Kavita & Devesh

Illustrative story

9 Vendors managed · £28,400 Total managed · 122 days Planning window

Kavita and Devesh didn't set out to have a complicated wedding. A Hindu ceremony in Leeds, the city where Kavita grew up, on Saturday 19 September 2026. Three ceremonies across a weekend: a mehndi on the Friday evening, the wedding itself on Saturday, a small family lunch on Sunday. Nine vendors in total. By most standards, they had planned a manageable event.

The complication was geography. Kavita's immediate family is in Leeds. Devesh's parents are in Manchester. His sister, who was coordinating much of the logistics on his side, lives in Sheffield. Three cities, and in each of them people with questions, ringing vendors to check on bookings that had or hadn't been confirmed. By early July, about eleven weeks before the wedding, Kavita reckons the caterer had received the same question about the menu from four different people across the two families.

The problem with family coordination

The specific difficulty was visibility. Everyone involved in planning the wedding (Kavita and Devesh, both sets of parents, Devesh's sister, Kavita's aunt who had offered to handle the florist) was working from different information. Nobody had a complete picture of what was confirmed, what was pending and what had been paid. The WhatsApp group that was supposed to solve this had, by July, become a 3,000-message thread that nobody except Kavita was reading in full.

"The 11pm calls were the thing that wore me down," Kavita told us. "Devesh's mum would ring to ask whether the caterer had confirmed the vegetarian menu option. I would have confirmed it two weeks earlier. But there was no way for her to see that without asking me. So she asked. Every time someone asked, it felt like the whole process had to go through me."

The odd thing was that the information already existed. Kavita had booked every vendor through Nodus, starting with the caterer on 20 May, each confirmed with a deposit paid directly to the vendor through Stripe. Every quote and message sat in her dashboard. The trouble was that only Kavita was looking at it. In early July, at Devesh's suggestion, they brought both families into the plan. Within a fortnight, every vendor enquiry, confirmation and payment was in one place both families could see.

What changed

The immediate effect wasn't dramatic. Vendors were already confirmed and deposits already paid, and sharing the plan didn't change any of that. What it changed was who could see it. When Devesh's mother wanted to know whether the mehndi artist had confirmed the Friday evening slot, she could check. When Devesh's sister wanted to see the payment schedule for the remaining balances, it was there. The calls to Kavita didn't stop straight away (it took a few weeks for both families to get into the habit of checking the platform first), but they dropped off within the first month.

Two months before the wedding, the caterer proposed a change to the vegetarian menu after a supplier ran short. The change was logged in Nodus, flagged to both families, and discussed and approved without anyone having to relay it between cities. "Under the old system, that would have been a confusing week of phone calls," Devesh said. "It was a 20-minute conversation in the platform."

The week before

By the week before the wedding, Kavita had three things left to sort: the timing of the dhol player's arrival for the baraat, a final headcount for the caterer, and the florist's balance, which fell due that week. Everything else was done, confirmed and visible in the platform. She showed us the dashboard from that week: nine vendors, nine confirmed statuses, every deposit paid and every balance either paid or due before the wedding.

"I kept waiting for something to go wrong," she said. "Because that had been my experience of planning. Something always went sideways at the last minute. And there were small things, small adjustments. But they were manageable because we actually knew where things stood. I wasn't guessing whether we'd confirmed something or just discussed it."

The wedding was, by their telling, exactly what they had planned. The mehndi was full, the ceremony ran on time, the Sunday lunch was relaxed. Devesh's mother, the one who had been calling at 11pm, gave a speech at the Sunday lunch in which she made a point of mentioning how smoothly the planning had gone.

What they would tell other couples

When we asked Kavita and Devesh what advice they'd give couples in a similar position (families in several cities, a lot of coordination), their answer was direct: sort out the information problem before anything else.

"The vendors were fine," Kavita said. "We were lucky. We had good vendors. But even with good vendors, the coordination was the hard part. Every question that had to go through one person, every message that got lost, every time someone had to ask me what had already been confirmed: that was the friction. Get that right and the rest is manageable."