The client paid. You have not delivered the event.
A deposit is cash and a promise. Until the event happens, you owe the client the event or you owe them the money back, according to the contract. Recording the deposit as sales makes this month look finished and makes the month of the wedding, when you are paying vendors and working the day, look oddly broke. Vendor money is the second trap. Sometimes you are reselling the florist's work: their bill is your cost and the client's bill is your sales. Sometimes you are only passing the florist's invoice through, and your income is your fee. Those are different businesses. One file that records every vendor dollar as your sales will show a huge year and a tiny, confusing profit.
Hold the deposit as a liability. Move it to income when you have earned it, which for most events is when the event is delivered, or on the schedule your contract actually uses if you earn a planning fee as you go and a production fee at the event. Read the contract and follow it. Do not follow the bank date. If the contract says half is earned at booking and half at the event, record it that way and be able to point at the sentence. If the contract is silent, do not invent a percentage. Ask, and write the answer on the event.
Refunds and forfeits follow the same contract. A refund of a deposit you had not earned is a return of a liability, not an expense. A deposit you keep because the client canceled, if the contract allows you to keep it, becomes income when you are allowed to keep it. Calling both of those 'refunds' in one account makes the next cancellation impossible to explain.
If you hire the florist, mark up the flowers, and the client never sees the florist's bill, you are reselling. The client charge is sales. The florist's bill is cost. Your fee may be inside the markup or beside it. If you collect the florist's money and hand it to the florist, and your only income is a planning fee, the flower dollars are not sales. They are a pass-through. Recording them as sales makes you look enormous and makes your fee look like a rounding error on a fake margin.
You can be both, on one wedding, for different vendors. The rental company might be a resale and the band might be a pass-through, or the reverse. Write it on the vendor, once, and code every bill for that vendor the same way. Changing your mind per invoice is how the same band appears as income in May and as a reimbursed expense in June.
A planning fee and a rental of linens, tents, or decor are often taxed differently, and this page will not pretend to know your state's rule or your rate. What the books can do is refuse to blend them. If the invoice shows one number called 'wedding,' nobody can see the rental. Put the rental on its own line, put the planning fee on its own line, and put pass-through vendors on their own lines. Then your tax preparer can apply the rule to something real. A single taxable guess, applied to the whole client payment, is how you either remit tax on your fee or forget tax on the tent.
Sales tax you collect, if you collect it, is not income. It is a liability until it is remitted. The same sentence is true here as it is in a shop. The event industry does not get an exception for being seasonal.
Send the contracts for events that have deposits, the vendor bills, the client invoices, and the bank account. The first product is an event list: cash received, how much of it is still unearned, which vendors are resales, which are pass-throughs, and what your fee actually is. The bank matches. Next season's weddings are not sitting inside this season's profit, waiting to be spent on this season's rent.
The relief is specific. You can look at a date and know what you are still obliged to deliver, and you can look at a fee and know it is a fee. The file stops pretending that the client's entire budget is your revenue.
Not if you have not earned it under the contract. It is their money, held by you, until the event or until the contract says the fee is earned. The bank date is not the earning date.
Only if you are reselling the flowers, with their cost as your cost. If you are handing their money to them and charging a fee, the income is the fee. Decide which one you are, per vendor, and do not record both ways.
Because they are often taxed differently, and because they are different work. A blended total forces a guess. A split invoice lets the tax preparer see the rental.
If your file looks like this, start with a free look: wedding and event QuickBooks cleanup.