Reservation Setup Beta

Hello in this tutorial I’ll demonstrate how to create and use Reservation List of SambaPOS V5.

You need to install latest update of 5.2.13.

:warning: The Configuration Task is in beta so don’t install it on top of production databases. I tested it with default database and few setups I have. Undoing setup and some validations are not complete so let us know if you notice conflicts with your existing setup.

On Configuration Tasks screen click on “Update” link. Reservation Setup should appear in the list.

Click on the Reservation Setup to import related setup.

Reservation Screen should appear on the main POS screen.

The screen divided to 3 parts. On the left side we can see occupied and reserved tables. The middle part is the list of Reservations and the right side section is the are we use to create / update reservations.

Creating a New Reservation

We’ll Start by Adding a new Reservation. After entering new reservation details click on Save Reservation button to create it.

When Reservation gets saved successfully it will appear in the middle list.

:bulb: Exclamation mark means a note entered for the reservation.

When we select a reservation on the list reservation details will also appear in the right. You can edit details and click on Save Reservation button to update reservation details.

To add another reservation click on New Reservation button. It will clear editors and wait for the new reservation details.

Create few more reservations before next step.

Check-in

Selecting a reservation on the list and clicking on an unoccupied table allocates table for the reservation contact.

Select first reservation and click on B21 table for check-in.

:bulb: Selected rows will appear on orange color but it appears gray here as it looses focus for the screen shot.

:bulb: Checked-in rows will appear in Green color.

Checked-in table will also appear in blue color on Tables screen.

If you prefer to see contact names on this screen you can enable Use State Display Format setting for the All Tables entity screen.

If you want you can remove a check-in by clicking on the table button or change checked-in table by clicking other unoccupied tables.

When we create a ticket for the checked-in table, reservation will appear as completed.

Contact name will not keep appearing on tables screens for privacy reasons but on reservation screen it will keep appearing. If you want to see contact names on all tables you can adjust New Orders state as Checkin state.

Finally closing ticket will remove reservation from the list.

Reservation Tickets

We can create a Reservation Ticket for pre-ordering. Select a contact and create a reservation ticket by clicking on Reservation Ticket button. We can create a reservation ticket anytime before creating the real ticket. I’ll create reservation tickets for first two reservations.

As you can see we can create reservation tickets for both checked-in and non checked-in reservations.

:bulb: When a reservation ticket gets created row appears in bold font.

When we start creating a Ticket for a Checked-in table pre-orders automatically moves to the ticket.

Deposit Payments

We may also receive Deposit Payments inside Reservation Tickets. To do that we can click on “Deposit” button after creating reservation ticket.

It automatically recommends %50 of the ticket amount but you can change it.

When there is a Deposit Payment on reservation ticket it reflects as a Discount on final ticket.

No-show

Clicking No-Show button marks a reservation as no-show. No-show items appears in red color. When a reservation is marked as no-show we can click on Close Reservation button to remove reservation from list.

No-show button will not enable if there is a reservation ticket. We need to cancel reservation ticket to enable it. If there is a deposit on ticket it will remain uncancelled but we’ll still be able to close reservation.

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Thankyou Emre for the new release,this will go along way in handling some issues that challenges us in our facility.
What about situation where we have a particular table booked for more than a day especially during the weekend.We run a sports bar and during the weekend we have people booking the tables that are close to the screen.Is it possible to interface with google calendar.

Regards

Google Calendar support is built into SambaPOS giving you acccess to the API… however I think Google recently changed the way their API works so it may need modification. @emre you may or may not wish to look into this. I know very few people used the google api support.

From Google Calendar API website:

Support for the JSON-RPC protocol and Global HTTP Batch endpoint has been deprecated, and will be fully discontinued on March 25, 2019. This change is being made to the Google API infrastucture and as such affects multiple Google APIs, including Calendar v3.

For more information and migration instructions, see the Discontinuing support for JSON-RPC and Global HTTP Batch Endpoints blog post.

@muthoga so what your asking is can you book a table that spans more than 1 day. You could book same person on multiple dates… but @emre that might be something to look into… allowing a date Range.

I’m not planning to implement allocating time spans for tables as I believe it is not very useful for most restaurant use cases. I’ll try to keep it as a plain list of reservations as much as I can. It might not be the case but this is where I’m inspiring from actually.

https://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-with-the-computer-screen/

As we keep improving it I believe we’ll discover great ideas.

3 Likes

@emre Just a thought would the reservation module give any statistics at all. We use it quite heavily while taking bookings. Any chance it could link when was the customer last booked in.

We find using such information while taking a booking from a customer they love it.

kindly send the link to download this version 5.2.13.Hope it will not mess up with my DB

@muthoga as we’re still on beta please don’t install it on production database. You can test it on a separate computer and let me know if you encounter issues with your setup.

You can find download link here.

Thankyou that so kind i will test it and let you know in case i have issues ,this will also serve as a way to reserve rooms in small bed and breakfast kind of hotel.

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Just realised on creating a booking customer is not automatically added to the customer table. So past reservations cant be accessed to see customer history. Also if a customer calls back to cancel no provision found for cancelling the booking.

found another bug. Booking can be entered in the past dates.

Edit:

No of pax accepts a negative value.

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To cancel you mark as no show. You could copy that and name it cancel

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Yes, These are considered as reservation contacts. That might be an agent or person. We need to discuss if we should consider reservation contacts as customers automatically or implement some other workflow.

That will have separate report probably. Based on {REPORT TASK DETAILS}

In fact these are different things but I didn’t implemented separate functions for Cancel and No-show as I’m not sure if it is necessary or not. As @Jesse suggested you can rename button as how customer wants to see.

Yes we’ll probably need a separate validation for editor widgets.

Hmm, maybe we’ll also need min max settings as it will also accept 999999 person. I’m trying to keep widget settings simple but … hmm :slight_smile:

I personally think customer flow should stay as is. If someone needs a different implementation nothing stops them from modifying it to their needs.

Using the light theme makes some of the text on Reservation screen and Reservation Ticket hard to read.

Here is the Reservation Ticket.


What is strange about the above image is the “Deposit” item is black font.

And just to confirm that it isn’t a text formatting setting, here is a normal POS screen:

I am also unable to enter Order Tags screen for items on the “Reservation Tickets”. The default Order Tags I have assigned to menu items do show up on the order line.

On a side note, I vote to have contacts entered in as customers. It would save time entering info for repeat customers.

The ticket screen order colors are more than likely state formatting. The font color on the reservation screen can be edited by editing the widget settings. Each one is a label widget.

Example change this to black or some other color… but you might want to look at it to make sure you want to do that. I am sure there was a reason he set this to a White color… you might want to match the reason with an appropriate color for light theme.

All of that you can modify for light theme.

Thanks kendash, I can confirm if I change the ‘color white’ to ‘color black’. It does show up correct. However if I clear all the format fields in “Reservation Item” state, it still shows up as white text. I’m not sure is a bug or by design. Again, this is just in the “Reservation Ticket” not in the normal POS screen.

Another observation, when closing a Reservation Ticket, would it be more convenient to go back to the Reservations screen? As of now, it go to the POS screen.

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You can make it do that. This is really not a built in feature. You have control to modify it to your needs.

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Thanks kendash, I just making a few suggestions, from an end user, to prevent repeat questions and frustrations. :wink:

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