Pacing: max covers per slot
What this covers
The setting that stops your kitchen being ambushed: a cap on how many covers may start
at once. Requires the manage-settings permission. Found on
Property Settings → Restaurant as Max covers per slot.
The problem it solves
Your room seats 60 and your kitchen can plate about eight main courses in half an hour. Nothing in a plain table-availability check knows that. So twelve people can quite legitimately book four separate tables all starting at 20:00 — every table free, every rule satisfied, and a kitchen that cannot possibly serve them.
The result is the familiar bad service: everything late, everyone apologising, and a room that was never actually full.
Pacing fixes it by capping arrivals rather than occupancy. It is the difference between "can we seat these people" and "can we cook for them all at once".
How it works
Enter a number of covers. Tabledoo then counts the covers whose start time falls inside each booking-interval window, and will not let that exceed your cap.
With a 30-minute interval and a cap of 12: the 19:30 window can take 12 covers in total. An eighth person arriving into a window that already has 8 is fine; a party of 6 into a window that already has 8 is not.
Leave the field empty to switch it off, which is the default.
What counts
- Covers, not bookings. A party of six uses six of your cap.
- Arrivals only. A table still occupied from 19:00 does not count against the 20:00 window. This is about the kitchen at that moment.
- Bookings with no table yet count too, because the guests are still arriving (link Unassigned reservations).
What happens when the cap is reached
| Who | What they see |
|---|---|
| A guest on your booking page | The time simply is not offered. No explanation, no error |
| Your staff, picking a time | The time is not in the list either |
| Your staff, creating anyway | The booking is created, with a warning: "Reservation created — heads up, this slot is now over your pacing cap." |
That last row is the important design decision: staff are authoritative. A regular ringing up for a table at a full slot is a judgement call for a human, not something the software should forbid. So the cap shapes demand quietly and warns your team rather than blocking them.
In seatings mode
The window becomes the whole seating rather than one interval, and the seating's own max covers wins if it has one — falling back to this restaurant-wide cap if not.
That is the more natural way to express it: "this sitting seats 40" rather than "eight covers per half hour" (link Managing seatings).
Choosing a number
Base it on your kitchen's real output, not your seat count. The question is: how many main courses can leave your kitchen in one booking interval without quality dropping?
- Ask your head chef. They will know, and they will be pleased to be asked.
- Or measure: on a busy night, count the covers that started inside your busiest half hour and ask whether service held up. If it did, that is your number or a little above.
- Start generous and tighten. A cap set too low turns away bookings you could have taken, and you will not see what you lost.
Rough starting points
| Kitchen | Per 30 minutes |
|---|---|
| Small, one or two chefs, plated food | 8–12 covers |
| Mid-size brigade, full à la carte | 16–24 covers |
| Large kitchen or simpler menu | 30+ covers |
| Set or tasting menu | Use seatings instead — the whole sitting is the unit |
Checking whether it is right
After a few weeks, read the bookings by hour chart on the reservation report. A flat ceiling across your peak hours, with your busiest slots pinned at exactly the cap, means the cap is now your constraint rather than your kitchen — either it is too low, or you genuinely have more demand than capacity, which is a nice problem and a different decision (link Reservation report).
The booking page funnel report is the other side of the same question: if slot checks are high and submissions low on your busiest dates, a tight cap may be part of why.
Good to know
Existing bookings are never touched. Setting a cap does not cancel anything already over it. It only shapes what can be booked from now on.
Walk-ins bypass it, as they bypass every advance rule — they are already standing in front of you.
It is one number for the whole restaurant, not per section or per weekday. For a Friday that needs different pacing from a Tuesday, seatings are the tool.
A cap smaller than your largest party makes that party unbookable online. A cap of 6 with a maximum party size of 10 means a party of 10 can never fit any window. Keep the cap at or above your maximum party size.