Running service from a phone
The same admin, adapted: where the navigation goes, what changes at each width, and the one thing that behaves differently on a small screen.
There is no app. The admin is one website that rearranges itself, so a phone signs in at the same address as the laptop in the office and lands on the same board with the same bookings. What follows is what moves, and at what width — because the answer to "where did the menu go" is that it is behind a button now.
Three layouts, not two
The console has three arrangements, and the width of the screen picks between them without asking.
Wide (1280px and up). The full sidebar, labels and all. A desktop or a laptop.
Narrow desktop and landscape tablets (1024–1279px). The sidebar collapses to a rail of icons. Everything is still there and still one tap away; the labels are what goes, because at this width the labels were costing more room than they were earning.
Phones and portrait tablets (below 1024px). The sidebar goes away entirely and becomes a hamburger button. Tapping it slides the whole navigation in over the page, and choosing something closes it again.
That last threshold is the one worth remembering, because it is where the screen stops looking like the one you set the venue up on. Nothing has been removed. Today, Bookings, Calendar, Floor plan, Events, Team, Menu, Settings — the same list, in the same order, behind one button.
A portrait iPad is below 1024px and gets the phone arrangement; turned landscape it crosses the line and gets the icon rail. If a tablet at the host stand seems to change its mind, that is what happened, and rotating it back is the whole fix.
Taking a booking on a phone
The booking drawer has its own threshold, lower than the navigation's: 768px.
Above it, the drawer slides in from the right, the way a side panel does on a desktop. Below it — which is every phone — it comes up from the bottom instead, as a sheet you can fill in with one thumb. Same fields, same order, same result.
The confirm button is the one thing that reads differently down there, and it is worth knowing why: on a phone the drawer drops its Cancel button. Not to save room, but because the sheet already closes by being swiped away or tapped outside, and a cancel control sitting next to a confirm control under a thumb is a mis-tap waiting to happen. The way out is the gesture you already use everywhere else.
The quick-add bar
The bar at the top of Bookings does not change shape. Name, party size, time, and a mode — Walk-in, Waitlist or Reservation — and it tells you where the entry will land before you commit:
- SEATED · WALK-IN
- WAITLIST · NO TABLE HELD
- CONFIRMED
This is the fastest path on a phone and the reason the bar exists. Someone is at the door, you have your phone, three taps and a name. If you need the full form, Full form opens it.
What does not change
Everything that decides what a guest sees. Capacity, slot length, turn times, party-size limits, your service periods, whether bookings arrive confirmed or as requests — these are the same settings, read from the same place, whichever screen you opened them on.
Dates and times follow your language, not the venue's. A Swedish manager opening a London venue's board sees Swedish weekday names above London times. The venue's own language is for guests.
Add the admin to your home screen and it opens like an app — full screen, no address bar. It is still the website; nothing installs and nothing needs updating. On iOS that is Share → Add to Home Screen, on Android ⋮ → Add to Home screen.
Signing in
The same address and the same credentials. If you are the only person who uses that phone, staying signed in is the point — a host who has to type a password at the door during a rush will stop using the phone and go back to paper, which is the outcome all of this exists to avoid.
If the phone is shared, or lives at the stand rather than in a pocket, give it its own login rather than sharing yours. Roles decide what each person can reach, so a host account can work the board without being able to change your pricing or your team. See Who can do what.