Run your bookings

Work your booking inbox

Open Inbox in the sidebar. This is where everything a guest sends from your live site lands before it becomes a confirmed line in the diary — enquiries about a table, newsletter sign-ups, gift-card purchases, event RSVPs, and GDPR data requests. A row of filter chips (All, Reservation, Newsletter, and more as they come in) narrows the list, each one carrying its own live count.

A Reservation card is a guest asking about a table before any time slot is booked — the fields underneath show exactly what they sent: a seating preference, an occasion, and their own message. Isabelle Fournier’s card asks for a quiet corner table for an anniversary dinner and flags a shellfish allergy; Tom Okafor’s asks whether the private dining room is free for eight on Friday. Press Reply to open a pre-addressed email and settle the details, then add the confirmed booking yourself with New booking (see the next step) once you’ve agreed a time. Once a card is dealt with, press Mark handled — it greys out and the button becomes Reopen, so nothing you’ve actioned keeps nagging you, and nothing is ever silently lost. Export CSV downloads whatever the current filter shows.

The Today’s service button at the top of the Inbox jumps to a same-day board of every booking on the diary, grouped by hour, with a date field to look at another day, a Mark Arrived button on each booking and a status list beside it (Booked, Arrived, Seated, Finished, No-show, Cancelled). Back to Inbox returns you. It’s a quick operational check from here — running the room through a full service, seating and payment, is its own guide.

Read the Bookings diary

Open Service in the sidebar and press Bookings in the narrow rail on the left. Tonight’s bookings are listed by time with the table each one is on, and a search box finds a guest or a table. The date and service pickers along the top move you to another day or sitting.

Press any booking to open its sheet. It shows the booking window, the table, the source, the guest’s phone and email, their visits and no-shows, and three edit buttons — Edit details, Change time and Change table. At the foot, Seat, Arrived, No-show and Cancel change its status, and Guest history opens the guest’s record. Press Full record to open the Bookings page for that day.

The Bookings page is the whole diary. The toolbar holds New booking, Services & rules, Service floor, Floor plan and Print run-sheet. Under the search box, Day and Month switch the view: Day is where you’ll spend service, with a date field and ‘‹’ and ‘›’ to move a day at a time; the search finds a booking on any date by name, phone or email. Bookings are grouped by service — Lunch, Dinner — each with its own covers count.

Month shows a calendar with the bookings and covers for every day; press a day to open its diary.

Every row carries the guest’s name, party size, a status chip and a source chip (Confirmed, Imported, Phone…), tel: and mailto: links, a Guest history link to their full profile, the booking’s duration, and — when they apply — a prior-no-show count, a reminder-sent badge, and a table chip. Press Copy guest link to copy the guest’s own self-service view/cancel page, ready to text or email. The dark button on the right always advances a booking to its next stage — Arrived, then Seat, then Complete — and the status list beside it jumps to any status, including Cancelled and No-show. A booking waiting on a deposit or card guarantee shows Awaiting deposit or Awaiting card until it’s paid or held — setting deposits up is covered in Hours and booking rules · Deposits & card guarantees. Print run-sheet prints the day for the pass.

Add a phone or walk-in booking

Press New booking at the top of Bookings (in Service, the same button sits in the top bar) — the form opens under the waitlist, and the button turns into Close while it is open. Set Date, Guests and Time — the time list follows the services that run that day. Set Source to Phone or Walk-in, then fill in Name. Phone is optional, and so is Email — it is what lets the guest receive a confirmation and reminders, so it’s worth asking for on a phone call; leave it blank and no email goes out.

Press Book and it runs through the same availability check as your website’s own booking widget — a genuinely full slot offers the nearest open times instead of quietly double-booking you. Phone and walk-in bookings skip the online lead-time window, so you can take a table for later tonight. A service that needs a deposit or card guarantee creates a payment hold instead of an instant booking, with a link you copy and send to the guest. New booking needs at least one active service to book against — if you haven’t set one up yet, start with Hours and booking rules · Add a service.

Choose or change a table

Table assignment is optional and deliberate — Auto (recommended) is the default on every new booking, and the engine seats it for you. When you want to choose, press Choose on the plan to open a miniature floor plan, colour-coded so the choice is obvious at a glance: green tables are free, grey tables are booked then (unclickable, with the time they are taken shown on them), and amber tables are free but their seats don’t match the party size — still clickable, for the nights a 2-top legitimately goes on a 6-top. Tables from every room are drawn on the one plan.

Click a table to pick it — the button below it then reads Use and the table’s name, such as Use T09. Clicking another table swaps your pick; press Combine tables… first to arm a mode where clicks add tables together instead, for a party that needs two tables pushed together in the same area. Press the Use button to confirm — the TABLE row then shows the table you chose — or Cancel to back out and leave it on Auto. On an existing booking, the table chip in the diary (⊞ T05, or ⊞ Assign table if it doesn’t have one yet) opens this same picker, and in Service the booking sheet’s Change table does the same job.

Edit, move or cancel a booking

Every booking row on Bookings carries three more controls beside its status list. Press Edit to change the guest’s name, phone, email, party size or notes inline, then Save — a bigger party than the one you originally booked needs a new booking instead, since capacity was only checked for the original number.

Press Move to reschedule the same booking: a New time list for the same service and day appears, and a second Move confirms it. The booking keeps its assigned table if that table is still free at the new time, so a manual table choice from the previous step is never quietly thrown away. Press History to expand a full timeline for that booking — booked, edited, tables assigned or cleared, deposit paid, reminder sent, moved, and every status change — useful the moment anyone asks “who changed this and when.” To cancel, choose Cancelled in the booking’s status list (or press Cancel on its sheet in Service); No-show sits in the same list.

Run a walk-in waitlist

On Bookings, the Waitlist card sits above the day’s services — always there, even with nobody in the queue. Fill in Name, Party, Phone and an optional Quoted wait, then press Add to waitlist. With the diary on today, the note beside the button reads Joins today’s walk-in queue; open another date first and the entry waits for that date. Service has the same list under Waitlist in its rail.

Once a party is queued, each entry shows how long they’ve been waiting and three actions: Notify emails them that their table’s ready when the entry has an email address (it sends within 15 minutes; with no email the button is greyed, so ring the phone number instead), Seat opens a short inline booking form that seats them through the same engine as a New booking, and Left takes them off the queue if they’ve gone.

Build your floor plan

Open Floor plan from the Floor plan button in the toolbar of Bookings, or press Edit floor in Service. Press + Table to add one, or the + Element dropdown for a room fixture — an area or room outline, a text label, a door, a window, a WC, a kitchen, a counter or bar, or a direction arrow. ⎋ Rotate turns the current selection 15° at a time, ⍑ Snap keeps everything on the grid, undo and redo sit before it, − and + zoom, and ⤢ Fit brings the whole floor into view in one press. Service floor → at the top right takes you to the live floor, and ← Service goes back.

Click any table to open its details on the right — its Label, Seats min and Seats max, Shape (rectangle, round or oval), Width and Height, Zone, Room / floor, and whether it’s Combinable with same-zone tables. Press Save details to keep the changes. Duplicate table copies the table; Retire table takes it out of use without losing its booking history, and the button becomes Restore table; Remove table… deletes it. Drag on empty space to select several tables at once and move or nudge them together; with nothing selected, the panel lists every keyboard and mouse shortcut.

Organise tables into rooms

The pills bottom-right of the floor-plan canvas switch which room you’re looking at — Main room, Terrace and Private Dining on the showroom, plus one pill per room you add; each room is its own canvas, and a new table always lands in whichever room is on screen. Press the layers icon next to them to open Rooms & floors.

Type a name — “Terrace,” “First floor” — and press Add for a new room. Press Rename on any room except the Main room to change its name, or the × to delete it; deleting a room only clears its tables’ room assignment, so they land back in Main room rather than disappearing. Select one or more tables on the canvas first and the panel adds a Move here button to every room row, so relocating a whole section of the floor is one drag-select and one click.

Together, the three pages run the whole booking lifecycle: an enquiry lands in the Inbox, becomes a confirmed row on Bookings with a table assigned from the plan you built here, and every change from there — a move, a cancellation, a walk-in seated off the waitlist — stays visible on the same diary, for as long as it matters.