A checklist that knows your wedding is six functions, not one.

A South Asian wedding is not one event with a rehearsal dinner the night before. It is a run of distinct functions, each with its own guests, vendors, attire, music, and food. Anvaya ships the six desi ones built in — mehndi, sangeet, haldi, a welcome party, the wedding, and the reception, each arriving with a name, a typical duration, and a dress code already filled in. You add them in a couple of taps and start tagging tasks, not building templates from scratch.

Every task carries the one function it belongs to. So instead of 400 to-dos in a single column, you ask the board a real question and get a real answer: what is still open for the mehndi, what does the haldi need this week. One click on the event filter narrows the whole checklist to that function and hides everything else — the difference between a list you can act on and a list you scroll past.

Anything the six templates do not name — the baraat procession, a post-wedding brunch, a separate ladies' sangeet — you add as your own custom event, give it a date and a venue, and tag its tasks to it exactly like the built-in ones. Each function also carries its own RSVP per guest, so the headcount you chase for the sangeet is not the headcount you chase for the reception.

The moment you create your wedding, six tasks are already waiting — set the budget, decide the guest-list size, book the venue, choose the dates, book the photographer, send the save-the-dates. No empty screen, no “where do I even begin.” You open the planner to work already in motion.

When you want the rest, the seed dialog reads how far out your wedding is and pre-checks the tasks for your stage — Early (12+ months out), Active (3 to 12 months), or the final stretch. There are 23 templates in all, each with a due date anchored back from your wedding day, so a task that should happen nine months out lands nine months out — not whenever you happen to add it.

Then read the checklist however the moment calls for. The list is the working view you live in. The timeline lays every task out month by month so you can see the whole runway. The calendar drops due dates onto the grid and exports the visible month as an .ics file for Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook. Same checklist, three ways to read it.

The timeline view lays the whole runway out month by month. Here is the shape of a full multi-event wedding, from the day you lock the date to the morning the baraat steps off — the milestones Anvaya seeds, anchored to your wedding day so each one lands when it actually needs to.

12 months out — foundations. Book the venues first; for a 400-guest reception in a major US or UK metro, the rooms that hold that many people are gone 12–18 months out. Hire a multi-event planner who has seated a baraat before, then lock the desi-fluent photographer and videographer. Choose the decor lead and mandap fabricator, build the working budget with a line per ceremony, and start both guest lists — for 400 guests they take three months to stabilise.

9 months out — vendors and save-the-dates. The best caterers and mehndi artists in any metro are locked 9–12 months out for a peak-season Saturday. Reserve the baraat horse and handler, hire the invitation designer, and send save-the-dates — 8–12 months ahead for a destination wedding (Mexico, Italy, India), since roughly a third of US weddings are now destination affairs (per The Knot's 2024 Real Weddings Study). Anvaya's digital save-the-date goes out by email or a shareable link and carries guests straight to your wedding site.

6 months out — outfits and RSVP go-live. The website goes live and the per-event RSVPs start coming back. The bride's lehenga needs four to six months of fittings; the sangeet, mehndi, and reception outfits follow, and the parents and siblings need theirs coordinated across all four events. Make each outfit a task, assign it to its owner, and the seven people each ordering three outfits can filter the board to their own list and nothing else. Open the hotel block and arrange transport per ceremony.

3 months out — invitations and ceremony detail. Invitations go in the mail. Confirm the panditji's muhurat and lock the ceremony script — gathbandhan and kanyadaan for a Hindu wedding; the four lavaan and langar for a Sikh one; the imam, witnesses, and mahr for a Muslim nikah. A generic checklist cannot ask these; you cannot miss them. Second fittings run, jewellery gets pulled, and caterer taste tests capture dietary notes — Jain, halal, vegan, gluten-free — against each guest, per event.

1 month out — final counts. Counts go to every caterer. Because each guest carries a separate RSVP and a separate dietary note per event, the confirmed headcount for the mehndi, the sangeet, and the reception each rolls up on its own — you pull a real per-event count straight from the guest list instead of reconciling four spreadsheets the week it is due. Pay midpoint vendor milestones and brief the baraat lead on the route and the horse.

Week of — the operation runs. Get the order of events to every vendor and both families; each person needs only the slice that touches them. Sangeet performers do a dress rehearsal three days out, the ceremony rehearsal runs the day before, and the parents get briefed on who they are greeting at which function. Make each briefing a task, assign it to the family lead who owns it, and it flows out of the checklist instead of a dozen unread group chats.

A list of 300 unfinished tasks does not tell you whether you are on track. So Anvaya runs your events and your guest list through a set of readiness checks and rolls them into a single score from 0 to 100 — one honest read on whether the weekend is coming together or quietly falling apart.

The checks look for the gaps that actually sink an event: a ceremony with no date or time, a ceremony with no venue, guests who are not assigned to any event, two events that overlap, and functions where more than half the RSVPs are still pending. Each check is weighted by how much it matters — a missing date or an overlap (critical) pulls the score down hard; a missing venue or orphaned guests (warning) pulls it down some; a wave of pending RSVPs (info) nudges it. The result is a number you can trust at a glance instead of a wall of green checkmarks.

Every check that drops the score is a link, not a lecture. The score lists exactly what is holding the weekend back — “the mehndi has no venue,” “40% of reception RSVPs are pending” — and each one routes you straight to the event or guest that needs fixing. The point is to make the work legible to the people running it, not to grade you.