Managing your tables

What this covers

Adding, editing and retiring tables at Property Settings → Tables (/settings/tables). Requires the manage-tables permission — which Owners and Managers have, and which can be given to a Host.

Your tables are the foundation of every availability calculation in Tabledoo. Nothing can be booked before they exist.

Adding a table

Field	Notes
Name	Required. What your staff call it — "12", "T4", "Window 2". Keep it short; it has to fit in a Timeline cell
Capacity	Required, 1–100. How many people it seats. Drives every best-fit suggestion
Section	Optional grouping — Terrace, Bar, Upstairs (link Sections)
Shape	Circle, square or rectangle. Visual only, for the floor plan
Rotation	0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees. Visual only
Notes	Up to 1,000 characters. Staff-only. "Draughty", "best view", "wobbles"

Set capacity honestly

Capacity is not a maximum you could squeeze in — it is the number you are happy to seat. Every automatic table suggestion and every capacity calculation trusts it, so an optimistic six-seater that is really a comfortable four will keep being offered for six.

Bulk add

For a new restaurant, adding 30 tables one at a time is a waste of an afternoon. Bulk add creates a numbered run in one go:

Prefix — up to 10 characters, e.g. T or Table . May be a single character or a word
Start and end number — between 1 and 999
Capacity and section — applied to all of them

A prefix of T from 1 to 12 gives you T1 through T12. Numbers are not zero-padded, so you get T9 and T10, not T09.

If any name already exists the whole batch is refused and names the clash, so you cannot create a duplicate by accident. Run it once per group — all your four-seaters, then all your twos — so the capacity is right without editing afterwards.

Retiring a table

There is no permanent delete. The action in the table's menu is Deactivate, and it is reversible.

Deactivating a table:

Removes it from the floor plan, the Timeline and Live View
Stops it being offered for new bookings
Takes it out of your utilisation calculations, so retiring an unused table does not drag your figures down
Preserves all its history — past bookings keep their table, and your reports stay correct

An Activate action brings it back with its history intact. So a table taken out for the winter, or a section closed for refurbishment, costs you nothing to restore.

This is the behaviour you almost always want, and it is why there is no harder option: a genuine delete would break the link between old bookings and the table they used, and quietly falsify your own history.

QR codes

If your plan includes the Menu Display feature, each table can produce a QR code, and there is a Download All QR Codes button that gives you a ZIP of every active table's code in one go — which is how you print a set without clicking thirty times.

A table's code is tied to that specific table, so the kitchen knows which table an order came from. Print them, and do not swap them between tables (link Menu QR codes and How at-table ordering works).

Tables and your plan limit

Most plans cap how many tables you can have. When you reach it, adding one is refused with a message naming the limit:

Table limit reached (20 tables). Please upgrade your plan to add more tables.

Bulk add checks the whole batch before creating anything, so it tells you how many slots remain rather than creating some and failing partway.

Things worth knowing about the limit:

Only active tables count. Deactivating frees a slot, which is the neat way to swap a table you no longer use for one you do.
Temporary tables count while they exist — the extra table you drop in for a busy Saturday occupies a slot until it expires and deactivates itself (link Temporary tables).
Your limit is on Your plan and usage.

Good to know

Reordering the list is cosmetic. It changes the order you see here and on the Timeline, not any behaviour.

Positions are set in the floor plan, not here. Where a table sits on the plan is part of the floor-plan editor (link The floor plan editor).

Changing capacity does not revisit existing bookings. A party of six already booked onto a table you have just reduced to four stays there.

Merging is a booking decision, not a table one. You do not create a "merged table" — you merge at the point of booking (link Merging tables).