Running ResoFlow as a booking diary (you don't mark arrivals at the door)

Tell ResoFlow how much of each visit you track, and it stops assuming someone is marking arrivals at the door.

Plenty of venues use ResoFlow to take bookings — online bookings, confirmations, reminders, deposits — but during service nobody marks customers as arrived, seated or cleared. The dashboard is the diary, not a live floor plan.

That works well. You just need to tell ResoFlow you work that way, because several automations assume somebody is marking arrivals at the door.

Tell ResoFlow how you work

Go to Settings → Alerts & sounds and find How you track visits at the top. Pick the one that matches your venue:

• Just take bookings — you use ResoFlow to see who's booked in. Nobody marks customers as arrived, seats them or clears their table.
• Mark customers as arrived — somebody ticks customers off as they arrive, but nobody seats parties or clears tables.
• Track the whole visit — arrivals, seating and clearing are all recorded as service runs.

The screen then lists exactly what your choice changes, in plain English. That list is generated from what ResoFlow actually does, so it stays true as the product changes.

If you don't choose anything, nothing changes — every venue starts on "Track the whole visit", which is how ResoFlow has always behaved.

What "Just take bookings" changes

Automatic no-shows are switched off and locked. This is the important one. With it on, any booking that hasn't been marked seated by the no-show threshold (default 30 minutes) is automatically marked a no-show. If nobody marks arrivals, that means every booking — including customers happily eating their main course.

What goes wrong is your records: your history, your customer records and your no-show rate all become false. They'd show a venue where nobody ever turns up, and every customer who came in and ate would carry a no-show on their customer history.

Picking "Just take bookings" stops that. The toggle in Alert rules greys out and explains why.

(This used to cost you a table as well — an automatically marked no-show released its table, so the booking page could offer it to someone else while your customers were sitting at it. That is fixed for every venue on every plan: an automatic no-show now keeps holding its table until the booking's window would have ended. A no-show you mark still releases the table straight away, which is the whole point of marking one.)

**The no-show follow-up still works — the email and the text — for the no-shows you mark yourself, if you have them switched on. Nothing here is marked as a no-show automatically, so the only ones that exist are the ones a member of your team deliberately recorded, and that's the strongest kind of record there is. Both switches stay yours on Settings → Customer notifications**: on means on, off means off, exactly as everywhere else.

(If you picked "Just take bookings" before this changed, both switches were turned off for you at the time. They're unlocked now, so switch them back on if you want the follow-up.)

The rule underneath all of this: "Just take bookings" switches off the automatic guessing, not your own record-keeping. Anything a member of your team deliberately does works exactly as it always has — mark a no-show and it's recorded as one, it shows on that customer's history, your follow-up goes out if it's switched on, and the No-Show update to any app you've connected still fires. It's only the things ResoFlow would have decided for you that stop.

Late and missing-customer alerts are switched off and locked. Both of them, together. These pop up when a booking hasn't been marked as seated — so without arrival tracking every single booking you take would set one off a few minutes after its time, with a sound, and on a busy night filling the screen. (They come as a pair: the missing-customer alert is what normally appears when late alerts are off, so switching off just one would have swapped a 15-minute alarm for a 30-minute one. The mode switches off both.)

Waitlist table-ready holds still expire. If you offer a waiting customer a table and they never come to the desk, the table is released when their arrival window runs out — recorded as cancelled rather than as a no-show, because nobody here saw whether they turned up. Your room never fills up with holds you can't explain.

What keeps working exactly as normal

Your diary and your table availability. This is the important reassurance: tables, times and double-booking protection all work from the booking itself, not from anyone ticking customers off. Your day reads correctly all the way through.

Everything customer-facing at booking time: online bookings, confirmations and reminders, deposits, cancellations and the manage-booking page. None of it needs door-marking. (The messages that come after a visit are the ones affected — see the thank-you and welcome sections below.)

Marking a no-show yourself, any time you want to — and it behaves exactly as normal. The booking is recorded as a no-show, it shows on that customer's history, and your no-show follow-up goes out if you have it switched on. Only the automatic guess is switched off.

The orange and red "late" highlighting is switched off. Because nobody marks arrivals, every booking would turn orange and then red once its time passed — on your bookings list, your timeline and your floor plan at once, every booking, every service. A colour that's always on stops meaning anything, so your bookings stay in their normal colours instead. Nothing to switch off yourself: the Late highlighting option simply doesn't appear in the Display menu while you work this way, and it comes back if you change how you track visits. This is display only — it never changes any behaviour, so filtering by Late still works and every booking's real state is unchanged. See What do the booking statuses mean?.

The Home banner drops its Seated and Late counts. The strip at the top of Home normally shows "Seated 3/12" and a Late count. Neither can be known here, and a "0" would read exactly like "nobody has turned up" — so both are left out rather than shown as zero, the same way Home already leaves out Walk-ins when walk-ins are off. Walk-ins itself stays: it counts how a booking was created, not anything marked during service. See How do I use the Home screen?.

Loyalty: members can spend, but they won't earn on their own

Automatic loyalty earning fires the moment a table is marked cleared, so it never fires here — while redeeming rewards keeps working exactly as normal. Left alone, that means members could spend points they were never able to earn.

Award them by hand instead: open the member in the Scanner and award the stamp or points. It works for any of today's bookings, including one ResoFlow marked as a no-show by mistake. The Earning section of your loyalty scheme says all of this on screen when it applies to you.

Win-back emails measure "last booked" here, not "last dined"

The win-back email normally counts from the day a customer last dined — a booking marked as cleared. There are none of those here, so it counts from the last date they were booked in instead. That means a customer who booked and never turned up counts as recently seen and won't be chased. The setting says so on screen.

Google reviews still send. The thank-you doesn't.

Google review requests work normally here. They run on their own timer, counted from when each booking's time is up — nobody has to mark anything. Nothing is sent for a booking you cancelled or marked as a no-show yourself. See How do I send thank-yous and ask for Google reviews?.

**The post-visit thank-you — the email and the text — does still need a cleared table. Both fire the moment a booking is marked cleared**, so if bookings are never seated or cleared neither goes out. If you want thank-yous, you'll need to mark visits through to cleared (even roughly, at the end of the night).

The first-visit welcome email needs one too. It goes out the morning after a customer's first visit is marked cleared, so it never sends here either. Your booking emails and your win-back email are unaffected — see How do I send welcome and win-back emails?.

All three are listed on the How you track visits setting itself, so you're told before you choose rather than discovering it later.

If you've connected another app, two updates never fire

If you send booking events to Zapier or your own webhook, Booking seated and Booking cleared are only sent when somebody marks a booking that way — so here they never fire at all, and anything you build on top of them will simply never run. Booking created, confirmed and cancelled go out as normal, and Booking no-show goes out whenever you mark one yourself. See How do I connect ResoFlow to other tools?.

Two reports stay empty

Average table turn time is worked out between the moment a table is marked seated and the moment it's marked cleared. The repeat-customer report only counts bookings marked seated or cleared. Neither can be worked out if nobody marks those things, however many bookings you take — and both say so on the Analytics page itself rather than looking broken.

The rest of your reports read from the bookings themselves and are unaffected: covers, bookings, your busiest days and times, party-size mix, table usage, deposits.

What "Mark customers as arrived" changes

This is the middle option: somebody ticks customers off as they arrive, but nobody seats parties or clears tables.

What it gets back, compared with "Just take bookings":

• Automatic no-shows work — and they're safe here, because ticking a customer off as arrived stops the timer. Only bookings nobody ticked off can be marked as no-shows.
• Late-arrival alerts stay on, and are worth keeping: ticking a customer off clears their alert straight away, so you only ever see the ones genuinely not here yet.
• The orange and red "late" highlighting stays on, for the same reason — a customer you've ticked off goes back to their normal colour.
• The no-show follow-up reaches automatic no-shows too — the email and the text. It already went to the ones you marked yourself; here it also goes to the ones ResoFlow marks, because ticking customers off at the door is what makes those genuine.
• Home's top strip counts arrivals, showing "Arrived 3/12" instead of "Seated 3/12" — because ticking customers off is what your team records here. The Late count stays too.

**What it does not get back.** Ticking somebody off as arrived is not the same as clearing their table — ResoFlow records it against the booking without changing the booking's status. So everything that waits for a cleared table behaves exactly as it does in "Just take bookings":

• the post-visit thank-you email and text never send;
• the first-visit welcome email never sends;
• loyalty members don't earn automatically (award by hand at the Scanner — spending is unaffected);
• the win-back email measures "last booked" instead of "last dined";
• average turn time and the repeat-customer report stay empty;
• the Booking seated and Booking cleared updates to other apps never fire (Booking no-show does here, since automatic no-shows work).

Google review requests, your diary, your table availability and all your booking emails keep working exactly as normal. Every one of these points is listed on the How you track visits setting when you pick this option, so nothing arrives as a surprise.

No card is ever charged automatically

Worried the automation could charge someone? It can't. A no-show fee (saved-card protection) is only ever taken after a member of your team deliberately marks the no-show and chooses the charge option, then a safety delay — automatic marking never charges a card (How do I mark a no-show?). A deposit is different: it was paid up-front, so marking a no-show keeps it (and emails the customer that it's been kept) — which is exactly why the automatic marking is switched off for you.

Related: Ways to run ResoFlow · How do I control dashboard alerts and sounds? · How do I set my opening hours?