The service floor

The live map you work from while the room is open: who is where, what is still free, and one tap to seat somebody.

This is the other half of Floor plan in the left menu. Drawing the room is a separate job, done once, and it has its own page: Floor plan. This page is about the hours the doors are open.

Most people use it standing up, on a phone. It is built for that.

1. Pick what is on

The dropdown at the top of the page chooses what the map is showing. It opens on the event nearest to now, so most of the time you can leave it alone. Beside it, a badge shows how many tables are still free out of the total. The map you see is the layout that event runs on.

The live map shows one of these at a time. If the dropdown is empty and the screen says Create an event to see the floor plan, publish something on the Events screen first.

2. Read the map

Every table is coloured by its state, and every state but Free also carries a small mark of its own, so two states are never told apart by colour alone:

State	Meaning
Free	Nobody on it.
Reserved	A booking is on it.
Held	You have marked the booking as contacted.
Confirmed	You have confirmed the booking.
Blocked	Held back by you or your staff, not by a guest.

The buttons under the search box are both a legend and a filter. Click Confirmed to show only confirmed tables, click it again to go back to All. Below the map, Occupancy and one card per state give you the numbers at a glance.

Under All tables there is a plain list of every table with its section, type, seats and status, plus a small search box for Search table, guest, section…. Some people prefer working from the list; it does everything the map does.

Paper for the door

The map on a phone is the fastest way to work the entrance: open Floor plan, type the guest's name in the search box and their table lights up. If your entrance staff still want paper, Door sheet next to the selector opens a printable page: the map with each seated guest's surname and party size under their table, then a table-by-table list with a tick box for arrivals, and the reservations without a table at the bottom. Print / save as PDF uses your browser's print dialog. The reservation export under Reservations also carries the assigned Table and Section columns.

3. Find a guest fast

The wide search box above the map is for exactly this. Type a name, a phone number or an email and the matching tables light up on the map while everything else dims. The results appear beside the map under Matches, and Open takes you straight to that table's panel. The X clears the search.

4. Seat a walk-in

1. Tap a free table on the map.
2. Under Book this table, fill in Guest name — that one is required — plus Phone, Party, Email, a Voucher tier if there is one, and a Note if you need one.
3. Click Create & assign.

The guest is created and put on that table in one step.

5. Seat someone who already booked

1. Tap a free table.
2. Scroll to Or assign an existing reservation and search under Search a reservation….
3. Pick the guest, then click Assign.

Auto-assign next to it does the same job without you choosing the table — it puts that guest on the nearest suitable free table and tells you which one it picked. If nothing suitable is left, it says No free table available.

You can also work the other way round: in the All tables list, every free row has its own Assign button.

6. Move a guest to another table

1. Tap the table the guest is on.
2. Click Switch table.
3. A banner appears saying Pick a table to switch … onto. Tap the destination.

If the destination is free, the guest moves. If somebody else is already there, the two swap places. Cancel in the banner backs out.

7. Change a booking without leaving the map

Tapping an occupied table shows the guest, the party size, the contact, and any voucher and entry tickets. From there you can:

• Change status — new, contacted, confirmed, waitlisted, declined or cancelled.
• Change the Voucher tier, or set it back to — none —.
• Free table — take the guest off the table and put the booking back on your unassigned list.

If two of you are working at once, the floor keeps itself up to date: when a colleague seats somebody on another device, your map catches up on its own.

8. Close part of the room

Most of the time you do not open the whole venue at once. Once your tables have section names, each section gets its own row under Sections, just above the map. The panel stays folded until you open it, and the name and date of what is on are repeated in its heading so you cannot close the wrong one by mistake.

Every row names the section — tables with no section name are gathered under No section — and counts it: blocked, booked and available.

There are two buttons, and deliberately only two, because a section is normally part-booked:

• Block available tables holds back every table in that section that is still free. Guests cannot pick them on your booking page, and your staff see them as Blocked. Tables that already have a booking are left exactly as they are, and the message that comes back tells you both numbers — for example, 12 tables blocked and 3 bookings kept.
• Release this section's blocks opens the section again in one tap when the first part of the room fills up. It lifts only the blocks that closing this section put there. A table you held by hand is a different thing and stays held — so the table you are keeping for a phone booking does not quietly become bookable again when you reopen the room around it.

A button is greyed out when there is nothing for it to do: Block available tables when the section has no free tables left, Release this section's blocks when nothing in it was closed this way.

Closing a section is not a standing rule — it is a hold on the tables that were free at the time. If a guest in a closed section cancels, that table goes back to free and the next guest can take it. If you want it held too, block it by hand.

Section names live with the tables, so they carry across everything that runs on that layout; the closing applies to one event only, so holding the terrace back on Friday leaves Saturday untouched.

9. Hold one table back

For a table sold over the phone or in a message, tap the free table and click Block table. It turns Blocked: kept off your booking page, and shown to your staff as held rather than as a booking — no guest name, no ticket, no email is sent. Release block gives it back, either on the table's panel or from its row in All tables.

Moving a guest onto a blocked table is refused, with a message telling you to release it first. And a held-back table can never be blocked twice, so two of you doing it at once is harmless.

A held-back table is never counted as a booking

This is true of both ways of holding a table — one at a time, or a whole section at once. A block is a hold on the table, never a guest, so it is left out of every number that counts guests and bookings: it does not appear in Bookings, it is not in Total requests, Confirmed or Guests in total, it is not in the CSV export, it is not on the door list, and it never lands in the queue of bookings waiting for a table. Your headcount stays the real one.

Where it does show is the floor plan itself, which is the point: a held-back table is Blocked on the map, counts on the Blocked card, and is no longer one of your free tables. If you later want that phone booking in your numbers, use Release block and then seat the guest on the table as a real booking — from that moment it counts like any other.

On a phone or tablet

• Tap Open full floor for the big view. There you can pinch to zoom and drag to move around, and the small buttons zoom in, zoom out, fit the whole floor back on screen, and close.
• In that full view, tapping a table opens its panel docked along the bottom of the screen, so the map stays visible while you work. The X closes it.
• Outside the full view the map is a fixed overview — tap a table and its panel slides in from the side.

What your guests see

Guests only get a table map when you switch it on. In the event's settings, tick Guest picks the table. The hint on that screen says it plainly: on, the guest picks a free table; off, the nearest free table is chosen for them.

When it is on, your booking page shows Choose your table with your real room — your stage, your bar, your tables, drawn exactly as you placed them. Guests tap a free table and see Selected: with the seat count, and Change to pick a different one. The legend explains the three colours:

• Available (your package) — they can take it.
• Taken — somebody else has it.
• Other package — a real table, but not part of the tier they chose.

Guests never see who is sitting where. A taken table is simply not available to them — no name, no phone number, no booking details of any kind. They get the same Open full floor view on a phone, with pinch and zoom.

If a tier is tied to a stage band and every table in that band is gone, guests are still offered the remaining free tables rather than an empty map. Nobody is ever blocked from booking because of banding.

If something looks wrong

• The map is empty or shows a room you do not recognise. Nothing has been drawn on this layout yet, so a default room is standing in. Open Edit layout and start from a template — see Floor plan.
• The wrong room is showing. The event is pointing at another layout. Open the event and change Floor layout.
• Nothing in the dropdown, and the screen says "Create an event to see the floor plan." The live map shows one event at a time. Create or publish one first.
• "Table is already taken". Somebody claimed it a second before you did. Close the panel, look at the refreshed map, and pick another table.
• "That table is not on the layout this event runs on". The reservations list offered a table from another layout. Pick one from the live map — it only ever shows the right ones.
• Guests are not offered a table on your booking page. Check that Guest picks the table is ticked.
• There is no Sections panel. None of your tables has a section name yet, or nothing has been chosen in the dropdown. Open Edit layout and give the tables a Section.
• A section reopened but one table stayed blocked. That table was held by hand, not by closing the section, so reopening left it alone. Tap it and use Release block.
• Auto-assign says "No free table available". Nothing free is big enough for the party, or everything of that type is taken or held back. Release a block, or seat them by hand.