Automatic no-shows and completion — Help

What this covers

Two jobs Tabledoo runs in the background to keep your day honest without anybody remembering to tidy up.

Why any of this exists

A booking nobody resolved is worse than a wrong booking. Left as Confirmed, it keeps its table looking busy forever — so Live View shows a table as taken, the Dashboard counts it as unavailable, and you turn away guests you could have seated. These two jobs close those bookings out for you.

Automatic no-shows

Every few minutes, Tabledoo looks for bookings that are still Pending or Confirmed well after their time has passed, and marks them No Show.

"Well after" is a setting you control: the no-show grace period, which starts at two hours. A booking for 19:00 with a two-hour grace period is marked as a no-show at around 21:00 if nobody has touched it.

Set it shorter and tables free up faster, but a genuinely late guest may find their booking already marked.
Set it longer and you are kinder to late guests, but tables stay blocked longer on a busy night.

Two hours suits most restaurants. Change it in Property Settings → Restaurant — see Booking rules reference.

The same grace period is also the point at which Live View stops treating an unresolved booking as holding its table, so the two always agree. See What each table status means.

Automatic completion

Once an hour, Tabledoo closes bookings that were marked Arrived or Seated and then left open 12 hours past when they should have ended. Nobody is still at a table 12 hours later; the booking was simply never completed.

This is housekeeping, not bookkeeping. It stops old bookings hanging around, but a booking closed this way has no bill recorded, so it contributes nothing to your revenue report. Which is the real argument for completing tables as they leave — see Recording the bill and tip.

What this means for your reports

Automatic no-shows count towards your no-show rate exactly like ones you set by hand. That is usually what you want — a guest who never arrived is a no-show however it was recorded. But it means a high no-show rate can be partly a recording problem: if staff are not marking arrivals, bookings get swept up as no-shows and your rate looks worse than reality.

If your no-show rate looks wrong, check whether arrivals are actually being marked during service before concluding your guests are unreliable.

Good to know

You can always correct it. A booking marked as a no-show by mistake can be edited back.
Nothing is deleted, ever. Both jobs only change a status.
Guests are not messaged when either job runs. Nobody receives an automatic "you didn't turn up" email.