Figuring out the right cover balance when pacing your reservations can be tricky. To achieve this, you only need to know to pieces of information about your restaurant before starting.

1. What is your total restaurant capacity? This is essentially, the total number of people you can accommodate if you were to fill every single seat in your restaurant.
2. What is your desired restriction? Eg: At any given point in time, you only want 30% of your restaurant occupied.

With these two numbers in mind, you can easily determine your restricted capacity.

For example, your restaurant can seat 250 customers but you now want to make sure your occupancy never exceeds 50%. This means your restricted capacity number is 125.

The video below will walk you through how to use Eat App to manage your restaurant's capacity with shifts. Read on for step by step instructions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TSHylwNxiw

Step-by-step instructions to managing capacity with Eat App

The following steps are how you can use Eat App to manage your restaurant's capacity.

• Create a new shift

  

• Under availability type, select "Volume". A volume shift allows you to set the maximum number of covers you want your restaurant to receive regardless of how many tables you have available online.

  

• Toggle "Use Pacing". Pacing allows you to set a fixed number of covers over the your reservation intervals that are never exceeded.

  

• Once you've toggled "Use Pacing" a new option to "Edit Pacing" will appear in green, selecting this will take you into the pacing editor.

  

• Here you can either select a set number of covers that will be applied to all intervals (Eg: 20 covers every hour) or you can select the number of covers for each individual interval in that shift (Eg: 15 covers at 1:00pm and 40 covers at 2:00pm).

  

• For this scenario, you'll want to toggle the option "Use the same pacing for all time slots", this will guarantee that you never exceed your desired number of covers at any point during your shift.

  

• Set the "Total covers per slot" to the number you calculated above, in our case its 125.

  

• The last step to restricting your covers is the "Duration" option. By default, Eat App comes with pre-determined reservation durations but this option lets you decide how long different party sizes should be allotted for every reservation (Eg: "Bookings of 3 or more customers should only be allowed to stay for 1 hour). We recommend using this setting to set the same duration for all party sizes.

  

• Once you're done, make sure all the other shift settings are in line with your restaurant operations and click "Save".