Run service at the table

Read the floor

Open Floor in the left rail. The header carries a date stepper and a service stepper — today's lunch or dinner, or step back to any other date and service — next to a running count of bookings and covers. Below that, the room itself: every table on the plan, coloured by what's happening at it right now, with room tabs along the bottom for a restaurant with more than one room (Main room, Terrace, Private Dining are typical). A search box and a scrollable list of upcoming and finished bookings sit to the left of the floor, showing the same bookings as a queue — searching one filters both together.

Every table's colour comes from one legend, and it's worth learning before anything else on this page: Free, Booked, Arrived, Seated, Running over (past its booked end time), Winding down (the bill's dropped or paid), Needs clearing (finished, waiting on a wipe-down) and Blocked.

A Status / Sections toggle in the bottom corner switches the same floor to colour by which server owns each table instead, zoom and fit controls sit above it, and a time-scrub slider under the header lets you preview the floor at any minute of the day without changing anything. A note icon and a bar-chart icon in the toolbar open the day's note (step 8) and a pre-shift briefing.

Seat a party, booked or walk-in

Tap any table with a booking, or a row in the list, and its booking sheet opens on the right — the guest's name, party size, booked window and table, and a status line. If the party already has a table assigned, one tap on Seat moves it straight to Seated — no second step to find and assign a table, because that already happened when the booking was made or confirmed.

When a booking doesn't have a table yet, the sheet shows a Seat at row instead of jumping straight to Seat: up to six free tables that actually fit the party, smallest workable one first, so one tap both assigns the table and seats the guest in the same action. A Pick on the floor… button falls through to tapping (or dragging) tables directly on the plan — the way to combine two tables for a party too big for any one of them.

For a guest who hasn't booked, tap any free table on the plan. Its lighter flyout offers Seat walk-in here, which opens a short new-booking form already set to walk-in and already pointed at that table — so a walk-in is seated in one flow, not booked and then assigned as two separate jobs.

Arrived, seated, and done

A busy Saturday shows every state at once. Below, table T01 and T10 are Arrived (blue), T02 and T14 are Seated (green, with elapsed time under the table number), and T13 has gone Winding down (purple) — its bill is already paid, so the table shows "paid" instead of a time. Everything else on the plan is still Booked, waiting for its guests to arrive.

Each move is one tap on the sheet's primary button: Arrived, then Seat, then Complete, in that order, no confirmation dialog. No-show and Cancel — visible on Renard's sheet above — are two-tap: the first tap arms the button and asks "Sure?", the second within a few seconds confirms it, which is enough friction to stop a mis-tap without slowing the room down with a pop-up. A seated table that runs past its booked end time turns Running over; once its visit finishes, it turns Needs clearing until someone taps it to confirm the table's been wiped down — and if nobody does, it clears itself after 45 minutes rather than staying flagged occupied all night.

Take an order at the table

Once a party is arrived or seated, its sheet gains a Take order button. Press it and the order pad opens on the same sheet: every published menu section, its dishes and their prices, sold-out items marked and disabled so nothing gets rung that the kitchen can't make. A plain dish adds to the cart in one tap; a dish with sizes or paid add-ons opens its choices first — the required ones enforced before Add switches on — plus a free-text note for the kitchen, like "sauce on the side" or "no onions", and a quantity stepper.

The cart shows a running total as you build it. Press Send order and it's rung — priced, saved, and, on a restaurant with a kitchen printer connected, queued straight to the printer in the same action, no separate step. It lands on this table's till exactly the way the two orders on Charlotte Clarke's table do in the next figure: one line per order, ready to adjust or pay.

Adjust the order

The booking sheet's Orders & payment block is the table's till, reading straight off what's actually been rung on it. Charlotte Clarke's table below has taken two separate orders across the evening: an earlier one, already paid, and a second, still open.

On the still-open order, every dish carries − / + steppers and a cancel mark for a dish that hasn't reached the kitchen yet; a cancelled dish stays visible, struck through, with a one-tap restore. A pencil next to Discount opens quick 5/10/20% buttons, a custom £ amount and a reason note that's saved with it; a pencil next to Service charge works the same way, with 10% and 12.5% shortcuts or a custom £ or %. None of this touches the paid order above it — once an order is marked paid, its steppers and pencils disappear and its totals lock, which is why the paid order only offers Mark unpaid, Kitchen copy and Print receipt.

Combine a table's orders into one bill

When a table has rung more than one order — starters sent, then mains sent separately — and two or more of them are still open and unpaid at the same time, a Combine into one bill button appears above the table total, and one tap merges them into a single order with one combined total. It only offers to merge orders that are both still active and unpaid, which is exactly why it isn't offered on Charlotte Clarke's table in FIG. 05: her first order is already paid, so there's nothing left on that side to combine — the second order simply stays on its own until it's paid too.

Above the button, a Table total line always shows how many orders sit on the table and what's still owed the moment there's more than one order or anything unpaid — £87.10 across two orders on Clarke's table, £32.06 of it still to pay.

Take payment

Every order on the till in FIG. 05 carries a PAID or UNPAID pill. For an order taken on-site — cash or a card terminal at the table — press Mark paid once you've settled it; the same button flips back to Mark unpaid if you need to undo a mis-tap. An order the guest already paid through their own online checkout is settled by Stripe automatically and carries no manual toggle here — the sheet just shows how it was paid, online or at the till.

Marking the last unpaid order on a table paid completes the visit on its own: the booking moves to Complete and the table frees for the next party, with no separate tap needed once nothing is left owing. Bill dropped, next to Complete and Take order on the sheet's footer, is a lighter signal for the floor — flagging that the bill is out with the table before it's actually settled.

Post a note, or block a table

Two signals sit on the floor itself rather than on any one booking. The note icon in the toolbar opens a short form for the day — free text, saved with Save note — and while it's set, it runs as a banner across the top of the floor that any host or server can tuck into a small pin with one tap and bring back with another, so it never blocks the view underneath it. The Saturday floor above carries one: "Two private parties in P03/P04 — stagger the service." — exactly the kind of thing worth the whole team seeing without a group text.

A free table's flyout — the same lighter panel that offers Seat walk-in here in step 2 — also offers Block table: an optional from/to time (leave both blank to block it for the whole day) and a note, like "broken chair" or "private hold". A blocked table shows the legend's diagonal-stripe pattern and can't be picked for seating until you press Remove block on the same flyout.

Read the floor once, and the rest follows the colours: seat what's booked, ring what's ordered, adjust and pay what's on the till, and let a completed, paid table free itself — one screen, start to finish.