Take a reservation

Add a booking that came in by phone or in person, including deposits and confirmation emails.

Customers can book themselves online, but plenty of people still prefer to ring up, and those bookings need to go into the same diary so that your tables are never promised twice. This is how you enter one by hand.

From Reservations, click Add Reservation. There is also an Add Reservation button on the Home page, which is the one to use when you are holding the phone in your other hand and do not want to go hunting through menus.

Fill it in

1. Covers is how many people are coming.
2. Date is the day they want. If you are closed that day Dinerly tells you, but it still lets you make the booking, because a private party on a closing day is a perfectly normal thing for a restaurant to do.
3. Time is chosen from the Available Timeslots shown. Any slot that would break one of your booking rules is not offered in the first place, so you cannot accidentally promise a table you do not have.
4. Customer Name, Phone Number and Email Address. Only the name is required, but it is worth asking for the email, because that is what lets Dinerly send them a confirmation and a reminder rather than leaving them to remember it themselves.
5. Table can be assigned now if you know where they are going, or left empty so that you can place them on the floor nearer the time.
6. Duration is how long you are holding the table for. It starts at the default you set in your reservation settings, and you can change it for this one booking when you know it will be different, such as a long lunch or a quick table before the theatre.
7. Source records where the booking came from, such as the phone or a walk- in. It is easy to skip, but it is the only way you will be able to see later which of your channels is genuinely bringing people through the door.
8. Special requests is where birthdays, allergies and “the quiet table please” go, so that whoever is on shift that night knows before the guests arrive.

Click Create Reservation when you are done.

Confirmation emails

Leave Send reservation confirmation email to customer ticked and the customer is sent the details automatically, which saves them writing anything down.

If you edit the booking afterwards, the same option is offered for an update email. It is worth using whenever the time or the table changes, because otherwise the customer is working from whatever you told them on the phone, and that is exactly how a party turns up an hour early.

Deposits

If you take deposits, tick Collect deposit for this reservation. Dinerly works the amount out from your settings, which are set as an amount per person, and creates a payment link to send to the customer. Until they pay it, the booking shows the deposit as Pending, and once the money arrives it changes to Paid, so you can see at a glance which tables are actually secured.

See Reservation settings for how to decide when a deposit is required.

If no times are being offered, the booking rules are doing their job. Something is telling Dinerly that day is not bookable. Start with Reservation hours in your opening hours, since those decide when bookings are allowed at all, and then check the minimum notice in your reservation settings, which can rule out a day that is simply too close to now.

Last updated 20 September 2026