Booking flows

A booking flow is the journey a guest walks through to book — the steps, in the order you choose, with the questions you want to ask. Open Booking settings → Booking flows.

You build a flow once and assign it to as many booking setups as you like. One flow can power your whole venue, or you can build different flows for different services. Edit a flow once and every setup using it updates.

The settings panel sits in the dark rail

When you click a widget, its settings open in the dark rail on the left — the same panel the page list and Flow design use. It is part of the rail rather than a separate white panel floating on top of it.

The page scrolls to what you're editing

Click a widget and the page beside you moves to it, so you're never editing something you can't see. A widget already on screen stays exactly where it is — only one that's out of view moves, and only far enough to be seen.

Shrink a widget you're not working on

Because the middle is your real booking page, a page with a few widgets on it can be taller than your screen. Every widget has a chevron in its black label tab: click it and the widget shrinks to a single row that still tells you its name and how it's set — so you can see the order of a whole page at once and rearrange it without scrolling. Click the row to open it again.

Collapse all at the top of the page does the lot; it becomes Expand all once everything is shrunk. Open one widget after collapsing them all and it stays open — the button sets the starting point, not a rule.

This is only about how you are looking at the page. Nothing you collapse changes your flow, needs saving, or is visible to a guest, and it starts fresh next time you open the builder. Anything the builder needs to warn you about — a question whose field was deleted, terms with no wording — still shows under a collapsed widget, so tidying the page can never hide a problem with it.

When a widget shows guests nothing

Because the middle is your real page, a widget with nothing to show draws nothing — and the builder tells you why, under the widget:

• a question whose saved field was deleted. If the question was optional, guests simply aren't asked. If it was required, nobody can book at all until you pick another field or make it optional — the builder says so in red.
• terms with no wording written, so guests aren't asked to agree to anything.
• a content block with no words and no image.
• marketing consent with no channels picked.
• a set menu widget whose menus are all unbookable or archived.
• card details, which is listed under the page rather than drawn on it. Guests are asked for a card from your venue's payment settings, not from a place in the flow.

Create a flow

Most venues get here from Booking settings → Booking flows. If you are still working through Get started with bookings, you reach it from the Booking flow card on your booking page instead: Build a flow opens the same starting-point picker there and takes you straight into the builder, skipping the list. Either way the builder is the same screen, and coming from the checklist it carries a Back to your booking page button so you can get back to what you were doing.

1. 1

   Click Create a flow and pick a starting point

   Choose the kind of booking you're taking — see the six starting points below. Each one builds a different guest journey, and every one of them is fully editable afterwards. You're choosing where to start, not locking anything in.

2. 2

   Name it

   Give it a name (for example "Dinner service"). You'll land in the builder with your chosen journey already loaded.

3. 3

   Compose the pages

   The builder shows your flow as the pages your guest walks through. The panel on the left opens on your pages, one card each, saying what that page holds — and the middle is your real booking page: the same page a guest gets, with your colours, your venue name and your live times, showing the edit you have not saved yet.

   Click a page card's arrow to open it, and the panel becomes that page's widgets. Click a widget and the panel becomes its settings; press Done and the widgets come back, and the back arrow beside the page name returns you to your pages. Drag by the handle to reorder pages or widgets, and use Add a page or Add a widget at the bottom of the panel — whichever list you're looking at is the one it adds to. Adding a page always starts by picking its first widget. The cog beside the page name is where you delete that page, and it tells you when a page can't be deleted and why.

   Note

   Nothing in the middle can be used. It looks like your booking page because it is one, but the buttons don't work and no booking can be made from it — clicking one just picks that widget to edit. To try the journey for real, use View.

4. 4

   Save

   Click Save at the top of the page. There's one Save for the whole builder — it stays greyed out until you change something, and shows "Unsaved changes" while you have work waiting. The flow is saved against your account, ready to assign to setups.

   Saving does not put your changes in front of guests. Your saved work is a draft that only you can see, so you can rework a flow in the middle of service without guests walking through a half-finished version of it.

5. 5

   Publish

   When you're happy with it, click Publish. That's the moment your changes go live for guests.

   While you have saved changes that aren't live yet, the top of the builder says "Unpublished changes — guests still see the published version", so you can always tell what's live from what you're editing.

   Publish stays greyed out until your work is saved — hover it and it tells you why. That's deliberate: Publish makes your last saved version live, so publishing on top of unsaved edits would put less in front of guests than you're looking at.

The list shows how many setups each flow is assigned to. You can rename a flow or archive one you no longer need — archiving hides it from the list but any setups still using it keep working until you assign them a different flow.

The six starting points

| Starting point | What you get | | --- | --- | | Restaurant booking with card (default) | The full journey. Card held against no-shows, cancellation policy and terms captured, allergies asked properly. Start here if you're not sure. | | Simple table booking | The same journey without the card and without the cancellation policy. For a venue that doesn't want to hold card details. Still asks allergies. | | Booking with a deposit | The default plus a deposit taken at the point of booking. For set menus, large parties and anywhere a no-show costs real money. | | Set menu or event | Adds a package choice on its own page. For Christmas menus, tasting menus and ticketed nights. | | Large party enquiry | Larger party sizes, an occasion question, and no card. Its Party size step runs from 6 to 30 guests, not 1 to 20 — it's the one starting point built for parties bigger than the rest. | | Bar or walk-up area | Date, time, party size and a name. The shortest journey that still holds a space. |

Every starting point except Large party enquiry sets its Party size step to 1 to 20 guests. You can change that number on the step at any time — and it's worth knowing that the number on the step beats your setup's Largest party setting. The steps, further down this page, explains why.

Two of these only appear if your account has the feature behind them: Booking with a deposit needs booking deposits, and Set menu or event needs bundles. We'd rather not offer you a starting point that would quietly arrive missing half its steps.

Allergies are set up for you

Every starting point except Bar or walk-up area adds an allergies and dietary needs question, and sets it up properly: the fourteen UK allergens as choices, flagged as a safety alert. That flag is what puts a ⚠ against the booking in your diary, on the till's table banner and on the kitchen ticket — without it an allergy is just a note somebody has to notice.

If you already have an allergy field, we use yours. You'll never end up with two.

Adding allergies to a flow later is one click too: Add a widget → Allergies & dietary needs. It arrives already set up the same way — no picking a saved field, no configuration. Once a page asks about allergies, the widget stops being offered on that page, so you can't ask twice by accident.

The pages in your flow

Opening a flow expands the sidebar into the flow builder — the rest of Tillable stays where it is rather than being covered over, so you always know where you are. The builder fills the window from the bar down to the bottom of the screen: the page itself doesn't scroll, so your pages stay put while you work and it's the middle panel that scrolls when a page holds more than fits.

The panel opens on your pages, in the order a guest walks them — Page 1, Page 2, and so on, each one a card saying what's on it, so you can see the shape of the journey without opening anything. Click a card to open that page: the middle shows it, and the panel shows its widgets. The back arrow beside the page name brings you back to your pages.

Under your pages you'll see how many pages a guest actually walks. That can be one more than you built — if a setup using this flow has more than one room and has "Ask guests where to sit" switched on, we add a "where to sit" page for you, and it's counted there. No setup asking, no extra page and no extra count.

Add a page sits at the bottom of the panel, and it's on the screen the builder opens on, so it's there without opening anything first. When you're inside a page, that same spot becomes Add a widget — the button always matches the list above it.

You can build up to six pages — plenty for any booking journey. At six, Add a page disappears rather than sitting there greyed out, and your pages tell you you've reached the limit. Delete a page and it comes back.

Deleting a page happens behind the cog beside the page name, which also tells you when a page can't be deleted and why.

A new page joins the part of the flow you're currently looking at: add one while you're on an early page and it lands before Your details; add one while you're on Your details or later and it lands after. That keeps the booking itself in one place — everything a guest chooses comes first, everything you need to confirm comes at the end.

Booking basics — the date, party size and time — is one locked block at the top of page 1. Tune any of the three by clicking it, but they can't be removed: without them there's no booking to take.

Your details is in every flow: contact and card details live there and can't be removed, with your terms directly below the card — the tick is the last thing above Confirm, and it is what unlocks the card box above it.

When a guest owes a set-menu deposit, the panel they pay on appears in the same step, between the card box and the terms tick. So the order down that page is card details, deposit, terms, Confirm booking — the guest pays before they confirm, and Confirm never shows a payment screen (restored 15 September 2026; there was no online payment step between 5 August and that date).

On the guest's page that step comes in two halves: the contact fields first, and the card, deposit and terms only once those are filled in. On a flow that takes a deposit but no card, the button under the fields reads Continue to payment from the moment the guest arrives — party size is what decides whether a deposit is owed, so the page knows before they have typed anything. It stays greyed until their details are complete; completing them holds the table and makes it pressable, and pressing it opens the payment box with Confirm booking below. See What guests see when booking for how that looks to a diner.

Changed 16 September 2026: that button used to say Confirm booking until the guest's last answer and then switch. The page was waiting for the server to price the deposit before it would show a payment step, when the party size had already decided there would be one.

You can add information pages after Your details if you need to ask something once the essentials are captured — they stay inside Confirm & details, and the booking-confirmed screen still comes last.

Pages are what the guest sees

Every widget on the canvas is drawn the way the guest meets it, questions included: your allergy question shows the real No allergies choice and the allergen list behind it, and a question you added shows its actual answer box, dropdown or tick box. The heading on the canvas is the heading the guest reads. An Area widget draws the real "where to sit" picker.

Under that widget we list your own room names, taken from the setups this flow is assigned to, and say when guests are asked to pick. That list is a note from us to you. It sits outside your booking page and guests never see it — on the page itself they choose a floor plan, and your rooms on one plan are a single choice between them. See What guests see when booking.

Guests are asked to choose when two or more things they could pick still have space at the time they chose — your floor plans, plus any room whose tables aren't on one. If only one does, we seat them there and don't ask. If you have one room, or none yet, the note tells you that instead of listing them.

If a question's saved field is ever deleted, the canvas says so where the widget sits — quietly when the question is optional (guests simply aren't asked), and as a warning when it's required, because a required question with no field behind it stops guests booking at all.

A page in the builder is a screen on your booking page — the page count in the rail is the page count your guest walks. A flow built before this builder opens showing exactly the pages its guests already see (Date, Party size and Time typically share the first page; the details and agreements share the last), and nothing changes until you edit it.

If a setup using this flow books across more than one floor plan, has Ask guests where to sit switched on, and your flow has no Area widget, guests are asked where they'd like to sit after picking a time. The builder shows that page. Open your page list and it appears as a greyed-out row, in the position guests meet it, and it counts towards the page total at the top.

You can't move or delete it, because it isn't part of your flow: we add it for setups that ask. Add an Area widget yourself if you want to control how that question is asked, and ours steps aside — and your own widget shows whatever the setup's setting says, because you put it there deliberately.

Nothing asking? Nothing shown. Since 15 September 2026 "Ask guests where to sit" is off for every setup, so most flows show no greyed-out row at all. The row follows the setups this flow is assigned to: switch the setting on for one of them (Bookings → Setups → your setup → Sections) and the row appears, with a line underneath saying how many of your setups it applies to.

The six-page limit counts the pages you build, so this one never uses one of them.

Card details

Card details are part of Your details in every flow — you don't add them, and they can't be removed. The builder keeps them last on that page with your Terms directly above, because the guest must accept your cancellation policy before giving a card. That wording is your no-show defence, so write it carefully.

If you built a flow before this and it's missing them, the builder shows a banner offering to add Your details — nothing changes until you click it.

The guest's bank checks who they are before a card can be stored, on every card taken at booking. Almost always they see nothing. Once in a while the bank takes them away to its own page and sends them back, and they land on a short "waiting to confirm your card" message rather than back on the form. There is nothing to configure — see What guests see when booking for what to tell a guest who rings about it.

The steps

Six steps are in every flow and can't be removed. Date, Party size and Time make up Booking basics on page 1; Contact details, Terms and Card details are fixed on Your details. You can still tune all six — you just can't delete them.

Everything else is yours to add and arrange. These are the widgets in Add a widget, named as you'll see them there:

• Contact details (fixed, but tunable) — the "Your information" step: name, email, phone and an optional notes box. Choose whether the phone is required, optional or not asked at all, and whether the notes box appears. To ask guests anything else, add a Custom question rather than extending this step.

• Allergies & dietary needs — the allergy question, already set up: the fourteen UK allergens, flagged as a safety alert, and required. One click, no configuration.

• Dogs — asks whether the guest is bringing a dog, and how many. The guest taps No dogs or Yes, bringing a dog and types a number. It arrives required so a "no" is recorded rather than left blank; untick Required on the widget if you would rather it were optional. A booking with a dog shows a dog icon in your diary, and the answer sits on the booking itself. It is not a safety alert and it does not print on kitchen tickets.

• High chairs — asks whether the guest needs a high chair, and how many. The guest taps No high chairs or Yes, we need a high chair and types a number. Same as the Dogs widget: it arrives required so a "no" is recorded rather than left blank, untick Required on the widget if you would rather it were optional, and a booking that needs one shows a high-chair icon in your diary with the answer on the booking itself. This is the guest's own answer at booking time — separate from the High chair visit tag you tick yourself on the day, which nothing syncs to it.

• Custom question — ask the guest anything else. Pick a field you've already saved, or create one with + New field. Answer types include Choice (pick one) and Multiple choice (pick several) — both show a Choices box for you to type the options, one per line. When you create a field here you can tick Safety alert, so allergen or dietary answers show prominently on the booking, the diary and the kitchen ticket.

• Area — let guests choose where to sit. They pick a floor plan, not a room, so it's only worth adding if your tables are spread over more than one. A widget you add here always shows, whatever a setup's "Ask guests where to sit" setting says — that setting only controls the page we add for you, and since 15 September 2026 it is off by default. So if you want the question asked on a flow, adding this widget is the way to be certain of it.

• Content block — your own copy or an image: a welcome note, house rules, a photo.

  Note

  Building your own allergy question? Use Multiple choice and tick Safety alert — guests can carry more than one allergy, and the safety flag is what puts the answer in front of the kitchen. Most venues don't need to: the booking-flow starting points set an allergies question up for you already.

• Marketing consent — let guests opt in to marketing email, marketing SMS or product updates. You set the exact wording, which is saved as the record of what each guest agreed to.

• Package — let guests pick an experience or bundle with optional set menus.

You can mark a Custom question or a Package step as required, so a guest must complete it to book. Consent cannot be — a marketing opt-in a guest is forced to give is not consent, so there is deliberately no such control. The allergy question is the one that always arrives required; see above.

Asking guests to confirm their opt-in

The consent step has a Require email confirmation (double opt-in) tick box. With it on, ticking the box at booking isn't the end of it: the guest gets an email with a confirmation link, and until they click it their opt-in is held as pending. Pending guests are skipped by every marketing message, so your marketing list only ever contains people who confirmed twice — once on the booking page, once from their own inbox. With it off, a tick at booking is the opt-in and marketing can go out straight away.

The flow checks that the three required steps are present before it publishes. If one is missing, Publish tells you which — for example "A booking needs a time step." — and nothing goes live until you fix it, so guests are never shown a flow they couldn't book through.

You can still save a flow that isn't finished. That's the point of the draft: you can leave a rebuild half-done, come back to it later, and guests carry on with the published version the whole time.

Make your cancellation policy mandatory

Add a Terms step, write your policy, and guests must accept it before they can book.

1. 1

   Add a Terms step

   In the flow builder, click Terms in the step palette.

2. 2

   Write your policy

   Type the wording guests should read — your cancellation terms, any no-show charge, whatever applies.

3. 3

   Save

   Guests now see a tick box on the last page and can’t confirm until they tick it.

There is no separate "make this required" switch — writing a policy is what requires it. A cancellation policy guests could skip wouldn’t be a policy, so the choice was removed rather than left as a step someone could forget to tick.

If you’d rather not ask guests to agree to anything, leave the wording empty: the step then shows nothing and asks nothing.

The contact step used to carry its own Fields list, where you could add a policy tick-box, a marketing opt-in and other questions. None of it ever reached guests — the booking page never read those fields — so the list has been removed. Anything you saved there is kept on your flow so nothing is lost, and the contact step tells you it's holding them; it just isn't shown to anyone. Use the Terms step for your cancellation policy, a Marketing consent step for opt-ins, and a Custom question for anything else.

The builder shows your colours — and lets you change them

The widgets on the canvas are drawn in your brand colour, taken from your default branding profile. The selected date, party size, time and area chips use it, so the builder reads as your booking page rather than a blank white form.

You don't have to leave the builder to change it. Branding lives behind the Flow design button at the top of the left panel — your three colours, and Logo and Cover buttons that open a small upload panel. Press Done to come back to your widgets. The canvas repaints as you pick, so you can see the result before you save. Your changes are saved by the builder's own Save button, along with any changes to the flow itself.

The panel names the brand set it is editing. If you have more than one, it edits the default — the one your customer pages use unless a location says otherwise — and tells you so. The profile's name, your booking page's About text and receipt printing all live on the full My business → Branding page, which the panel links to.

Only the guest's part of each widget is branded. The card around it, the selection outline and the widget's title bar belong to the builder and stay neutral, so it is always clear what a guest sees and what is yours to edit.

Undo a change you did not mean

The top bar has Undo and Redo arrows. Undo takes back your last change. Redo puts it back again.

They work on everything you edit here: adding or deleting a page, adding or removing a step, moving one, changing a step's settings, and changing your colours.

You can also press Cmd + Z (or Ctrl + Z on Windows) to undo, and Cmd + Shift + Z to redo.

Undo does not save anything. If you undo all the way back to how the flow was when you opened it, Save goes quiet again, because nothing has actually changed.

Preview the real flow

The View button opens the genuine embedded booking flow — the one your guests see — in a window, so you can walk through it exactly as they would.

See it as a phone or as a computer

At the top of the preview there are two small buttons: a screen and a phone. They change what the preview is pretending to be.

The preview opens as a computer. Tap the phone and the flow redraws at phone size, exactly as it would for a guest booking on their mobile. Tap the screen to go back.

This is a real change, not a picture of one. The flow inside re-lays itself out the way it would on that device, so you can check your wording fits and your buttons are easy to tap.

Assign a flow to a setup

A flow does nothing until a setup uses it. Open a booking setup (Booking setups) and use its Booking flow card to choose a flow. Choose No custom flow to fall back to the standard booking journey.

If you do not have Bookings Pro

Opening this page without the add-on shows you what it does and links back here, rather than a "page not found". Bookings Pro is switched on for your account by us — talk to your account manager to add it. Everything else in Bookings, your diary included, works exactly as before.

When a venue's page is switched off

A guest opening the booking page while Accepting online bookings is off is told the venue isn't taking online bookings right now, and asked to call instead. No Try again button — nothing is failing, the page is simply not on. This is separate from a genuine loading failure, which does still offer a retry.

What's next

• Set menus in a booking flow — offer fixed-price bundles inside the package step.
• Booking setups — assign your flow to a setup.
• Your booking page — go live and share your link.

A deal across a category (for example "buy one pizza, get the second half price") never appears in the set-menu step. It is a percentage rule rather than a priced menu, so it cannot be sold as a pre-order — offering it here would put a £0 "set menu" on your booking page. The same goes for a spend-and-get offer ("spend £10, get the fries free") and a set price across a category ("£3 on any drink"): they are rules staff apply on the till, with no price of their own, so the step leaves them out too. Set menus, and only set menus, are what this step lists.