Online Bookings Setup

You can use TablesReady to add Reservations/Appointments and offer online bookings.

Concepts

There are 3 main things needed for setting up online bookings:

Your schedule(s)
The services you offer and how long they last
The resources (e.g., tables, rooms, staff) that provide the services and what their capacity is

These 3 things need to work together so we can tell if a particular table is available at a certain time for the entire duration needed for the given group size.

In addition, we offer you fine-grained control of how your bookings will work with things like:

Options you can configure about how reservations work, like how often you want bookings to start and how many bookings can start at the same time.
Customized booking-specific notifications
The ability to take reservations from anywhere

These concepts and options map to what you'll need to set up and are all covered in this article.

Schedules setup

You can setup multiple Schedules within TablesReady in the Settings > Schedules section. Your first/primary Schedule should be your overall hours, then additional schedules can narrow that window for different services you might have. For example, in a restaurant, you might create 4 separate Schedules, like so:

Business Hours: 11:00am - 11:00pm
Lunch Service: 11:00pm - 3:00pm
Happy Hour: 4:00pm - 6:00pm, 9:00pm - 11:00pm
Dinner Service: 5:00pm - 10:00pm

If you only want your Waitlist to be open during certain hours, create a new schedule and assign that schedule to your Public Pages in the Settings > Public Pages section.

Services setup

Services are the types of reservations/appointments you offer (i.e. Lunch, Dinner, Shopping, Haircut, Office Visit, etc.) and can be setup in the Settings > Services section.

The main considerations when setting up the services you need are:

The duration of the service (how long does it last on average?). If all your services take the same amount of time, you might not need separate services.
The schedule of the service. If your services operate on different schedules from each other or from your main business hours, you'll need to create services that relate to those schedules. If you haven't already set up your Schedules, see the section above.

For now, entering the Description and Price fields doesn't do anything.

Resources setup

Resources must be set up in Settings > Resources in order to take online reservations/appointments. They can also be useful if you want to keep track of the particular resource your guest will be using during their visit.

To create a new Resource:

Click the green + sign in the bottom righthand corner of the page
Add a name and the Minimum and Maximum capacity. For example, a four top table might have a minimum of 2 and maximum of 4, but a Resource for a retail store could have a minimum of 1 and maximum of 20.
Choose if the Resource is available for walk-ins, bookings, or both
Select the Service(s) using the Resource
Click Confirm.

Reservation Options & Settings

Before accepting reservations online, you'll need to enable them in Settings > Reservation Options:

In addition to enabling and disabling online scheduling, you can also configure your online scheduling flow to meet your business's needs in this section. Here's a list of all the options and what each means:

Appointment label: Choose what you want to call things. Reservations? Appointments? Bookings?
Default reservations Page View Mode: Choose a List or Timeline view as your default setting.
Set reservations as default page: Instead of defaulting to the Waitlist page when you login to the manager side of TablesReady, you'll be directed to your Reservations page.
Limit appointments per time slot: Choose the maximum number of bookings you can accept at a given time slot start time.
Waitlist: hours of upcoming appointments to show: If you have a lot of Reservations and want to narrow down the view, you can use this option to only show upcoming reservations for next N amount of hours on your Waitlist tab.
Allow Multiple Parties to Book a Resource: If this option is not checked, each booked party will occupy an entire Resource. For restaurants, you probably don't want 2 parties of 2 to occupy a table of 4, so don't check this. For retailers, you want different groups to be able to be in your single resource ("Store") at the same time, you should check this.
Count each person in a group as 1 spot each: If "Allow Multiple Parties to Book a Resource" is checked, this option will appear. Do you want each person in a group to count towards the capacity, or is your capacity based on the number of groups (not people)?
Online appointments: Select and Save to enable Online Appointments.
Serving Tracking: Enable this feature to track your parties as you're serving them, giving you a real-time view of your operation. Learn more here.
Appointment Interval: This how often appointments will be offered; for example, if you input 15, appointments will be offered at 3:00, 3:15, 3:30, 3:45, etc.
Max days for advance bookings: Set the maximum days in advance that online appointments can be scheduled. For example, 0 means same-day reservations only, whereas 365 will allow people to book up to a year in advance.
Service selection required: Require people to select a service while booking. If you only have 1 service, like Shopping, you shouldn't check this. Or, if you have multiple services that don't overlap in their timing (e.g., Lunch and Dinner), you don't need to check this.
Resource selection required: Require people to select a resource while booking. While most restaurants won't ask someone to choose a table, this is particularly useful if you're setting up Resources as staff and you want your customers to choose a service provider.
Search by party size: Ask your customers to enter their group size when booking online.
Search by time: Ask party to enter their preferred time when searching for availability. Otherwise, when searching, all your availability for the selected day will be shown.
Redirect Mode: Automatically redirect to your online bookings page after someone makes a reservation.
Display party notes in timeline view: Enable this to show any party notes while using the timeline view.

Reservation Notifications

Notifications can be enabled, disabled, and edited in the Settings > Notifications section of your account.

We offer the following Reservation-related Notifications:

Reservation Confirmation SMS
Reservations Reminder SMS
Reservation Cancellation SMS
Follow-up SMS

Embedding Your Online Scheduler

Head to Settings > Public Pages to get the code you need for:

Adding a button to your online bookings page
Adding a link to your online bookings page
Getting a QR code for your online bookings page
Getting the code to embed your bookings page on your website

You'll find a section that looks like this:

Select "Online Reservations Page" from the drop-down, then choose whether you want the direct link, embed code, button code, or QR code. Then click to copy it.