Multiple Seatings on a Dining Table

Multiple seatings lets you seat several unrelated parties (groups) at the same dining table at the same time. Each group keeps its own guests, orders, kitchen order tickets (KOTs), comments, and bill. A table that is only partly occupied can still be offered, by reservations and by automatic allocation, to a new party that fits in the seats that remain free.

Note: Multiple seatings is set per dining area. Single-seating dining areas are unaffected.

To use multiple seatings on a dining area, see How to: Set Up a Dining Area for Multiple Seatings, which also covers changing an existing dining area.

Using multiple seatings on the POS

On a dining area with one seating per table, pressing a dining table opens a pop-up menu for the table. With multiple seatings, a table can hold several groups and reservations, and one menu for the whole table cannot offer the right commands for each of them. So when you press a table that has seated groups or reservations, the POS opens a panel with one block for each group or reservation. A free table still opens a pop-up menu.

Three pop-up panels are used: the Overview Table Popup panel (the groups seated at the table), the Allocation Table Popup panel (opened from the The Dining Allocation Panel) and the Upcoming Reservations Table Popup panel. See The Multi-Seatings POS Panels for the panels, the commands they offer, and their setup. To seat groups, see How to: Seat Multiple Groups at a Dining Table.

A table also does not need to be empty to be available for a reservation or a walk-in. It stays a valid target as long as enough seats remain free. See Availability in the Dining Area.

Statuses

A table with seated groups is Partially Seated until the guests of its groups take all of its seats, and then Fully Seated. It stays Seated and never becomes Occupied, because orders belong to the groups. In the Dining Allocation panel, a booked table shows these statuses too. See Table states on a multiple-seatings dining area for the table overview and On a multiple-seatings dining area for the Dining Allocation panel.

Where the setup lives

Multiple seatings is set up in four places. The program checks only the hospitality type and the dining area when the POS starts, but the template menus, service flow and menu profile are needed for the POS to show the multiple-seatings information.

Where	What you set	More information
Hospitality Type Card	Guest handling and guest registration. Validate Setup runs the check.	How to: Set Up a Dining Area for Multiple Seatings
Dining Table Type and Dining Area Card	Seat capacity on the dining table types. On the dining area: seating capacity, the three handlers, availability calculations, and the three template menus.	Dining table types and multiple seatings, The Multi-Seatings POS Panels
Hospitality Service Flow	When a table becomes occupied, and the pop-up menus per state.	Pop-up menus set on the hospitality service flow
POS menu profile	Copies of the menus, changed to fit multiple seatings. The menu profile is assigned to the POS terminals that use multiple seatings.	POS Menus for Multiple Seatings

Limitations

The following are not supported on a multiple-seatings dining area:

Combined dining tables: See Combined Dining Tables.
Joining tables: If a reservation is seated at more than one table, the transaction must be settled separately for each table.
Alert text: See Setting Up Dining Table Alerts.
Waiting lists: See How to: Manage Waiting Lists.
Transferring a single order or part of a seating: Only a whole seating (the seated group) can be transferred, together with its orders.

Multiple Seatings on a Dining Table

In this article

Using multiple seatings on the POS

Statuses

Where the setup lives

Limitations

See also