Three things I tell restaurateurs in week one
Three things I tell restaurateurs in their first week with Bordflow: small settings that turn into heavy lifting six months and two thousand bookings in.
I help restaurateurs get going with Bordflow every week. When I sit down with someone who's just opened an account I don't look at everything. I look at three things. That's where most people either get the system to fly, or land on a config they'll regret six months in.
Here are those three.
1. Get the zones right before you add tables
Zones are the invisible rooms in your venue. Dining room, bar, terrace, wine cellar. You can have one or five.
What I see restaurateurs do: create "Restaurant" as the only zone and dump all 24 tables in there. Works for three months. Then summer arrives. Suddenly you want to open the terrace, and now you have to split tables off a bundle while the bookings already sitting there are stuck on the "Restaurant" zone.
My advice: create the zones you have and the zones you plan to have. Adding an extra zone up front is free. Re-zoning two hundred future bookings is not.
2. Pace control, the setting nobody dares to touch
Pace control tells the system how many guests can start their seating in any 15-minute window. Default is 20. Restaurateurs look at the number, decide "that's enough", and move on.
That's the wrong setting for 90% of restaurants. 20 covers per 15 minutes is 80 guests an hour. Fine for a big bistro, wrong for a 30-cover trattoria where the kitchen dies if eight guests walk in at once.
Count backwards from your kitchen: how many new orders can you absorb in a quarter without the pass dragging? That's your real max. For most places it's 5–12, not 20. Use that number instead.
Also: add peak times for Friday/Saturday 19:00–20:30 if you want to throttle the rush just there. That's often when no-shows plus late arrivals break the kitchen. With a peak time you can clamp down there without ruining the Tuesday evening that runs calm anyway.
3. The widget on your site takes five minutes
The last thing I push for is the widget on your site. It's one line of code you paste:
<bordflow-widget data-org="your-slug"></bordflow-widget>
Done. Works in WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and anything else that lets you paste HTML.
What I see: restaurateurs who test the system for two weeks, fall in love with it, but put off the widget install because "we'll do the website first". That day never comes. The website has been half-finished for three years and will keep being so.
Install the widget on day one. It looks good, works on phone, and takes exactly 0% of your bandwidth. The whole point of Bordflow is that the guest can book without calling you. That doesn't work if the booking button isn't on the site.
The fourth tip, if I had to add one
Your opening hours. Set them right the first time. Default is "always open" and I see restaurateurs who can't work out why the system is taking bookings on Tuesdays even though they're closed. They forgot to mark Tuesday as closed. Five minutes to fix, six months of "why is someone calling about a Tuesday booking?" if you miss it.
Questions on this? Email hello@bordflow.com. Every email gets read, and the reply comes the same day.
Hanna