Day/evening guests

[ReverseGiraffe]

DP and I are getting married in autumn 2021. We haven't had any offers for financial help from either family (not that we expected to, of course, just to give more information!)
We're on quite a small income but still want to have a nice celebration so we've opted for a package wedding. Unfortunately, the package (and our budget) limits us to 50 day guests and 100 evening. We're currently sitting at around 90 guests. We'd obviously love to cater for everyone, but this isn't really an option.

My question is: how do you decide who is a day guest and who is an evening guest? Due to some fairly complicated family dynamics, it's not really as simple as immediate vs extended family on my side, as I have quite a strong relationships with my great aunt, second and third cousins, so I can't really decide it that way.

We’ve restricted evening invitations to local friends of family who can attend service and return later without too much inconvenience.

Oh, thank you. That's a great idea!

For us, the evening guests were for example, old family friends who weren't close enough to us to need to see the ceremony, or family members who we hadn't seen in years but felt we had to invite

We took a view of who did we want to pay for a 3 course meal for. My grandad’s brother? No, so evening. Our friends? Yes, so day. This is obviously a crude way to do the list and shouldn’t be shared with anyone. That gave us two very rough lists and we moved people about accordingly based on budget and general rules but allowing for some exceptions. Rules fitted to a side of the family, rather than a blanket rule for both of us. So I’m a lot closer to my cousins than DH and they were all local, so we were happy to invite them to day. For DH’s cousins we invited them to the evening. We had the wedding away from where his cousins lived so only one cousin turned up but this is the cousin we would have probably invited to the day (they aren’t close but he’s the cousin with the most favourable personality and family). However, most of DH’s cousins fell into the evening category and this cousin got moved into the evening group to avoid us inviting the other cousins. I have family friends that I am close to, my grandparents long time friends. So they got a day invite but grandad’s brothers were still stuck with an evening invite (which pissed them off and is partly why they were on the evening list anyway). If anyone gives you any shit, you tell them you’re paying for this wedding yourself and you can’t invite everyone that you would like to but you’re working to your budget the best you can.

Thank you @CakeAndGin that is so helpful. I was just worried about offending, and having to explain why my cousins etc were day guests vs why DP's million cousins would be evening. He doesn't care so I suspect I'm overthinking it.

Back to the drawing board!