Event Checklist: A Conference Planning Timeline From Six Months Out to the Day After

You are running a conference mostly on your own, or with one or two other people. The venue, the speakers, the catering, the badges, the budget, the slides. All of it routes through you.

This event checklist lays the work out by phase, from roughly six months out to the day after. It is built for a conference or a corporate event, and it leans toward the parts a small team trips on: late confirmations, missing files, and a final week that fills up fast. Work through it in order, or jump to your phase.

Most of the stress in event planning is not the event itself. It is the weeks of chasing people for things they promised and forgot to send. A checklist tells you when each thing should already be in hand, so nothing surprises you on event morning.

Four to six months out: book what you cannot reverse

This is when the expensive, hard-to-reverse decisions get made. Booking later narrows your options and raises your costs.

• Write down the goal of the event and how you will measure it, in one or two sentences.
• Pick a few candidate dates that could work, checking them against holidays, school terms, and competing industry events. The venue often decides the final one.
• Shortlist venues, run site visits, and confirm capacity, accessibility, load-in times, and what equipment comes with the room.
• Build your budget scenarios. Food and beverage and audiovisual are usually the two biggest line items, and you cannot size them properly until a venue quotes you, so firm up the numbers once the shortlist is in.
• Sign the venue contract and pay the deposit.
• Identify your session topics, then research and invite speakers, internal or external. In-demand speakers often book six to twelve months ahead, so start now.
• Start sponsor conversations and define what each sponsorship level includes.
• Decide your ticket tiers or registration fees, and put up a save-the-date or early-bird page.
• Book the major vendors: AV and production, catering, photography, and secure a badge printer.

A note on the speaker side, because it quietly eats your final weeks. Each speaker owes you a bio, a headshot, a session title, dietary needs, AV requirements, and eventually their slides. Bios and headshots should be in hand two to four months out, well before the program goes to print or gets published and promoted on the website. Collecting that from twenty or more people over email, in a mix of formats, some of them PDFs that are awkward to resize or edit, then renaming and sorting every file by hand, is where a small team loses days. Collecting speaker and exhibitor files through one link is worth setting up before the requests go out, not after.

Two to three months out: confirm vendors and start the public push

The foundation is set. Now you fill in the details and start the public push.

• Finalize the program, the agenda, and the speaker lineup, then update the website.
• Confirm AV needs in writing: microphones, screens, lighting, and an on-site technician or AV team for the day.
• Confirm catering, including a plan for dietary restrictions.
• Book parking, transportation, and any hotel room block for out-of-town attendees.
• Collect bios, headshots, and session titles from every speaker.
• Send sponsors and exhibitors their deadline list: logos in the right format, a certificate of insurance, and any tax or payment paperwork your finance side needs (in the US, a W9; other countries differ).
• Promote registration and watch your numbers against the venue capacity.

Vendor coordination is the classic small-team failure point. Speakers confirm late and sponsors are slow to send their logos, so you cannot go to print on time, and one weak link can stall months of work. The fix is one running list of who owes you what, so a late item shows up the day it is late.

Four to six weeks out: confirm the final details

The big pieces are booked. This phase is about removing ambiguity from every handoff.

• Confirm the final menu and service style with the caterer.
• Print signage: directional, room, registration, and parking signs.
• Confirm accessibility resources and any security or crowd-control staffing.
• Schedule a script read and an AV run-through for the days before the event.
• Assign session moderators and brief them on timing and Q&A format.
• Chase any speaker who still owes a bio, a headshot, or an AV requirement.

One to two weeks out: the slides, the script, and the run of show

This is the week the missing files become a real problem, because everything downstream depends on them. You can finalize the script and the slide order, but you cannot build the master show deck, or know which decks carry embedded video and audio that need testing, until the slides are in.

• Collect every speaker's final slides. Set a hard deadline several days before the event, not the morning of.
• Finalize the run of show. It carries the cues, the timing, and the slides for each segment, kept as one live shared document so any last change reaches everyone at once. For the full structure, see the run of show guide.
• Confirm final guest numbers and give the caterer a confirmed count.
• Hold a final walk-through with the venue and key vendors.
• Print name badges and the program, and double-check spellings against your registration list.
• Send a reminder to anyone who has not registered or RSVP'd.
• Build a packing list of everything that travels to the venue with you.

When the slides arrive with random filenames, you still have to match each one to a speaker and sort them by session before the AV team can use them. A submission tracker that shows who is still missing turns it into a glance: "25 of 30 presentations have come in. Here are the ones you're missing." Files land sorted by session, renamed to your convention.

The final 48 hours: test everything

• Check your actual content on your own machine: fonts, video and audio playback, and that the right version of each deck is loaded. The full in-room AV test happens on site on event day.
• Set up the arrival flow and check-in lanes: speakers, VIPs, general, and walk-ins.
• Print the script in large font, and confirm the AV tech has every cue.
• Take supplies to the venue and be on site for setup.
• Send a final reminder to attendees: address, parking, start time, and a monitored email address for questions.

Event day: the run sheet takes over

By now the checklist hands off to a minute-by-minute run sheet. Your job shifts from preparing to managing the room.

• Get the AV and production crew on site early, usually two to three hours before doors, for system checks.
• Confirm every presenter's mic level, clicker, and slides during soundcheck.
• Open registration and check-in, with a printed attendee list on hand in case the system goes down.
• Brief volunteers and assign each a clear role and a point of contact.
• Keep the run of show visible to everyone managing the room, and adjust timing live as needed.

The day after: close the loop

The event is over, but the close-out now saves you real time next cycle.

• Send thank-you notes to speakers, sponsors, vendors, and volunteers.
• Send the post-event survey while the experience is fresh.
• Process final invoices and reconcile the budget against what you spent.
• Run a debrief while it is fresh: name the few things that broke and the one change that prevents each next time.
• Archive the final files and the run of show where you can find them in a year.

How to use this event checklist

Treat the phases as deadlines, not suggestions. Each item should be in hand by the end of its phase, so the next phase has what it needs. For a smaller event, like a one-day seminar or a workshop, compress the early phases but keep the order. The sequence protects you, not the exact week count.

One habit matters most: separate the things you control from the things other people owe you. You can book a venue on your own schedule. You cannot make a speaker send slides on yours. Track those owed items in one visible list from day one, and the late ones stop ambushing you.