Amendment to wedding invoice - where do I stand?

Flyboy152

ThumbRemote wrote: »

As part of a larger bill, its quite easy to overlook a mistake that's hidden in the detail. After all, if you get a quote you tend to look at the bottom line, not check the individual calculations.

The people who really should have picked up on that are the venue.

That said the OP has no real grounds to avoid paying. All you can really do is ask for a goodwill gesture to reflect the inconvenience.

I agree. If they had discussed the transaction based on the final costs, the breakdown of how that cost was arrived at is somewhat irrelevant.

However Musical_rower, you also have to consider the morality of your expectations. It might be wise to re-negotiate he final price and meet them half way.

Do not pay in full, until after the event and if they deserve the tip, pay it. But, ask the management, "how much of the tip the staff get and how much, if any, is retained by the company for "administration?" Then, during the event, ask the staff to confirm how much they get keep in tips. If it does not concur with what you have been told, report them to trading standards.

Equaliser123

ThumbRemote wrote: »

The inconvenience of spending 6 months under the impression the bill was £1000 less than it actually is, and now having to find more money than they had expected.

Basic maths and the OP would have realised it from the start.

And if they didn't have the money, how could they have invited 80 guests at the known charge?

tyllwyd

Maybe the most practical thing would be to go back to the venue and explain the problem, and ask if there is anything you could agree to bring the price down closer to the original, by changing the menu options or something like that? They really should be flexible, considering it was their mistake.

ThumbRemote

Equaliser123 wrote: »

Basic maths and the OP would have realised it from the start.

And if they didn't have the money, how could they have invited 80 guests at the known charge?

Basic maths and so would the venue...

This mistake is by the venue, not the customer. While you can argue that the customer could have noticed the mistake, they should never have been put in the position of having to.

Do you stand at the checkout in the supermarket and ensure the receipt adds up correctly?

As for not having the money, since they were paying further down the line they would be saving to a target. Consider booking a holiday; you pay a deposit and know that 6 months later you need to pay (say) £1000. If you subsequently find out the invoice had been miscalculated and you need to pay £1200, but hadn't saved that much, it causes you a problem.

Equaliser123

Going to have to agree to disagree. As has been said there is nothing legally that can be done.

musical_rower

Hi,
Thanks for all the thoughts and suggestions. A solution has been reached, but first some clarifications for a few questions/comments above:


The '80 x 80' was indeed part of a larger quote. We were getting lots of quotes at the time based on adding or removing options. The email would say what we get, and an excel spreadsheet accompanied it with the invoice. The email never said "food is £80 per head", and I thought that an excel sheet would have calculations so no need to check it. We did just look at the bottom line.

The tip is a 'discretionary 7% tip'. Before the event, we pay 90% of the regular bill (excluding tip), then the last 10% within 30 days of the wedding. The tip would be paid then too, I don't know if they'll actually suggest/tell us an amount to pay.
We didn't really want to withhold the tip as the staff have been great from what we've seen (top notch service for our menu tasting afternoon last weekend, poshest waiter I'd ever met!). It's just that it had been suggested to me by a friend that we could tell the venue to pay the staff's tip as it was their error.

re. how we knew we could afford to invite 80 guests, 80 is the minimum for a Saturday wedding with the venue. We were working on 80 guests for all our quotes



And the solution...

We spoke to our account manager on the phone, and then after a few emails back and forth and her speaking to her manager, we got a compromise.
We've got various things discounted or included free, for a discount of around £550.
The other £450 should be much easier for us to absorb.
I don't think the venue is too far out of pocket either, as I'd seen a sign at their wedding fayre saying that if you book on the day, you get some of those things free anyway. We had already booked by that point, and they wouldn't change our invoice to match it.

Can't fault them for service, we're very pleased with everything through this situation and more generally, and we're both very excited for September to come around!