Restaurant booking
- Covers the plan seats in one service
- 66
- Seats on the floor plan
- 46
- Tables the book has to allocate
- 14
Every figure the worksheet returns is worked from the figures you enter. Where this site names an occupancy rule or a definition it comes from a public document, cited under the tool it appears in, and nothing here is advice about whether your own room is safe or lawful to fill to a given number.
Restaurant booking, for the room that already fills rather than the one deciding whether to open, is one question with an unglamorous answer: where does the booking go after somebody says yes. The saying yes barely changes between a paper diary and a system. What changes is whether the party of eight is on tables that actually join, whether the second booking taken on the website at the same time can be seen by the person on the phone, and whether anybody can say, a month later, that the same guest has now failed to arrive three times. This page sets out what the book has to hold for those three questions to have answers, and what the room seats before demand is even the constraint.
Open the Restaurant floor plan covers worksheet Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Count what the room seats before you count the demand
Table mix, how long you hold a table, how long it takes to clear and reset it, and the share of seats you really fill: the free worksheet on this site puts those together and returns the covers a service and the sittings a table turns. A restaurant that knows those two figures takes bookings differently to one that does not.
Put every booking on a named table
Not a time and a party size, a booking: this party, on this table, at this time, taken by this person. A booking with a table on it can be moved, joined and defended at the host stand; a row in a diary can only be argued about when two of them turn out to be the same table.
Keep the guest, not just the date
Cancellations and no shows hang off the guest rather than the service they spoiled, so the third one is visible before you confirm it. That is what turns a deposit policy from a blanket rule that annoys regulars into a decision about one booking.
Tell us what your room is doing with the Restaurant booking
Tell us how you take bookings today and we will tell you whether Sittingly fits, what it does not do, and what it would cost. A person who works on the product reads it.
What operators ask about the Restaurant booking
Do I have to take my bookings off the website widget I already have? No. The point of the book is that everything lands in it, so a booking taken on your own site, one taken on the phone and a walk in seated at 8:40 are the same kind of record on the same plan. What you should not keep is two books that neither of them can see, which is the arrangement that double sits tables.
Does Sittingly charge per cover? No. It is £59 a month for the restaurant, whatever you seat. A booking system that charges per cover is more expensive on exactly the nights you are busiest, which is a strange thing to buy with your own money, and it is the reason a marketplace's economics and yours are not the same.
Will it tell me how many people my room is allowed to hold? No, and be careful of anything that says it will. The worksheet works out the covers your table plan seats at your own turn times. What your premises may lawfully hold is a matter for your fire risk assessment and the authority that enforces it; the guidance figures cited on this page are design factors for escape provision, not a permission.