The deposit that never arrived, the final numbers that came in two days late, the client who turned up expecting a different start time — most of these trace back to a message that should have been sent and wasn't. Not because anyone was careless, but because sending it depended on someone noticing the date.
Reminders now send themselves.
Two kinds of reminder
Booking reminders fire against the booking itself — the confirmation after a deposit lands, the nudge before a payment is due, the note before the event.
Schedule reminders cover the dates around an event rather than the event alone. A function isn't one date; it's a deposit deadline, a final-numbers cut-off, a balance date and a setup day. Each of those can carry its own reminder, which is what stops the deadlines in your terms from being decorative.
They use your own wording
Reminders send using the email templates you've already built, so they read like your venue rather than like a system notification. Nothing has to be retyped per booking, and changing the wording once changes it everywhere.
Why this is the best candidate for automation
Most things in a venue need judgement. Reminders don't: the date is known, the recipient is known, the message is the same every time. It is the clearest case on the whole booking for taking a task off a person, and the one where forgetting is most expensive.
The cadence that works is unremarkable — state the deadline when the booking is made, remind a couple of weeks out, remind again two days before, then close it. A reminder sent before the deadline recovers the payment or the number. One sent after it starts a negotiation.
More on that in what to put in a function deposit policy and getting an accurate headcount.
Automations are available on Pro and Enterprise — see pricing.