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 today’s diary, grouped by hour, with one press to mark a table Arrived against a Booked/Live status. 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 Bookings in the sidebar — the page every phone booking, walk-in and guest reservation lives on once it’s a confirmed time. Day and Month switch the view; Day is where you’ll spend service, with a date field, ‘‘‹’’ and ‘‘›’’ to move a day at a time, and a search box that finds any booking on any date by name, phone or email. Bookings are grouped by service — Lunch, Dinner — each with its own covers count.

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 deposit chip. Press Copy guest link to copy the guest’s own self-service view/cancel page, ready to text or email. The one-press button on the right always advances a booking to its next natural stage — Confirmed → Arrived → Seated → Completed — and the dropdown beside it jumps straight to Cancelled or No-show whenever you need to. A booking waiting on a deposit or card guarantee shows Awaiting deposit instead and offers only a cancel until it’s paid or held — setting deposits up is covered in Hours and booking rules · Deposits & card guarantees.

Add a phone or walk-in booking

Press New booking at the top of Bookings. Set Date, Guests and Time — the time list is grouped by whichever service runs that day, and a slot already booked out is marked so you can see it before you try it. Set Source to Phone or Walk-in, then fill in Name and Email — the email is what lets the guest receive their confirmation and reminder, so it’s worth asking for even on a phone call; Phone is optional.

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. 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 mini floor plan, colour-coded so the choice is obvious at a glance: green tables are free, grey tables are already booked then (unclickable, with the clashing time shown), 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.

Clicking a table swaps your pick by default; 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 Use selected table to confirm, or Cancel to back out and leave it on Auto. On any existing booking in the diary, its table chip (⊞ T05, or ⊞ Assign table if it doesn’t have one yet) opens this exact same picker to reassign or clear the table — no separate save step, the change applies the moment you confirm it.

Edit, move or cancel a booking

Every booking row on Bookings carries three more controls beyond its status button. 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 to a different time within the same service and day; it keeps the 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.”

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 — it joins today’s walk-in queue, or waits for whichever future date you have the diary open on.

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 (call instead if there’s no email on the entry), 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 in the sidebar, or the Floor plan button at the top of Bookings. 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 either side of it, and ⤢ Fit zooms out to the whole floor in one press.

Click any table to open its inspector on the right — its label, seats min and max, shape (rectangle, round or oval), zone, room, whether it’s combinable with same-zone tables, and its width and height, with every change previewing live on the canvas before you move on. Drag on empty space to select several tables at once and move, nudge or set a zone on all of them together.

Organise tables into rooms

The pills bottom-right of the floor-plan canvas switch which room you’re looking at — Main room plus one pill per room you’ve added; 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 custom 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.