Using reservations on a phone
What this covers
What changes on a phone or a small tablet, and which jobs are better done on a bigger screen.
Tabledoo rearranges rather than shrinks
On a narrow screen the long tables become one card per booking — for Reservations, Guests and the Waitlist alike. Each card shows the guest, the date and time, the pax and the status, with the same action menu as the full-size row. You can confirm, seat, complete and cancel from a card.
Nothing is missing and nothing is read-only. You are not using a cut-down version.
The Timeline is the exception
The Timeline is a wide grid of tables against time, and that genuinely does not work on a phone. Below a certain width it offers a switch to list view button instead.
You lose the at-a-glance shape of the day — the gaps, the back-to-back turns, the over-booked section — which is the whole point of the Timeline. So keep Timeline work for the host-stand tablet or the office computer, and use the list on a phone.
What works well on a phone
- Checking who is due in the next couple of hours, from the Dashboard.
- Marking guests arrived, seated and completed while you are on the floor.
- Taking a booking on the phone while standing away from the host stand.
- Looking up a guest before you greet them.
What is better on a tablet or computer
- The Timeline, and planning a service.
- The assignment tray, when you are placing many bookings at once.
- Drawing or editing your floor plan — it says it prefers a bigger screen, though it will not stop you.
- Reports and settings.
Two things worth doing
- Install Tabledoo as an app so it opens full screen and loads instantly. It takes 20 seconds: see Installing Tabledoo as an app.
- Tick "Remember me" when you sign in on your own phone, so you are not typing a password at the start of every shift.
If the connection drops
If your wifi is patchy, an installed Tabledoo keeps showing you the last information it had rather than an error page. It catches up on its own when the signal returns. During service, it is worth glancing at Live View again after the connection comes back, in case a colleague changed something while you were offline.