Your first day: a setup checklist
What this covers
The order to set your restaurant up in, and why the order matters. Allow about an hour for steps 1 to 5. You can take bookings as soon as step 4 is done.
Why the order matters
Tabledoo works out which times it can offer a guest by combining three things: your opening hours, your tables, and your booking rules. Until those exist, it has nothing to calculate from, and every screen will look empty or refuse to offer a time. So they come first, and everything else follows.
The checklist
1. Your restaurant's details
Property Settings → Restaurant (/settings/restaurant). Enter your
name, address, phone number and email. Then set your time zone, your
currency, and how you want dates and times displayed.
Do not skip the time zone. Every booking time, reminder and report is worked out from it, so getting it wrong shifts your whole day. See Time zone, currency and formats.
2. Your opening hours
On the same screen, set, for each day of the week, whether you are open and between which times. Guests can only be offered times inside these hours. See Operating hours.
3. Your tables
Property Settings → Tables (/settings/tables). Add every table you
seat guests at, with how many people it holds and which part of the room it is in. If you have a lot
of similarly named tables, use the bulk option to add a numbered run in one go. See
Managing your tables.
Be honest about capacity: this is the number Tabledoo uses to decide whether a party fits.
4. Your booking rules
Back on Property Settings → Restaurant, set how long a booking lasts by default, how far ahead guests may book, how much notice you need, and the smallest and largest party you accept. These are the rules that shape what a guest is offered. See Booking rules reference, which lists every field with a sensible starting value.
You can now take bookings. Everything below improves the experience.
5. Your staff
Property Settings → Staff (/settings/users). Create an account for
each person, and give each the right role. Do not share one login — the history of who did what
becomes useless, and so does the audit trail. See
Roles and what each one can do.
6. Your guest messages
Property Settings → Notifications (/settings/notifications). Decide
which messages guests receive — confirmation, reminder, changes, cancellation — and whether each
goes by email, text message, or both. Reminders are the single most effective thing you can switch
on to reduce no-shows. See What Tabledoo sends, and
when.
7. Your branding
Property Settings → Public Pages Design (/settings/public-pages).
Upload your logo, pick your colours and write a short welcome line. This styles every page your
guests see. See Branding your public pages.
8. Turn on your booking page and share it
On the same screen, switch your public booking page on and copy its web address. Put it in your Instagram bio, on your website, and on your Google listing. See Your public booking page and Add your booking link to Google.
9. Anything else your plan includes
These are optional and can wait for a quiet afternoon:
- Floor plan — draw your room so the Live View matches the real thing.
- Digital menu and table codes — publish your menu and print a code for each table.
- Events — set up a tasting menu or a quiz night.
- Chatbot and phone — an assistant that answers guests, and caller details appearing on screen when the phone rings.
If you cannot see one of these, it is not part of your plan — see Plans, features and limits.
Before you go live, test it yourself
Open your own booking page as if you were a guest and make a real booking for tomorrow. Check that the confirmation email arrives and that the booking appears in Reservations. Then cancel it. Five minutes here catches most setup mistakes.