Bookings lets your venue take and manage reservations and function enquiries in Tanda, in the same place you build your rosters. This guide explains what Bookings is, who can use it, what each part of the Bookings menu is for, and how to get a location ready to take bookings.

Bookings is built for hospitality venues such as restaurants, pubs, bars, cafes and function spaces. It brings your bookings and your guests into Tanda:

Because your bookings live in Tanda, your roster can show how many bookings are arriving and how many guests are seated across the day. That helps you roster the right number of staff for how busy each service will be, instead of guessing.

Bookings is in early access, so Tanda switches it on for your organisation. There's no setting to turn it on yourself.

Once Bookings is switched on for your business, everyone sees Bookings in the top menu, but what each person can open depends on their permission level. With Tanda's default permission levels:

Only users with the Admin permission level can open Guests, Settings and quotes, even if your business has customised its permission levels. Everything else follows each person's permission to edit locations, and setting up bookings at a location also needs permission to create locations. If your business has customised its permission levels, access may differ.

If you don't see a Set up button next to a location, ask an Admin to set it up. Once a location is set up, anyone who can manage its reservations can change its booking settings.

You can see each person's permission level on their profile under Permission levels. In some older accounts, the Manager permission level is called Team Manager.

Click Bookings in the top menu. It opens on the Reservations page. Users with the Admin permission level see five items in the Bookings menu. Everyone else sees Reservations, Functions and Locations.

View and manage reservations across the locations you can manage. Click Create reservation to add a booking, filter the list, or click Export run sheet to download the reservations you're looking at. The Create reservation button appears once at least one of your locations is ready to take bookings.

Track function enquiries and function bookings across your locations.

See everyone who has booked with you, and keep their name, email, phone, allergens, dietary preferences, guest tags and notes up to date. You can also mark a guest as Do Not Book. Only users with the Admin permission level see this page.

Set up and manage bookings for each of your Tanda locations. This is where you switch bookings on at a location and change its capacity, booking hours, areas, tables and online booking link. The rest of this guide walks you through it.

Click View next to a location to open its Reservations, Functions, Daily manager and Settings tabs. The Daily manager is your service screen: one location's whole day on a single page, where you can take new bookings, check guests in, seat them and move reservations.

Manage the lists your team picks from when recording guest details: Allergens, Dietary preferences and Guest tags. Tanda includes a standard list of each, such as Peanut, Vegan and VIP, and you can add your own or archive ones you don't use. Only users with the Admin permission level see this page.

Quotes for your functions sit outside the Bookings menu. If you have the Admin permission level, you'll also see Sales in the top menu, where Sales > Quotes lists the quotes you've raised for your functions.

If you're setting up Bookings for the first time, this order gets you taking bookings fastest:

Bookings are set up one location at a time. A location can take bookings once it has at least one booking area and some booking hours. Until at least one location is ready, the Reservations and Functions pages show No locations are taking bookings yet with a Go to locations button.

A Bookings set up message appears and the location's settings open. On the Locations page, its status is now Taking bookings.

You can also click View, which opens the location's reservations, then click its Settings tab. Each location has Reservations, Functions, Daily manager and Settings tabs.

The settings menu on the left has these sections: General settings, Availability, Online bookings, Booking areas (only once the location is split into areas) and Tables.

The Details section holds the location's Display name, Reply-to email and Maximum capacity. Click Update to save your changes.

Maximum capacity is the most guests the location holds at once. It counts everyone booked at the same time, whether they're with a reservation or a function, and if the location is split into areas, it applies across every area together. Leave it blank for no limit.

To stop taking online bookings for a while, for example while the location is closed for renovations, click Stop taking bookings at the bottom of General settings, then click Stop taking bookings again to confirm. This switches off the location's online booking page, and its status changes to Not taking bookings. Existing bookings stay as they are, and your team can still add bookings there in Tanda. Click Resume bookings at any time to start again.

Click Availability in the settings menu. There are two things to set here:

To copy your location's business hours from the roster into the form, click Prefill from location hours.

If the days stay empty after you prefill, your location's business hours haven't been set, so enter your booking hours yourself. Click Update to save. If you remove all opening hours, bookings can't be taken at the location.

If you run separate services, such as lunch and dinner, tick Allow days to be split into multiple periods, then click Add hours under a day to add another period. To clear a period, click the bin icon next to it. Click Update to save, and you'll see Availability saved.

At the bottom of Availability, click Availability History to open a list of every change saved to the location's availability, newest first. Each row shows the Action, the User who made it, the Time and the Changes, with the value before and after. Booking hours are listed for each day that changed, and a day with no booking hours shows as Closed. Changes to the Default booking length are shown the same way the form shows them, for example 1 hr 30 min to 2 hrs.

This is handy when online guests are suddenly offered different times and you want to know who changed the hours and when.

Booking areas let you take bookings into separate parts of your venue, such as a dining room, terrace or private room, each with its own capacity. If you set the location up as one space, you can split it at any time:

Booking areas then appears in the settings menu. A split location can't go back to being one space, but you can archive any area you stop using.

In Booking areas, you can:

A location always needs at least one active booking area, so you can't archive the last one. An area's Maximum capacity is the most guests that area holds at once. The location's own maximum capacity still applies too, so a booking needs room in both.

Tables are optional. Without them, reservations are placed in an area only. Add tables when you want each reservation seated at a specific table.

Once an area has active tables, every reservation in that area is seated at a free table that fits the party size. When you create a reservation, the Table field is set to Assign automatically, which picks the smallest free table that fits, or you can choose a table yourself. Tables are only used for reservations. Functions are booked into areas.

To manage your tables, click the three dots next to a table:

When you archive an area, its tables move under Show archived areas and aren't offered. To offer them again, restore the area, or edit each table and move it to another area.

The Online bookings section shows the location's Reservations page link, with a Copy booking link button so you can share it. If you change the link and click Update, Tanda asks you to confirm with Change link, because links you've already shared stop working.