Running service: advancing a booking
What this covers
The buttons you press during a shift as guests arrive, sit and leave. All four roles can do everything on this page — including servers, deliberately, because this is the work of the floor.
The buttons
| Button | Press it when |
|---|---|
| Confirm | You have checked the booking and are holding the table. |
| Mark Arrived | The guests are in the building — at the door, at the bar, waiting. |
| Mark Seated | They are at their table. |
| Complete | They have left and the table is free. See Recording the bill and tip. |
| No Show | They never came and never said anything. |
| Cancel Reservation | The booking is off. You are asked for a reason. |
Where the buttons are
Everywhere you can see a booking, so you never have to navigate to act:
- The Dashboard arrivals list.
- Live View — the natural place during service.
- The Reservations list, from each row.
- The Timeline — click a block.
- The booking's own page.
Arrived or Seated?
Use both if you have a bar or a wait — Arrived means "they are here", and Seated means "they are at the table". The gap between the two is what tells you how long people are waiting at the door.
If guests always go straight to the table, going from Confirmed to Seated in one step is perfectly fine.
Cancelling
You are asked for a reason. Write something a colleague would understand — "guest called, child unwell" beats "cancelled". If cancellation messages are switched on, the guest is told automatically, and the table returns to the available pool immediately.
Marking a no-show
Only after you are genuinely sure. Tabledoo will also do it for you: any booking left unresolved past your grace period is marked as a no-show automatically, which stops forgotten bookings blocking tables all evening. See Automatic no-shows and completion.
No-shows feed your no-show rate in the reservation report, which is how you find out whether reminder messages are working.
Good habits during a shift
- Complete tables as they leave, not at the end of the night. That is what keeps Live View honest and lets you seat walk-ins with confidence.
- Do not batch it up. The times are recorded as you press the button, so pressing everything at 23:00 makes your turnaround reports meaningless.
- One person owns the door during a busy service. Two people marking arrivals on different devices is fine — Tabledoo keeps up — but it is easy for both to assume the other did it.