How to get bookings to show up on your till

There are three ways to get bookings onto your till: a native integration between your booking platform and your EPOS, a middleware bridge when the two won't talk directly, or replacing one side so the pair connect naturally. Most venues need less work than they fear, and the fix usually takes days. What you're replacing is the morning printout, and it's more expensive than it looks.

What the printout actually costs

In a surprising number of good venues, tonight's bookings travel to the floor on paper: printed at four, annotated with a biro, propped near the pass. The bookings system knows names, times, covers and the note that says birthday. The till knows none of it. So walk-ins get sat on booked tables, pre-orders live in an email thread, and no-shows hold tables the till would happily release. Each failure is small. Together they're a service that runs slightly worse than the same room and team should, every night.

Which route fits your setup?

Native integration

Most of the major booking platforms can talk to most of the major tills now. If both your systems are mainstream, the connection may already exist and just need switching on and configuring properly. Configuration is the real work: table maps, statuses and who wins when the two disagree.

A bridge in the middle

When there's no native route, a small piece of middleware can move bookings one way and status the other. I've built these for tills, bookings, ticketing and finance. Done properly it's days of work, not months, and it means keeping two systems you otherwise like.

Replace one side

Sometimes the honest answer is that one half of the pair is the problem. If the till is the blocker for this and three other things, this becomes an EPOS decision, and it's worth making deliberately rather than around a single feature.

Who this is for

• Restaurants and bars on ResDiary, SevenRooms, OpenTable or DesignMyNight whose till doesn't know a booking exists
• Venues where someone types bookings into the till every afternoon
• Groups where every site solves this differently and none of them well

What it costs and what to expect

Switching on a native integration is typically small: configuration and a testing window. A custom bridge is a defined project measured in days. Either way the payback is nightly, and the fix outlives the person who used to do the typing. What keeps it broken is never difficulty, it's that nobody owns it. Pick an owner, set a date, and recycle the biro.

Want it looked at properly?

Run the free Stack Check to see this disconnect in context of the rest of your stack, or book a free 30 minute call via the contact page and tell me which booking platform and till you're on. I'll tell you which of the three routes fits.