Sections and tables
Building your room: sections, per-table seat counts, who sits where, and reading tonight as turns and sellable gaps.
A floor plan here is a list, not a drawing. You name your sections, list the tables in each, and say how many each one seats. There is nothing to drag and nothing to align, because none of that changes how many people you can feed.
Sections first, then tables
Open Floor plan, then Edit layout. The editor tells you its job in one line: "Name your sections, list the tables in each, set how many each one seats."
A section is whatever you already call a part of your room out loud — Terrace, Bar, Upstairs, Garden. If your team says it during service, make it a section. If they don't, don't.
Then tables, each with a name and a seat count.
Names are yours. Numbers, letters, "the window", "big round" — whatever your team shouts across a pass at eight o'clock. The software never shows a table name to a guest, so the only test that matters is whether your floor staff recognise it.
Tables with no section land in Unzoned. That is not an error state and you do not have to clear it — a venue with one room and eight tables can leave every one of them unzoned and nothing works worse. Sections earn their keep when you have parts of a room that behave differently: a terrace that closes when it rains, a private upstairs.
Archiving, not deleting
Tables go away by being archived.
The editor says why: "Archived tables keep their bookings and keep their names reserved, so a new table can't inherit an old one's history."
That is the whole argument. A table you delete takes its past with it — last month's covers, who sat where, which section a booking belonged to. A table you archive stops being offered for new bookings and keeps everything it has already held. If you bring it back, it comes back as itself.
The name stays reserved too, which is why creating "12" again while an archived "12" exists tells you to restore it instead. Two tables called 12 in one history is a reporting problem you would find months later.
Putting a booking on a table
Assignment is per booking, from the booking itself. The picker sorts what is available at that time into three groups, and the labels are worth knowing because they are doing real work:
- Free & big enough — free at that time, and seats at least the party size.
- Free, but seats fewer — free, and smaller than the party. Offered rather than hidden, because you know things the seat count does not: two of the four are children, or you pull a chair up.
- Taken — with who has it, so you can decide whether to move them.
If nothing is free the picker says so plainly: "Nothing free at this time. Pick from the taken list to see who has what."
Assign a table that is already occupied for an overlapping period and it refuses, naming the clash: "That table is taken." — with the hours. It is one of the few places the software will not let you proceed, and it is deliberate: a double-booked table is discovered by the two parties standing in front of it.
A booking with no table is fine. It shows as No table and it still counts toward your covers, your capacity and your service. Table assignment is a floor tool, not a booking requirement — plenty of venues seat on the night and never assign in advance.
Reading tonight
The main floor-plan view is not a map. It is one row per table across the whole service, and its own hint says what to look for: "Each row is a table, across the service. Select a turn to see its detail — the gaps are where you can still sell."
Along the top:
- Turns — how many sittings you have tonight in total.
- Second turns — how many tables are turning more than once. This is the number that tells you whether your seating times are actually working.
- Sellable gaps — space between two bookings on the same table, long enough to be worth filling.
- Covers expected — people, not bookings.
- Unassigned — bookings with no table yet.
Sellable gaps are the reason to look at this screen at five o'clock rather than at eleven. A ninety-minute hole on table six at seven-thirty is a walk-in you can take or a waitlisted party you can call, and it is invisible on a list of bookings sorted by time.
Second turns and seat counts are related, and the relationship is not obvious. How long you hold a table decides whether a second turn fits at all — that is set once for the venue, not per table, and it lives with the rest of your capacity settings. If your second-turn count is stubbornly zero, the seat counts here are rarely the cause; the hold time usually is.
What this does not do
It does not draw your room, and it will not stop you overbooking a section. Per-slot cover limits and party sizes are separate controls and they are the ones that actually cap what the booking page offers — a floor plan tells you where people sit, not how many the page will take.