Banquet seating plans for venues and caterers
Front of house needs a picture. The kitchen needs a list. A good banquet plan produces both from the same file, and settles the covers-per-table question before the chairs come out of the store.
Banquet style or rounds?
"Banquet" is used two ways in the trade, which causes no end of confusion on a function sheet. To some venues it means the whole seated-dinner service regardless of table shape. To others it means specifically long trestle tables set in parallel runs, as opposed to rounds. When you take a booking, ask which one the client means, because the covers, the linen order and the floor efficiency all change.
| Layout | Typical covers per table | Floor use | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5ft round | Usually eight, ten at a squeeze | Moderate | Weddings, awards, anything with speeches |
| 6ft round | Ten to twelve | Better per cover than 5ft | Large dinners where you need volume |
| Cabaret round | Six to eight, one quarter left open | Poor | Rooms where every guest must face a stage |
| 6ft trestle in runs | Six a table, joined into long runs | Best in a narrow room | Communal dining, long-table weddings, halls |
| U-shape | Depends on the run length | Poor | Formal dinners and board events under about forty |
| Herringbone runs | As trestles | Good in an awkward room | Angled or irregular spaces, better sightlines |
The general rule is that rounds are more sociable and trestles are more efficient. Rounds also absorb late changes better: adding a tenth cover to a round of nine is a chair and a place setting, whereas extending a trestle run means moving everything downstream of it.
Covers, not guests
Once you are working with a kitchen, stop counting guests and start counting covers per table. The kitchen plates by table. The brigade wants to know that table 7 is ten covers with two vegetarian and one dairy-free, not that Aunt Margaret is sitting next to a man called Dave.
Build the plan in the planner with the real number of seats at each table, so the seat count on screen is the cover count in the kitchen. Rename tables to whatever the room actually uses. Numbers for a large dinner, names for a wedding. Keep that naming identical across the floor plan, the place cards and the function sheet. Mismatched table names between the plan and the cards is a reliable way to slow a service down.
Service aisles and access
A plan that looks tidy on screen can be undeliverable in the room. Servers need room to pass behind a seated guest carrying a tray, which means allowing for the depth of the chair when it is pushed back, not the depth of the table. In practice most venues work to something over a metre between the backs of chairs on adjacent tables, and rather more on the main runs between the kitchen doors and the far side of the room.
Other things to place before any guest names go in:
- The main service run from the kitchen doors, wide enough for two servers to pass.
- Fire exits and gangways kept clear to the widths on the venue's licence. Check these against the venue's own scale plan, always.
- Wheelchair spaces, on an aisle, with a step-free route to both the exit and the loos.
- The top table riser, plus the space in front of it that nobody may occupy during speeches.
- Cake table, gift table, band, DJ and the bar queue, which will spill sideways further than anyone expects.
One honest limitation: the canvas has no room dimensions and you cannot drop in the venue's floor plan as a background. It gives you a relative layout, which is exactly right for deciding what goes where and for showing a client, but it is not a scale drawing. Do the aisle and capacity arithmetic on the venue's own plan.
Worked example: 180 covers in a long room
Eighteen 5ft rounds of ten would fill the space but leaves an awkward walk to the stage. Instead run sixteen rounds of ten, plus a banquet top table of twelve on the riser and one round of eight for suppliers and the band near the service door. That is 180 covers with a two-metre central aisle. Number the rounds from the stage backwards so the kitchen serves front to back and the speeches land on the tables already cleared. Export the CSV sorted by table for the chef, and the PNG for the setup team the night before.
Give the caterer a list, not a picture
Floor plans are for the people moving furniture. They are close to useless in a kitchen. What the caterer needs is a text list they can print, annotate and clip above the pass:
- Table by table, with a cover count per table. Export TXT for the counts, or CSV for one row per person.
- Special meals joined on by name. The planner does not hold dietary or meal choices, so keep those in your own sheet keyed by full name and merge the two. The output the kitchen wants is: table 7, ten covers, two vegetarian, one dairy-free, one gluten-free.
- The setup sheet. Number of tables by shape and chairs per table. Read those straight off the floor plan. Linen and cloth sizes come from the venue’s own hire list, since the plan carries no real-world table dimensions.
- A final version with a date and time on it. Plans change on the day; an undated printout is a liability.
Send the PNG floor plan to the setup team and the CSV to the kitchen, and be explicit about which document is authoritative if the two disagree. It should always be the list.
Front of house on the day
Print a large plan for the door and a second one for the pass. If the event has more than about a hundred covers, produce a poster for the entrance from one of the four print templates, at A2, A1, 18x24 or 24x36, and choose the A-Z index rather than the by-table listing. The preview is free and watermarked. The print-ready file, without the watermark, is a one-off €9.99. Guests scan for their own surname; making four hundred people read twenty table lists is how a drinks reception overruns.
Save the finished layout as a .tablout.json file per event. A browser holds one plan at a time, so if you run several functions a week, keep a folder of saved files named by date and client. There is no undo, so save before you rearrange a room that already works.
What it does not do
No RSVP or meal tracking, no venue background image or scale dimensions, no stage and dancefloor objects on the canvas, no shared editing link, no rules for keeping two people apart, and no undo. The plans stay in the browser's own storage, with no account and no backend behind it, which suits a client list you would rather not upload anywhere.
Sponsor tables, top tables and badge printing are covered in corporate event seating. If you are working out how many rounds fit a given headcount, guests per table has the arithmetic. Otherwise, open the planner and set your covers.
Set your covers
Lay out rounds, trestles and the top table, then export a PNG for the floor and a CSV for the kitchen. The planner is free, browser-only, no account. Only the print-ready poster file is paid.
Open the planner →Common questions
- How many covers fit on a round table?
- A 5ft round usually seats eight comfortably and ten at a squeeze; a 6ft round takes ten to twelve. Cabaret style, with a quarter of the table left open towards the stage, drops that to six or eight.
- Can I import the venue's floor plan as a background?
- No. There is no background image or room dimension support, so the layout is relative rather than to scale. Check aisle widths, gangways and capacity against the venue's own scale drawing.
- What format should the caterer get?
- A TXT list sorted by table with cover counts, not a picture. Join your own dietary spreadsheet to it by name so the kitchen sees special meals against table numbers.
- Does it handle dietary requirements?
- Not directly. Keep meal and dietary choices in your own sheet keyed by full name, then merge them with the exported guest list before it goes to the kitchen.
- Can I keep a plan for every function we run?
- Yes, as files. Save each event as a .tablout.json named by date and client. A browser holds one plan at a time, so reopen the file for whichever function you are working on.