mee-table guide: for the venue manager

mee-table is your venue's booking system, inside your own site. One single panel, and the data stays yours.

Bookings

• Widget on your site, in 8 languages, with no commission per cover
• Capacity per time slot: you decide how many guests you accept at 13:00 and how many at 21:00
• Quick blocks: close a day, a date range or single slots, for holidays or private events
• Discounts by time slot and by day, to fill the empty hours
• Waiter Dashboard: who is coming tonight, confirmations, cancellations, notes and allergies
• Bookings list and exports, anonymised statistics included
• WhatsApp button so guests can contact you directly

Communications, automatic

• Request, confirmation, reminder, cancellation and refund emails, all editable by you
• SMS reminders, with your own operator or with an Android phone: we do not sell SMS
• The reminder goes out before the cancellation deadline expires, not the evening before: that is when the table can still be filled again
• Review email after the evening, optional

The money

• Card guarantee against no-show: the card is held, charged only if the guest does not show up
• Rates Menu: real prepayments by time slot and by day
• Gift cards with your own amounts, redeemable in the dining room
• Refunds from the dashboard, without leaving the panel

The events that fill the empty evenings

• Dating Aperitivo and Cooking Class: sign-ups, tickets, communications and automatic reminders
• Print-ready flyers, four formats, with the date, price and QR code of the event

If you have more than one venue

• Several locations from the same panel, each with its own capacity, prices and settings
• The widget lets the guest choose the venue

The plugin talks to the mee-table.com servers to make everything work: bookings, payments and availability are not stored on your site, but on a dedicated and secure external service.

During the 14-day trial you get everything, with no exceptions: gift cards, prepayments, card guarantee, events. The trial is there so you can really try it, not watch it from outside.

What you sell during the trial stays yours: the gift cards you have issued remain valid and redeemable afterwards too, even if you then choose a plan that does not include them.

For more than four venues the price is tailored: write to us.

1. Go to mee-table.com, create a free account (no card required) and log in to your dashboard.
2. Copy your license key, in the format MTBL-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.
3. In your WordPress, go to mee-table → Settings.
4. Paste the license key into the relevant field and click "Activate licence".
5. If you need unlimited bookings or Premium features, you can upgrade from the same dashboard on mee-table.com, paying with Stripe or PayPal.

After activation, the plugin checks the licence automatically every day: you do not have to do anything manually.

Go to mee-table → Location and fill in your venue's details:

• Name, address, city: shown to customers.
• Contact email: where you receive booking notifications.
• Phone: normal contact number.
• WhatsApp (numbers only): see the section "The WhatsApp button".
• Max guests, opening/closing times: used to calculate availability.

If you run more than one venue, you can add them all from this same page, each one has its own independent settings (capacity, prices, no-show, and so on), except the Mollie connection, which can be shared automatically between locations belonging to the same owner (see "Settings → Global Mollie").

Careful: this is NOT a payment of the bill. It is a guarantee: the customer's card is held, and the amount is charged only if the guest does not show up.

How to activate it

1. In Location, tick "No-show protection active".
2. Set the guarantee amount per person (minimum 5.00 €).
3. Set the guest threshold: with 1 the guarantee is always requested, with 5 only from groups of 5 or more. It is there so you do not add friction for Tuesday evening couples.
4. Connect Mollie. It is the only method that can hold an amount without taking it: Stripe and PayPal charge straight away.

How you connect it, in practice: you do not have to copy any key. Go to mee-table → Settings, press Connect Mollie and the Mollie site opens, where you log in with your account and authorise. Then you come back and you are connected. If you have more than one venue you can connect a single account for all of them, or one per venue.

Mollie asks for an identity document of the owner and the bank account details for verification. You can connect straight away without waiting for that to finish: live payments unlock by themselves as soon as Mollie completes the checks.

If you do not connect Mollie the protection does not activate, and the booking goes through anyway without a guarantee.

What the customer sees

After filling in their details they are taken once only to the Mollie payment page, where they enter the card. They pay nothing: the amount is only held. Then they come back to your site and see the confirmation.

The behaviour changes depending on how far away the booking is, but for the customer it is always a single step:

• Within 5 days: the amount is held on the card straight away.
• More than 5 days ahead: the card is verified with a symbolic charge of 1 cent and saved securely. The real hold starts by itself 5 days before the date. This is needed because a card hold lasts about a week: for a dinner two months away it could not be held today, and this is the way to have it guaranteed all the same.

How to collect the penalty

When a customer does not show up, go to the Waiter Dashboard, find the booking and press "No show". You are asked to confirm, because that button really does take the money from the customer's card.

The amount is released by itself, without you doing anything, when:

• you mark the booking as shown up (the customer came)
• you cancel the booking

If you do nothing, the hold expires by itself after a few days. Confirming a booking does not release the guarantee: it stays active until the evening itself.

Different from the no-show guarantee: here the customer really pays, straight away, at the booking stage, it is a genuine advance on the bill, not a guarantee.

A practical example:

• Aperitivo: €40 per person
• Dinner: €55 per person
• After dinner: €40 per person

To activate it, in Location → Rates Menu: Booking Prepayment:

1. Click "+ Add rate".
2. Write the name (for example "Aperitivo") and the amount.
3. Optional: set a time slot (for example 17:00–19:00): if you do, the system automatically proposes that rate to the customer based on the time they choose when booking.
4. Click "Save rates".

The refund policy: there are two of them, not one

The no-show guarantee and the Rates Menu have two separate settings, because they are two different economies.

No-show guarantee: the card is only held, you have never taken the money. So there is nothing to give back, and what you set is a deadline for cancelling without a penalty. If the customer cancels within the deadline the guarantee is released; beyond it, if they do not show up, the penalty is yours. The typical value is 24 or 48 hours.

Rates Menu: you have collected the money and you have already spent it. Here the setting decides whether it is refundable, and the default value is non-refundable, which is the standard for fixed-price menus. If you prefer to be flexible, set a wide window: 72 hours, not 24.

You can keep them different from each other. The typical case: bookings with a flexible guarantee, non-refundable 55 € tasting menu.

In every case you can always refund by hand from the Waiter Dashboard.

The reminder always arrives by email. With SMS it arrives as well as a message, which is read far more often. mee-table does not sell SMS and takes no commission: the cost, if there is one, is your operator's.

In Location → SMS Reminders you choose how to send them:

• My Android phone: you use a phone you already have, with its SIM and a free gateway app. It costs whatever your phone plan costs, but the phone has to stay switched on and connected.
• Twilio, Skebby, Aruba SMS, Brevo, Vonage: choose yours from the list and we ask you only for the credentials you find in its panel. The address, the authentication and the format of the request we already know: you do not have to copy anything from the documentation.
• Other provider: only if you use a service that is not in the list. There you fill in the technical fields yourself.

You do not write the text here: the SMS uses the same text as the reminder email, which you edit once only in mee-table → Email → Reminder.

Test it before activating it

Below the credentials there is Send test SMS: write your number in international format, with the +, and press. You get a real message, with the settings you have in front of you at that moment even if you have not saved them yet. That way you know it works before a customer receives it.

mee-table checks the fields before sending, so it flags the most common errors for you without using up credit. If the message really does go out, that is a send like any other and your provider deducts the credit.

One useful note: the test goes out from your WordPress site, while the real reminders go out from the mee-table servers. If your provider only accepts sends from authorised addresses, write to us and we will give you ours to put on the list.

To activate them, in Location → Gift Card:

1. Click "+ Add amount".
2. Write the name and the amount (for example "€25", "€50", "€100").
3. Click "Save gift cards".

The plugin automatically creates a dedicated page on your site (see Settings → 🎁 Gift Card Page, it works like the "Book" page). A "Give a Gift Card" button appears by itself under the booking widget, and you can also put it on other pages of the site: see the section on shortcodes.

In mee-table → Hourly Capacity you find two tabs:

• Hourly Capacity: in each box you write how many guests at most you accept in that slot. If you leave 80, which is the starting value, at 20:00 you accept up to 80 people. If you write a lower number, for example 33, beyond that the slot takes no more bookings. If you write 0, that slot cannot be booked and the guest does not even see it.
• Quick Blocks: to close single dates (for example a public holiday) or entire time slots on specific days.
• Block a range (from: to): for long closures, such as a seasonal closure (for example October–April): you just give the start and end date, without having to click every single day on the calendar.

It is just a link, not an automatic messaging service.

What it does:

• Fill in the "WhatsApp (numbers only)" field in Location, in international format without symbols (for example the Italian number +39 333 123 4567 → write 393331234567).
• Under the booking widget a "Message us on WhatsApp" button appears.
• When a customer clicks it, WhatsApp opens on their phone, with a message already written, addressed to your number.
• The customer writes, you reply normally: like any other chat.

Automatic WhatsApp reminders and confirmations (from the Silver plan): the reminder always arrives by email; with WhatsApp it also arrives as a message, which gets opened far more often. You connect your own Meta Business account from the panel (Location → WhatsApp reminder): mee-table does not sell messages and takes no commission, you pay Meta directly.

A shortcode is a short code that you insert in a WordPress page to display a feature of the plugin.

• [mee-table]: shows the complete booking widget (guest choice, date, time, contact details). If you activate the automatic creation of the "Book" page (Settings), this shortcode is already inserted there for you.
• [mee-table-giftcard]: shows only the button "Give a Gift Card", to put on any other page of the site (for example the homepage, or a "Gifts" page).
• [mee-table-giftcard-page]: shows the complete form for buying a gift card (choice of amount, buyer details). It goes on the page dedicated to gift cards: if you activate the automatic creation (Settings → Gift Card Page), it is already inserted there.

To use them: create (or edit) a page in WordPress, and paste the shortcode into the text, for example:

`

Come and see us!

[mee-table]

`

The shortcodes, and what each one is for

A shortcode is a word in square brackets that you write inside a page: WordPress replaces it with the real thing. There are five of them.

• [mee-table] the booking widget. It is the one you use almost always.
• [mee-table-giftcard] the "Give a Gift Card" button, to put wherever you want.
• [mee-table-giftcard-page] the complete gift card purchase form. You do not have to write it yourself: if you have activated the automatic creation of the Gift Card page, the plugin creates a page that already contains this shortcode. You only need it if you prefer to put the form on a page you have made yourself.
• [mee-table-privacy] the venue's privacy notice, generated automatically with its details. Next to the consent box in the widget the law requires a notice: with this you publish it without writing it. If you have more than one venue, [mee-table-privacy location_id="4"] generates the one for the right venue.
• [mt_staff_dashboard] the waiter dashboard on the site, for those who do not want to let staff into wp-admin.

From mee-table → Events you find the buttons to print the poster with the QR code. The flyer always shows the next event on the schedule: if there is none it tells you so, instead of printing a date that has already passed.

Three formats, and they are not the same sheet enlarged:

• A3: a poster, looked at from a distance. Large title, 85 mm QR code.
• A4: shop window or wall, read from a couple of metres away.
• A5: table stand, portrait or landscape for the fold-open photo frames.

Each size has its own layout because what makes a text legible is the distance you read it from, not the size of the sheet. A title that works at 40 cm disappears at 4 metres.

You do not print the A3 in the office, you take it to a print shop: it is the cheapest large format there is.

The photo

It has to be landscape. On the flyer and in the email it sits in a wide band: of a portrait photo only a central strip is visible, usually the wall behind the plate.

When you choose the file a 3:2 crop appears that you can move and enlarge. On confirming, the photo is reduced and lightened before it leaves your computer, so the 15 MB that a phone produces today never get uploaded.

The panel tells you straight away up to which format that shot holds up: for A3 about 2200 pixels of width are needed, for A4 about 1550. If the photo is small it writes it to you in orange. It is not a formality: compressing better does not invent pixels that are not there, and a small photo printed in A3 looks grainy.

It is the tool for filling the hours when the room is empty, without lowering the price of everything else.

Go to mee-table → Discounts:

1. Tick Activate time-based discounts.
2. Choose the active days: the discounts apply only on those.
3. Put the percentage in the slots you want to empty. 0 means no discount.

Weekdays and weekend have two separate grids, so you can discount Tuesday at 21:00 without touching Saturday.

With Override for a specific date you change the discounts of a single day, for example a festive evening or an event night.

The guest sees the discount while choosing the time, with the label next to the slot: that is what moves them from 20:30 to 21:00.

They are two different pages and they serve two different moments.

mee-table → Bookings is the complete list: date, time, guests, name, email and status. It is there to search for a booking or to check the history.

mee-table → Waiter Dashboard is the service page, the one you keep open in the evening. You filter by today, this week, this month or a precise date, and from there you confirm, cancel, mark who has arrived and who has not shown up. The No show button is also the one that collects the penalty, if the guarantee is active.

Exports

From the Dashboard you download:

• Service list: the list to print and keep on the stand.
• Bookings in CSV: for your spreadsheet or your accountant.
• Marketing database: only those who have given newsletter consent, to import into your sending tool.
• Anonymised statistics: without names, emails or phone numbers, with the charts, to view on screen or download in print-ready HTML.

The exports come out in the language of the panel.

In mee-table → Email you decide what arrives, and when, both to you and to the guest. Every text can be edited: subject and body.

The moments covered:

• New booking to the restaurant, as soon as it comes in
• Awaiting confirmation to the guest, if you confirm by hand
• Confirmed to the guest
• Reminder to the guest, before the cancellation deadline expires
• Cancellation and refund, to both

In the texts you can use the variables in double curly braces, which the system replaces with the real data: {{nome}}, {{data}}, {{ora}}, {{ospiti}}, {{location}} and others. The panel lists them above the editor.

Do not change the name of the variables, not even by translating them: {{nome}} stays {{nome}} in an English text too, otherwise instead of the data the wording comes out just as it is.

There is also a fallback restaurant email, used when a venue does not have a contact address of its own.

The events serve one purpose only: filling the evenings when the room stays empty. They are ticketed evenings, so the guest pays in advance and you already know how many they are.

They are created from mee-table → Events. For each one you set date and time, ticket price, capacity and a discount on the ticket if you want to run a pre-launch. The panel tells you how many tickets you have sold, and from there you close or cancel the event.

To sell tickets you need Mollie connected.

Dating Aperitivo

An evening for singles, standing up, with drinks and finger food: it takes up no tables and requires no table service.

How it works:

1. The participants sign up online and buy the ticket. They fill in a short profile: a photo, their age, two lines of description.
2. In the evening they meet each other in person, at the aperitivo.
3. The next day they vote, with a swipe mechanism, on the people they have already met. Not photos of strangers: people seen face to face. That is the difference with dating apps.
4. If the like is mutual it is a match: the contact is unlocked by paying a 20 EUR deposit, which they find deducted from the dinner bill.
5. The couple books dinner with you, and you can steer them towards a discounted slot, filling another empty evening.

So from one evening you fill two, and the second is a real dinner, not an aperitivo.

For every event mee-table generates the flyer to print, in four formats, with the date, price and sign-up QR code: see the section on posters.

Cooking Class

A cookery lesson in your venue, at the times when it is closed. Those who sign up buy the ticket, cook with the chef and eat what they have prepared.

It has a presentation page with a title, description and photo, which you fill in, and from there the tickets are sold. Recurring sessions can be created, for example every Thursday.

It is the event that monetises the closed venue: no covers taken away from service.

Wall4Art

Real works of art on the walls of your venue, changing every month.

It works the opposite way to how you would imagine: you do not rent out your walls, you rent the works. You pay a fee based on how much wall you use, and the artist receives a recurring share for the whole time their work stays with you. No new production, and no unpaid artist while their work is hanging.

Why it pays off for the venue, even though it pays a fee:

• The opening. Every change of works is an evening: the artist comes, their people come, and that is twenty people drinking at least one drink each. You earn back a month's fee right there.
• The walls change every month. Those who follow art come back to see what is new, and those who come back for the art then have dinner.
• The guest can buy the work, by scanning the QR code from the table. Or take it home themselves in turn: "how much does it cost to keep it for a month?". That starts from your table too.

For the artist it is a month of exhibition in front of people who never set foot in galleries.

How much it costs:

• it starts from 29 € a month for the small format (50x50 cm), up to 150 € a month for 3 square metres of wall
• every wall is insured up to 3,500 €, and the deposit is fully refundable when you close the space
• the fee becomes credit: every euro spent on rental counts as a down payment if you then buy the work
• mee-table customers get an automatic discount, because the two platforms are connected

Not only restaurants: clinics, shops, offices, libraries, hotels and private homes too.

It is not connected to mee-table yet. In the panel you find it as "coming soon", with the link to see the platform. When the integration is ready, spaces and works will be managed from here.

Customisable event

In progress. It will be used to create an event type of your own, with texts, photos and flyer made from scratch, for the evenings that do not fit any of the formats above.

In mee-table → Settings are the things that apply to the whole site, not to the single venue.

The look of the widget

• Use the theme's font and style: if you activate it, the widget takes the fonts of your site instead of its own. It is there to make it look like part of the page and not a piece stuck on.
• Main colour: choose the colour of the buttons and of the highlighted elements. The starting value is a warm gold.

The pages created automatically

• Book page: mee-table can create it by itself, with the name you choose. It is the page the Google link should point to, instead of the home page.
• Gift Card page: the same thing for gift cards, with the complete purchase form.

If you prefer to decide yourself where to put things, you deactivate the automatic creation and use the shortcodes.

The waiter

From here you create the waiter user, who only gets into the Dashboard and does not see the rest of the panel. It is there to give access to the service without giving the keys to everything.

The payment methods, and what each one is for

You can connect three services, and they do not do the same thing:

• Mollie: it is the only one that can hold an amount without taking it. So it is needed for the anti no-show guarantee, and it is also used for prepayments, gift cards and event tickets.
• Stripe and PayPal: if you already use them, you can connect them as collection methods. They cannot do the guarantee, because they charge straight away.

The credentials put here count as a fallback setting for all venues: a venue can always have its own.

Privacy

One address of your privacy notice valid for all venues, used when one does not have its own. It appears in the widget next to the consent box, and it is required by law.

Whoever books can tick the consent to receive your communications. The box is always there, on every plan: it is required by law together with the privacy notice.

What changes is what happens afterwards.

In Settings you can connect:

• A webhook address (for example Zapier or Make): every new consent is sent there, and from there it ends up in the tool you use.
• Mailchimp, with the API key and the list ID: the contacts go straight into the right list.

There is also double opt-in: if you activate it, the subscriber receives an email and has to confirm. It is slower but it keeps the list clean, and in some countries it is the correct practice.

Without any of these settings the contacts are yours all the same: you export them from the Waiter Dashboard, in the "Marketing database" file, which contains only those who have given consent.

For each venue, in Location, you decide what happens when a booking comes in:

• Automatic confirmation on: the booking is confirmed straight away and the customer receives the confirmation email. Less work for you, but you accept everything that fits into the capacity.
• Automatic confirmation off: the booking stays pending, the customer receives an email telling them so, and it is you who confirms or refuses from the Waiter Dashboard.

The second one is the right one if you have a small room, if you work on tight sittings, or if you want to look at the requests from large groups before saying yes.

Can I have more than one location with a single licence?

It depends on your plan: some licences allow more than one location, others are limited to just one. Check in your mee-table.com dashboard.

What happens if a customer cancels the booking?

If they have paid a no-show guarantee, they are refunded if they cancel more than 48 hours before the booked time. Within 48 hours, the amount is retained (an anti no-show deterrent) unless you decide otherwise as manager.

How do I know whether a booking is confirmed or pending?

From the Waiter Dashboard, where you see the status of every booking (confirmed, pending, cancelled) and can manage them.

Do I absolutely have to connect Mollie?

It depends on what you want to do. For normal bookings, without a guarantee and without payments, it is not needed.

It is needed instead for everything that moves money:

• the anti no-show protection (it is the only one that can hold an amount without taking it)
• the Rates Menu, that is the prepayments
• the sale of gift cards
• the event tickets: Dating Aperitivo, Cooking Class
• the refunds, which are done from the Waiter Dashboard

In practice: if you only want to receive bookings you can do without it, if you want to collect money you cannot.

How do I contact support?

Through your dashboard on mee-table.com/dashboard.

Plugin version: 1.0.0