Diners can request a table straight from your menu, it lands on a real table, and you answer from the dashboard.
Nothing is ever auto-confirmed — a request arrives pending and you answer it — but the table is held from the moment somebody asks for it, so two parties are never sent to the same one.
To switch it on: 1. Open Profile and turn on bookings. 2. Choose Tables — guests dine in. 3. Set the notice you need, how far ahead people may book, the smallest and largest party you accept, and how long a table is held (ninety minutes unless you say otherwise). 4. Save. A "Book a table" entry appears behind the More button on your menu. 5. Open Bookings, then The room, and list your tables: what the staff call each one, how many it seats, and where it is.
Step 5 is what makes the rest work. Until you list the room, bookings still come in exactly as they always did — but nothing can tell you when you are full, and the form cannot grey out a time that has gone.
If you have no tables — a bakery, a patisserie, a shop people collect from — choose Pickup instead. Everything works the same way, except the form asks for a collection time rather than a party size, and the wording your customer sees says pickup throughout: "Schedule a pickup", "Your pickup request", "Pickup confirmed". Your inbox becomes Pickup requests. You can switch between the two at any time; requests already in your inbox are unaffected.
Answering a request: 1. Open Bookings. It opens on today, in time order, with each booking's table beside it and the ones still waiting on an answer called out. 2. Confirm or decline, and add a note if you want to ("Table by the window", "Fully booked, try Sunday"). 3. The diner sees your answer on their own phone, with a short pop-up the moment it changes. If they left an email, they get one too.
Through the night: 1. Seat them when they arrive. A booking with no table cannot be seated — give it one first. 2. Finish it when they leave, and the table goes back into the evening for somebody else. 3. Mark a no-show if they never came. That frees the table too, and it is the one thing every restaurant wants written down.
Both endings can be undone: a cancellation taken for the wrong party, or a no-show marked five minutes before somebody walks in.
Somebody rings up? "Take a booking" on the same screen goes through exactly the same availability check, and arrives confirmed — you have already said yes.
Changing a table: tap Table on a booking and you are offered the ones actually free for that slot, checked at the moment you tap rather than when the page was drawn.
Taking a table out of use: a table nothing has ever booked is deleted; one with history is put out of service instead, so last month's bookings keep it.
The diner needs no account and installs nothing. Their phone remembers the request, which is what lets it show them the answer later. What they never see is your own wording — seated, finished and no-show are your words for your evening; their card says the booking has passed.
The limits you set are enforced when the request is sent, so a party of twelve cannot arrive through a form that says you take eight — and a party bigger than any table you own is told that plainly rather than being told you are full.