My Wedding Companion Reviewer's Comments

My Wedding Companion is a functional wedding planner program. You can track your guests, reception, tasks and more. It is fairly intuitive, when you enter a guest’s name as husband or wife, it automatically fills in the last name of the second guest with that of the first. Additionally, they include a processional feature that allows you to arrange how your wedding party will enter the church or reception.

Although My Wedding Companion effectively helps you organize your wedding it includes several features that may be a headache to use. The vendor section is weak, you can’t print your budget, menu or guest accommodations, the daily calendar feature doesn’t synchronize with the monthly calendar and the interface is old and dated.

Features Set:  

My Wedding Companion allows you to import or manually enter your entire guest list. Lists can easily be imported from a TXT file. When manually entering you can include title, full name, address, nickname, email, phone number and relation. You can not sort guests into a primary/secondary lists.

The program is fairly intuitive. When entering a guest if you choose the husband or wife feature, the software knows to automatically fill in the second guest’s last name the same as the first’s guest.

Additionally, you can add guest’s spouse, children or unknown date. You can also track out of towner accommodations and RSVPs. Guests can be exported to a TXT, CSV, Excel or Lotus file.

The budget section is relatively simple. You just place your budgeted amount, paid amount and date. The software will mathematically calculate how much you are over or under. Unlike some of the other wedding software we evaluated, you can add additional “Groups” to your budget. Given your budget amount My Wedding Companion will suggest the amount typically spent on those items like flowers, photography or attire.

Although the budget section is effective, tracking your vendors is below par. They provide sections and specific fields like, deposit, total and arrival times for major services like floral, photography, bakery, entertainment and transportation, but if you would like to add an additional type of service there is a limited amount of fields for name, address and contact, all additional information needs to be placed in the notes section.

My Wedding Companion includes less than 100 pre–loaded tasks in the task list. The tasks provided and tasks you add are all included in the monthly calendar feature; however, nothing transfers to the daily planner and nothing in the daily planner transfers to the monthly calendar. We would have like to have seen these two features work together.

The gift section works more like a registry than a gift tracker. The program includes a list of suggested items and it is easy to modify that list. You can track how many items you have requested and from which store they are registared at. If you want to track gifts given by each guest you have to go into the guest list screen and enter them in the “gifts” tab.

My Wedding Companion’s checklists are interesting and comprehensive. You can print lists of questions or checklists relating to the caterer, wedding day attire or name and address changes. A unique feature to this software is the ability to organize and print your precession. You can arrange how the wedding party will enter the ceremony or reception. Additionally, you can write, but you cannot print your own vows.

My Wedding Companion allows you to print many screens, compile tasks and checklists. Unfortunately, there are a few important sections that do not allow you to print, like the menu, budget or accommodations.

Ease of Use:  

This software is easy to navigate and self–explanatory. Every thing is clearly labeled in the opening screen. Although this program is easy–to–use the interface seems old and dated.

Ease of Installation/Setup:  

We didn’t encounter any problems installing this software.

Help/Support:  

My Wedding Companion includes a built–in user’s guide and online FAQ. However, the user guide would be a little more user friendly if it included a search feature. They also provide telephone and email support, but our emails were never answered.

Summary:  

My Wedding Companion was a good program in it’s day, but technology has changed and many of it’s downfalls could be corrected with an upgrade. We found that although it may get the job done, using this software might be more headache than its worth.

Five Star Software does offer a Gay Wedding program designed specifically with homosexual marriages in mind. This was the only manufacture we found that caters to this type of wedding.