to plan the wedding and add in the important stuff to remind you to do as well. 

Summary

Marrily is a GO-TO place if you are looking for an online platform to plan for your wedding. The cost of it is not exorbitant given that it is a once-in-a-lifetime event you are planning for. There are monthly, 3-monthly and 6-monthly subscriptions you can refer to. 

If your wedding is one year away, it would merely cost you $100, which I would say is extremely decent for the savings in terms of time and hassle one has to go through in coming up with all the things from scratch. You should see the number of Google Documents I have on my own wedding.

If there are any improvements I say the site should have, they are

1. a file-sharing feature, 
2. iPhone app for true portability and 
3. a further look into adding users to "assign duties" 

Other than that, Marrily is totally Awesome :) 

You can try it out here for a 14-day risk free trial.