Only one of them can have the last 20:45.Only one of them can have the last 20:45.

The second press reads a different room

The two requests never see the same free chairs. Writing a booking takes a lock on that venue and that day and counts the seats again inside it, so the second press waits for the first to finish and then reads a room that has changed underneath it. One party gets the table. The other is told the time has gone, with whatever is still open listed below. A table cannot be sold twice. On a wet Tuesday you would never notice this; on the Saturday before Christmas, with three parties after the same 20:45 and your host out on the floor rather than watching a screen, it is the difference between a full book and an apology at the door. What the sums will not do is stop you overbooking your own room on purpose, and they should not. That is a call hosts make on good evenings.

Before a time appears on the screen

A guest asks about 20:00 on Friday, for seven. Klevra adds up the seats you said each table has, takes off every booking whose sitting overlaps that stretch of the evening, and offers 20:00 only if seven people still fit. It is subtraction. The confirmation comes back immediately because the sum is done while the guest is still on the page, and nobody on your side is keeping a second count in a notebook. Only sittings that genuinely overlap are taken off. You are the one who sets how long a sitting runs, and the seats come back on that clock rather than because anybody watched the table empty: put it at two hours and a table that sat at six counts again from eight, whether that party has gone or is still on coffees. If you would rather look at every booking yourself before it becomes a yes, turn that on. Requests then wait for you, and the guest is told they are waiting rather than confirmed, which is a different promise and reads like one. Either way the answer arrives by email carrying a link back to the booking, so a guest who wants 20:30 instead of 20:00, or who has to drop out altogether, deals with it themselves up to two hours before their own time. That cutoff runs from the booking rather than from the start of service. A 21:30 party who pulls out at half seven puts its covers back on sale while you are still laying up.

Twelve on the terrace is twelve

Tables get grouped the way you say it out loud at the pass: the terrace, the garden, inside, the room upstairs. A guest who asks for the terrace is checked twice, once against the terrace and once against the venue as a whole, and the lower of the two answers is the one that counts. The terrace has the chairs it has. Twelve of them will not take a booking for fourteen because the dining room happens to be half empty that night. Put no tables into an area and it stops being a limit: it becomes a preference written on the booking, which your host reads and honours if the evening allows. You decide which of the two an area is by tagging tables into it or leaving it empty.

What a host can do that the form cannot

A booking taken over the phone goes into the same book as one made on the page, counts against the same seats, and takes the same lock while it is being written. What is different is what a host can do when the answer comes back no. With a second and deliberate press the booking goes in regardless: a time that is not on the published grid, a party bigger than the form allows, an evening inside your own notice period, or a seat count that has already said full. They are your seats. Whether one more party fits tonight is a judgement your host is entitled to make, and the sums are read either way, so it is a decision rather than a guess. The single refusal no press will overrule is a time that has already passed. You can put that booking on table 11, and doing so changes nothing about who may sit there. It is a note, read by your team and by nobody else. Software cannot keep a chair empty, and a system that refuses a walk-in a tab has not kept the table either: it has only made the man already sitting in it wave at someone. So Klevra says what it knows instead. Table 11 carries its evening in the table detail, in time order, next to whatever is open on it now. Somebody who scans that table inside the two hours before a booking is told the table is taken at 20:00 and asked to have a word with a waiter. Then the person nearest the door decides, which is who was deciding anyway.

• A host types the booking in with the phone still at their ear, and it is in the book before the call ends.
• Page bookings and phone bookings are one list in time order, not two lists that have to agree with each other.
• The day book carries each line through the service: requested when you approve by hand, then confirmed, seated, completed, or a no-show at 20:40 when the chairs go back into use.

A booking that has to prove it is one

A table is held the second somebody presses book, which is what keeps the count honest — and it is also what one bored person with ten invented addresses could have used to fill your Saturday. So a booking proves itself first. What arrives on the press is not a confirmation, it is a link, and opening it is what says the address is real. Until it is opened the table is held and nothing else happens: you are not emailed, no card is asked for, and your book is not carrying a booking that was never one. If nobody opens it within a quarter of an hour, the seats go back into the evening on their own and the guest is told why. For a real person that is one tap while the screen is still in front of them. For somebody making addresses up it is the end of the exercise. A booking your own team takes over the phone skips all of it, because there is nothing to prove: it is in the book the moment you write it.

A card against the Friday table that stays empty

You can ask for a card, and a booking without one is never confirmed: it holds its seats while the guest adds it, and gives them back within the half hour if nobody does. Set what an empty seat costs you — ten euro, twenty, whatever is true for your room — and, if you want, the party size it starts at, so a table for two is left alone and a table for eight is not. Nothing is taken when they book. Before anybody types a card number they are shown, in their own language, what the amount is per person AND what it comes to for their party, that nothing is taken today, the date it will appear on their statement as money set aside rather than paid, and that it is released the moment your host seats them, which costs nobody anything. It is charged only if a person on your team presses No-show, and only between three quarters of an hour after the sitting and two days later. There is a 'do not charge' button beside every one of them, because the reason somebody gives at half past eight is usually a good one, and the booking still counts as missed. The charge is yours, on your own payout account, and the guest is emailed the moment it happens with the exact sentence they agreed to.

€19 a location, and one address to give out

Nothing else is wired together, and it does not need to be. The party sits down, scans the code that was already stuck to that table, orders from it, and at the end each of them pays for what they had, or the whole table settles at the counter. The booking does not turn into the tab, the order or the bill. The table is the thing they have in common. Bookings are the Reserve plan, €19 per location per month, with nothing charged per cover. Essential at €39 carries them too, with ordering at the table on top. The other €19 plan, Lite, is pickup only and has no tables at all, so it carries no bookings. There is no contract, and a seasonal location is switched off the month it stops earning. Nothing is charged to set it up, and there is no hardware to buy. You do not need a website of your own either. The page those bookings arrive on is a Klevra address rather than a domain that belongs to you, and it can be the only one you give people. It carries:

• Your opening hours, the address and a map.
• The phone number, for the people who would still rather ring.
• Photographs of the room.
• The live menu, which is the same data the code on the table serves, so the page cannot quietly go out of date.
• The booking form.