Reservations

Reservations is your live table plan - the working floor view your team uses to seat guests, move tables around and take deposits. Open a venue and choose Reservations. The grid keeps itself up to date by polling for changes every 30 seconds, so everyone on the floor sees the same picture.

Four views

Across the top you can switch between four ways of looking at reservations:

Grid - the time-versus-tables floor plan (the main working view, below).
Coverflow - a per-venue day aggregate for a quick shape of the service.
List - a sortable, groupable table of every reservation.
Pre Orders - every pre-ordered item across a date range, for kitchen prep (see The Pre Orders view below).

The time grid

The Grid lays tables down the side and time across the top, running from 6am through to 6am the next day in 15-minute steps (bookings snap to 15-minute increments). Turn on Hide closed hours in your account preferences to trim the grid down to just your open hours instead.

Each reservation shows as a colour-coded pill placed on its table at its time. Colours reflect the reservation’s status - confirmed, pending, checked-in, late, no-show or cancelled - layered on top of your venue’s own colours. Small icons on a pill tell you more at a glance:

Icon	Meaning
Paid	The reservation has been paid.
Deposit hold	A card hold - gold = held, green = captured, grey = released, amber = expired (the bank released it before the visit and it needs re-requesting).
Lock	The reservation is locked to its table (won’t be auto-reassigned).

Late and no-show don’t have their own icon: the pill’s colour signals them (amber for late, red for a no-show), and the grid’s Legend below spells out what each status colour means.

Blocks appear as hatched bars. Along the edge, an orphans / waitlist strip holds reservations that aren’t assigned to a table yet - drag from here to seat them, or drag a pill back to unassign it, and reorder within the strip.

Working the grid

Drag a pill to a new table or time to assign it.
Resize a pill to change its duration.
Locked reservations and blocks can still be dragged when you need to.
Moving one table in a combination moves its siblings together.
Click an empty cell to start creating a reservation or block there.
Click a pill to open its detail panel.

Creating a reservation

Choose + Add (or click an empty cell) and pick Reservation.
Search for the guest, or create a new one if they’re not on file.
Set the date, time, party size and duration, choose the reservation type (see Reservation type below), and choose the table. Leave it on Auto select to let Sidedoor seat the party for you, choose Select table(s) to pick yourself, or No table to book it for now without seating it (see Choosing tables below).
Add any tags and notes.
If you want a deposit, choose + Request deposit to attach a card hold.
Save to place the reservation on the grid.

Reservation type

Every reservation is booked under an access rule, shown as its Reservation type. When you create or edit a reservation, the field lists rules in two groups: Matches this date, time & party first (every rule that naturally covers the slot), then Other rules (every other table rule at the venue), so your team can book, or rebook, a party under any rule - even one that doesn’t cover its current table. Picking a type carries that rule’s tags and front-facing display name onto the reservation, and changing it on an existing reservation is logged on the History tab as reservation type changed.

Choosing tables

Whenever you create or edit a reservation, the Table field offers three tiles:

Auto select - Sidedoor picks the best free table for the party when you save.
No table - books the guest without seating them. The reservation sits as an unassigned entry in the orphans / waitlist strip until your team seats it by hand, by dragging it onto a table, using Assign / Move table from its detail panel, or picking a table from here later. Unlike a regular waitlist request, a reservation booked this way is never seated automatically, so it waits exactly as long as your team needs it to.
Select table(s) - opens a picker so you place the party yourself.

On an existing reservation the same three tiles appear in the detail panel (see Changing tables on an existing reservation below). Choosing No table there takes a seated booking off its table and puts it back on the waitlist, flagged so it’s never auto-assigned. Choosing Auto select clears that flag again and hands the booking back to Sidedoor, which seats it on the best free table straight away.

The table picker

Select table(s) opens a picker panel with everything you need to seat the party by hand:

Two summary tiles at the top: Party size and Table selection capacity. The capacity tile turns amber to warn you when the tables you’ve picked can’t seat the whole party.
A Table name search to jump straight to a table.
Per-area accordions of table tiles, listed in table-number order (Table 2 before Table 10). Tap a tile to select it, and tap more to build a set, as many as you like. Select all picks every table in an area at once.
Each area’s combined tables (tables joined together to seat a larger party) sit in their own {area}: combined tables section, marked with a link icon.
Tables already booked or blocked for that date and time show greyed out and can’t be picked - including a table held by a booking that runs past midnight, which stays marked unavailable on both the date it starts and the date it ends.

Changing tables on an existing reservation

Open a reservation and choose Assign / Move table in its detail panel to get the same three tiles - Auto select, No table and Select table(s) - with one extra: Allow override onto blocked tables, which lets you place the reservation onto a blocked table when you really need to.

Waitlists

When you can’t seat a guest right away, add them to the waitlist instead of turning them away. A waitlist request sits in the orphans / waitlist strip as an unassigned entry until a table frees up - then you seat it like any other reservation.

Choose + Add → Add waitlist. It’s available from both the all-venues view and a single venue’s grid.
Search for the guest, or create a new one. (Leave it blank and we’ll add a quick walk-in for you.)
Set the party size and the time window you’re happy to seat them in - an Earliest time (defaults to now) and a Latest time (defaults to an hour later). We’ll try to fit the guest onto any free table between the two.
Add any tags and notes, then save. The request appears as an unassigned entry in the orphans / waitlist strip.

Seating a waitlist request

Drag the waitlist entry onto a free table (or use Assign table from its detail panel). That confirms the reservation and lets the guest know - by email, a push notification, and a message in the reservation’s chat thread.

Adding guests to the waitlist from the grid works whether or not you’ve turned on the waitlist option on your public booking widget - the two are independent.

Creating a block

Choose + Add → Block to take tables out of service - for a private hire, maintenance or a walk-in hold. Set the date, a reason, the start and end times, and whether it repeats (once or weekly). Blocks show as hatched bars on the grid.

The reservation detail panel

Click a pill to open its detail panel. The Details tab shows the guest’s contact information and the current status pill, and gives you everything you need to run the table. A Pre-order tab appears alongside it for pre-ordered items and add-ons (see below). The Chat tab is a two-way conversation with the guest about this booking - see Messaging. A Till tab appears, right before History, once there’s something to show on it: a running bill from your till (when a till integration is connected) and any money already taken against the reservation, such as a captured deposit (net of any refunds) or a redeemed voucher - not a payment made for the pre-order, which pays for items instead of crediting the tab. It totals everything as the Tab total. A History tab keeps the audit trail.

The action stepper

A stepper walks the reservation through its service lifecycle:

Check in → In use → Mark paid → Close / Cancel

Move the reservation along as the guest arrives, sits down, pays and leaves.

Other actions

Edit the party size, duration and reservation type.
Edit guest - update the name, email or phone stored on this reservation. If it’s linked to a guest account, tick Notify guest (on by default) and the guest is emailed a link to accept or decline the change on their account too; leave it unticked and only the reservation changes. Edit the email itself and Notify guest switches off and locks, with a note that it’s not available when the email is changed - put the original email back and your last choice returns. Choose Link a different guest alongside it to attach the reservation to a different account instead.
Assign / Move table - opens the table picker.
Lock the reservation to its table so smart reassignment leaves it alone.
Deposit - a full Deposit tab for capturing, releasing, refunding and requesting more against the booking’s card hold or deposit - see Deposits & card holds.
Send pre-order request - see Sending a pre-order request below.
Resend confirmation email - email the guest their booking confirmation again. Available for a confirmed, upcoming booking; greyed out, with the reason shown on hover, once it’s checked in, closed, cancelled, marked no-show, or its start time has passed.
Send review request - see Sending a review request below.
Add comments and tags.

Editing the guest’s details

Next to the guest’s name on the Details tab, Edit opens a clean view in place of the panel, with a back button to return to the reservation. Update the name, email or phone held against this booking here. If it’s linked to a guest account, Notify guest (see Other actions) decides whether the guest is also asked to update their account.

Underneath the form, Link a different guest moves the whole booking to a different guest account instead.

Sending a pre-order request

Choose Send pre-order request from the reservation’s Actions menu (above Save changes) to invite the guest to add pre-order or add-on items to this booking themselves, without you cancelling and rebooking it. The request goes out on the venue’s Deposit request channels (Settings → Notifications) - email, app push and SMS, whichever the venue has turned on for that row.

The action is greyed out, with the reason shown, when:

the reservation is cancelled, closed or has already started,
its access rule has no pre-order or add-on items to offer, or
the booking is past the venue’s Pre-order cutoff, a setting under Settings → Tables → General that closes pre-orders a set number of minutes before the start time (left blank, there’s no cutoff).

Once a request has gone out, the action reads Resend pre-order request and sends the same link again - handy if the guest missed it the first time. Every step is logged on the reservation’s History tab: the request being sent (and on which channels), the guest opening the link, and what they add.

A reservation can also pick up a pre-order request automatically, a set number of days before the booking, from the Pre-order request automation - handy if you’d rather not send these by hand.

Sending a review request

Choose Send review request from the reservation’s Actions menu to email the guest a link to leave a review of this visit. The email uses the venue’s review wording (Settings → Marketing → General → Reviews) and includes a Leave a review link for that visit.

The action is greyed out, with the reason shown, when:

the reservation is upcoming, a no-show or cancelled, or
the guest has already reviewed this visit.

It becomes available once the guest has checked in, and stays available after the reservation closes. Once a request has gone out, the action reads Resend review request and sends the same link again. Every send is logged on the reservation’s History tab.

The Pre-order tab

The Pre-order tab collects the pre-order and add-on items on a reservation, and lets you add more on the guest’s behalf. It’s on every reservation, so you can add items even when the guest didn’t order any at booking. A small count badge shows how many items are on the reservation, and a Pre-order tag is added automatically so these bookings are easy to spot and filter.

Items are shown in two groups, and the guest’s group carries a status that reflects how their deposit was actually taken:

The guest’s pre-order (items picked at booking) shows one of Paid, Card hold, Card on file or Not paid, depending on the booking’s payment policy. Under a Capture policy the total was genuinely charged, so it reads Paid. Under a Hold policy it’s secured by a card hold instead (or a saved card, held closer to the visit) and released at check-in, so it reads Card hold or Card on file - a note tells you to collect payment at the till. If no card is on file at all, it reads Not paid.
Items a guest adds later through a pre-order request link get their own card, separate from the booking’s original deposit: Paid via pre-order link if they paid online there and then, or Card hold via pre-order link if the venue’s policy holds rather than charges - again collect payment at the till for a hold.
Payment not collected - items your team added. These aren’t paid, so collect payment at the till or on service. A running Total due is shown.
Paid by pre-order payment - items your team added that a captured payment made for the pre-order (requested from the Deposit tab with its Purpose set to Pre-order payment) has paid for, in the order they were added. A part payment only marks the whole items it can afford; refunding that payment marks them not paid again. A regular deposit that happens to cover the total due never marks items paid this way - it shows Covered by deposit instead.

All of the above are for reference; you can’t change them here.

Adding items

Choose + Add items. Sidedoor loads the items available for this reservation. The list follows the reservation’s access profile: if the profile pins a set of pre-order or add-on lists, only those are offered; if it doesn’t, your full venue menu is available.
Pick an item and set a quantity. If an item has options (like a size or a choice of side), choose them - some are single-select, some let you pick more than one. Prices come from your menu, so the total is always right.
Choose Add. The item drops into the Payment not collected group.

To take a staff-added item back off, choose the × on its line. Items the guest paid for at checkout can’t be removed here.

The List view

The List view is a spreadsheet-style read of the day, with columns for Time, Covers, Name, Table, Notes, Booked by, Status and Spend. Use Group by to cluster rows by None, Time, Area, Tags or Status.

The Booked by column tells you where each reservation came from:

Booked by	Source
Staff	Created by your team in the portal (this includes walk-ins you seat on the night).
Guest app	Booked by the guest through the Sidedoor guest app.
Widget	Booked through an embedded website widget.

You may still see Walk-in on older reservations. It’s kept for historical rows only: a walk-in you seat today is recorded as Staff.

The Pre Orders view

Switch to Pre Orders for a single list of every pre-ordered item across a date range, not just one day, which makes it useful for planning kitchen prep ahead of service. It’s a line-item view, not a reservation view: a reservation with three pre-ordered items shows as three rows, one per item.

Columns are Covers, Time, Name, Table, Item, Qty, Deposit and Type. Deposit and Type describe the reservation the item belongs to, not the item itself: Deposit is the reservation’s deposit status, and Type is its access rule or booking type. Item totals for the filtered range are shown too, a quick prep count for the kitchen.

Use Group by to cluster rows by Pre-order item, Time (15 min), Seating area, Reservation type or Status. A search box covers item, guest and table, and you can filter by:

Date range - a custom range, or a quick pick (Today, Tomorrow, Next 7 days, Upcoming, Past, Any).
Status - Confirmed, Pending, Awaiting payment, Approved, Checked in, No show, Expired or Cancelled (Cancelled is unchecked by default).
Deposit - Has a deposit or No deposit.
Item payment - Paid or Payment not collected.

Results page in as you scroll, so long lists stay quick to load. Choose Print for a print-friendly copy, handy for handing a prep sheet to the kitchen.

To add or manage the pre-order items on one reservation, open that reservation and use its Pre-order tab instead.

Deposits on reservations

Reservations use the same card-hold model as guest-list bookings: an authorisation that you capture (in full or in part) or release at the door. Per-cover deposits are driven by your price lists. For the complete walkthrough, see Deposits & card holds.