Reservations
Take table bookings from your own website, your telephone and your floor — and see all of them in one book. Reservations is part of SSP Manager, so there is no separate booking service to subscribe to, no commission on covers, and no second system for your team to learn.
A booking platform charges you for every cover it sends — including the regulars who already knew your name — and puts its brand between you and your guest. With Reservations, the booking form lives on your website, the confirmation email comes from you, and the booking lands in the same book as the one your host just took over the phone.
The Big Picture
You describe your service — when you seat and how much the kitchen can absorb — and SSP Manager works out which times a guest may actually choose. Nobody maintains a list of times by hand.
Before You Start: Two Switches
The public booking form is gated by two separate settings, and both must be on. This catches people out, because turning on only one produces a form that renders nowhere with no error message.
| Switch | Where | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Reservations | Location settings | This restaurant takes bookings at all |
| Accept bookings from my website | Reservations → Settings | The public booking form specifically |
The public endpoints deliberately answer the same "not found" whether reservations are off or the form is off — a more specific error would let anyone probe your configuration, since the site key ships in your own page source. That means "my widget shows nothing" cannot be diagnosed from outside. The Settings page is the only place that will tell you which half is missing, so start there.
Setting Up
Everything lives on Reservations → Settings, and it is four cards: Take bookings from your website, Service periods, Closures and Pacing.
Service periods
A service period is one span of time you seat guests in — Lunch and Dinner are normally two rows.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | Lunch, Dinner, Brunch — whatever you call it |
| Day | A single weekday, or Every day for one row covering the week |
| From / To | When the service starts and ends. A service crossing midnight (20:00 → 01:00) is understood |
Each new period is saved with a 90 minute table turn and a 30 minute last-seating offset — a 22:00 finish means the last bookable slot is 21:30. Both values are shown in the period's row but are not set on the form.
Periods are added and deleted, not edited. To change one, delete its row and add it again with the new times.
Until you add a period, bookings fall back to the location's plain opening hours, so this is the first thing to set.
Closures
One date, closed, without disturbing the weekly pattern. Set Christmas Day once and there is nothing to remember to switch back on afterwards.
Pacing
Pacing is how you stop the room being sold faster than the kitchen can cook.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Covers / 15 min | The most guests the kitchen will accept in any quarter hour |
| Concurrent covers | The most guests you will have in the room at one time |
| Count walk-ins | Off by default. On, walk-ins consume pacing too — use it if you pace by total covers rather than booked covers |
Leaving a box blank means no limit of that kind.
Availability is enforced on the server. A booking for a time outside your service periods (or, before you have any, outside your opening hours) is refused outright — a guest cannot land a table at a time your kitchen is closed, whether they came through the website or a member of staff typed it in.
Take bookings from your website
The switch that publishes the form, plus the three limits that govern it.
| Limit | Range | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Least notice (minutes) | 15 – 10080 | 60 |
| Book up to (days ahead) | 1 – 365 | 60 |
| Largest party online | 1 – 50 | 12 |
Parties above your online limit are told to telephone you, rather than being quietly refused — a table for twenty is usually a conversation, not a form.
Confirm each booking myself is off by default. Left off, a guest's table is held the moment they book. Turned on, website bookings arrive as pending and the guest is told their table is not held until you accept.
SSP Manager does not yet have a button to accept or decline a pending booking. Pending bookings appear in your book with a Pending badge and can be cancelled, but not accepted. Leave this switch off.
A largest-party of 0, or a booking window of 0 days, refuses every booking while the form still looks installed. The Settings page reports the form as Live only when every condition it genuinely needs is satisfied — both switches on, all three limits in range, a site key generated, and at least one allowed website.
Putting the Form on Your Website
Your menu widget and your booking form share one snippet and one list of permitted websites, both managed on Your website. See Styling the Website Widgets for making them match your site's design.
Two things to know:
- The allowed-websites list covers both widgets. If it is empty, nothing displays anywhere. A site that is not on the list is refused by the browser, not by us.
- Generating a new code replaces the old one for both widgets. The code already on your site, including your live menu, stops working immediately and shows nothing until you paste the new lines in its place. Only generate a new code if you no longer have the old one.
Guests receive a confirmation email and can change or cancel from it themselves, without telephoning you in the middle of service.
Taking Bookings
| Source | How it arrives |
|---|---|
| Website | The guest books through your booking form |
| Phone | Staff use New reservation on the Service or Bookings tab |
New reservation asks for party size and date, offers the available times, then takes the guest's name, phone number, optional email and a note. Staff times come from the same availability as the website, so the book cannot be double-sold between the telephone and your site. The website-only limits (least notice, booking window, largest party online) do not apply to staff; a staff booking can be for a party of up to 50.
The website source is reserved for bookings that genuinely came through the public form, so it stays a trustworthy answer to "where did this booking come from". Bookings made with New reservation are recorded as phone bookings.
When a booking is created, a table is assigned automatically — there is no table picker on the form. Each booking gets a short reference the guest can quote.
During Service
The host screen
Reservations → Service answers one question: who is arriving now. It lists bookings due from an hour ago through the next two hours, and flags tables running past their expected finish — worst first — so you know which party is about to be kept waiting before they are standing in front of you.
Each arrival has its actions on the card:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Seat | The guest has arrived and is at the table |
| No-show | They never came. Frees the table and goes on the guest's record, so it asks you to confirm first |
| Cancel | Releases the table immediately, with an optional reason. There is no undo |
| Complete | Shown once a party is seated: the table has finished |
These buttons appear only for staff whose role can manage bookings.
The day's book
Reservations → Bookings is the whole day, in order, whatever state each booking is in: time, guest, party size, table, status, reference and notes. Change the date to look at any other day.
Booking Statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Held | A slot briefly reserved while the guest finishes booking |
| Pending | Waiting for you, when Confirm each booking myself is on |
| Confirmed | Booked and the table is held |
| Seated | The guest is at the table |
| Completed | The table has finished |
| Cancelled | Called off by the guest or by you |
| No-show | Never arrived |
| Expired | A hold that was never completed |
Troubleshooting
The booking form does not appear on my site. Work down the Settings page in order: are reservations on for this location; is Accept bookings from my website on; are all three limits in range; has a site key been generated; is the site you are testing on the allowed-websites list — including the port number, if you are testing locally.
Guests say there are no times available. Check that a service period actually covers the day and time they want, that the date is not in your closures, that your pacing limits are not stricter than you intended, and that Least notice is not excluding the near-term slots they are trying to book.
A time I expect is missing. The 30 minute last-seating offset removes slots from the end of every service. A 22:00 finish stops at 21:30, by design.
Related
- Table Management — the tables bookings are assigned to
- Styling the Website Widgets — making the booking form match your site
- Location Settings — where the reservations switch lives