How to manage restaurant bookings without going crazy on the phone

If you run a restaurant you know the scene: it's Saturday night, the dining room is full, the phone rings and someone asks for a table for eight. You answer with busy hands, jot it down in pen and hope you don't get it wrong. Phone bookings work, but they cost time, attention and sometimes customers.

The most common problems

• Phone calls during service that interrupt the people working in the dining room
• Tables noted in notebooks or on sheets of paper that get lost or are hard to read
• Double bookings, because there is no single up-to-date list
• Customers who book and then don't show up, with no reminder at all

What changes with online bookings

The customer picks the day, time and number of people from their phone, at any hour, even when the restaurant is closed. The system knows which tables are free and only offers real availability. You see everything on a single page: who is coming, at what time, how many of them, with any notes.

Tables, joins and timing

A good system thinks in terms of real tables: it knows that a party of eight can take two joined tables and that a table becomes free again after a certain time. This way you don't have to do the maths in your head while serving.

Where to start

You don't need to change everything in a day. You can start with bookings alone and add table ordering and the till later. If you want an idea of what can be digitised in your business, download the free guide with 100 concrete examples.