We are looking for two more venues, ideally a restaurant

One of the pilot seats is taken. We want to fill two more, and then we plan to stop there for a while. We would most like the next seat to go to a restaurant.

This post is for anyone considering one of them. We have tried to write down everything that actually applies, including the parts that do not sound good, because finding those out in November is worse.

Why only three

Because we are small. No department with support on a rota, no queue of tickets.

If we take on ten venues at once we become a queue. Then you sit waiting for answers exactly like you would with any other system, and at that point you have no reason to pick this one. With three we can call all of them in an afternoon, and we know what each of you is dealing with without having to look it up.

That is the whole point of a pilot seat. You get a person who knows your place, not a ticket number.

What you get

Pro free for three months. Then regular pricing if you want to continue, and nothing at all if you do not. No lock-in, no notice period, no exit fee. You say the word and it stops.

We set it up for you. Send us your floor plan, your opening hours and how you want bookings to work. We put in the zones, the tables, the hours and the rules. You never have to open a settings menu unless you want to.

If you are switching, your data comes along. You can paste bookings and guests from your old system straight into the app. If you would rather not, send the export file and we enter it for you. It costs you nothing.

A phone number. Not a support address. If you call at half past eight on a Friday because something looks wrong in the middle of service, we answer, and if we miss it we call back.

What you need gets built first. Tell us something is missing and it goes to the front of the list. That is not generosity, it is self-interest: we do not know what is missing until somebody standing in it tells us.

What we want back

That you run it for real through a whole season. Not try it one evening and go back. A booking system only shows what it is worth when the room is full, when somebody calls to change from six people to nine, when a floor plan that looked fine in February does not work in July.

Honesty when something is bad. This is what we need most and get least of. People are polite. They say "it's fine" and then we see in the numbers that they never opened half the app.

What we want to hear is the kind of thing nobody can be bothered to email about. That you can never find the button to move a booking. That the confirmation email reads stiffly. That you still keep a paper list beside you, because it is faster. That last one especially. If you are keeping a paper list, we have failed at something, and we want to know what.

When it is not a fit

We would rather write this now than have you work it out later.

If you are happy with what you have. Then keep it. Changing systems costs you a messy week no matter how good the new one is, and you should only pay that week if something genuinely chafes today.

If you need something completely finished. Bordflow is ready and does what it says, but there are rough edges. Things that work and look dull. Things we have not built because nobody asked. If you want a system where everything has already been thought through by a thousand customers before you, those exist, and they are priced accordingly.

If you are a chain with many sites. It works, but we have not built for it, and you would end up piloting something quite different from what we are looking for now.

If you want somebody to blame. The upside of us being small is that you know who answers. The downside is also that we are small. A sick day shows.

What the system does today

So you know what you are saying yes to, not just what it is called.

Bookings come in through a widget that is one line of code on your own site. The guest never leaves your address, and it looks like your place, not ours. Tables are assigned automatically as bookings arrive, and you can move things around afterwards. A waitlist when you are full, drop-ins when somebody is at the door.

The evening has its own view showing who has arrived, who is seated and what is left. Events and activities booked by table or lane get their own sitting, separate from the dining room, with a guest list to check people off at the door when seats are paid for on the spot.

Confirmations, reminders and cancellations go out as emails that look like your restaurant.

How to get in touch

Email hello@bordflow.com and tell us what you do, roughly how many covers on a normal evening, and what system you run today. If you run nothing at all, that is an answer too.

We reply the same day. If it is not a fit we will say so straight away, and then you have only spent five minutes on an email.