The guest book (CRM)

The guest book is TableStack's memory of the people you serve. It's built for hospitality: a returning guest's preferences, allergies, and history are there before they sit down, so your team can greet them like a regular.

Guests belong to your whole group

A guest record is scoped to your organization, not a single venue. A regular at your downtown room is the same guest at your uptown room — same allergies, same preferences, same visit history — because guests are shared across every venue in the group. Preferences and safety information follow the guest wherever they dine with you.

No duplicate guests

When a booking comes in, TableStack matches it to an existing guest by phone or email rather than creating a second record. Online bookings match silently — diners never see a prompt. When your staff create a guest who looks like an existing one, TableStack surfaces a fuzzy-match prompt so a human decides; records are never merged silently. This keeps a guest's history in one place instead of scattered across near-duplicates.

What the guest book tracks

• Preferences — seating, wine, occasion, and other notes about how this guest likes to be looked after.
• Allergies — structured and safety-critical (see below).
• Visit history and spend — where they've dined and what they've spent, built from completed visits.
• No-show count — how often they've failed to turn up, so your team can gauge risk.
• Tags — your own labels (regular, press, industry, etc.).
• Notes — staff-visible notes, organized by category.
• VIP flag — marks a guest for special attention.
• Connections — the companions a guest most often dines with.

Allergies are structured and safety-critical

Allergies are never stored as free text. Each one is a specific, recognized allergen — Peanut, Tree nut, Shellfish, Fish, Egg, Dairy, Gluten, Soy, Sesame, and more — recorded with a severity from Mild through Moderate and Severe up to Life-threatening. Structuring the data this way is what lets TableStack show allergies reliably where they matter: prominently on the seat card during service and as red badges on the kitchen display. Allergy data is a hospitality and safety feature and is never dropped from those views.

When two guest records are merged, the worse severity is kept for any shared allergen — the system never quietly downgrades a life-threatening allergy.

VIP and no-show handling

The VIP flag surfaces a guest for special care across the floor and pre-arrival briefings. No-show tracking counts missed reservations so your team can decide how to handle repeat offenders. You can also block a guest — a blocked guest can't book online and must arrange any booking with staff, who see the reason while the diner only ever sees a generic message.

Flagging a guest VIP also arms VIP alerts: the bell rings when they book or arrive.

Privacy: export and erasure

Guests have the right to their data and the right to be forgotten, and TableStack supports both:

• Export produces a downloadable file of the guest's record.
• Erasure (right to be forgotten) anonymizes the guest rather than deleting the row: their name, contact details, notes, preferences, allergies, tags, and marketing consent are scrubbed, and the record is removed from search. The underlying visit and reservation history is preserved in anonymized form, so your analytics stay intact while the person is no longer identifiable.

Auto-tags that explain themselves

Alongside the tags your team applies by hand, TableStack applies a small set of system tags from the guest's actual history — first-timer, regular, big-spender, frequent-canceller and no-show-prone. Two things make them trustworthy:

• Every auto-tag carries its reason. Hover a tag and it tells you why it's there — "Avg $100/cover vs $20 org average", "12 visits". No black boxes.
• They never touch your manual tags. The rules only add and remove their own tags; anything your team applied stays put. On the tags page, system tags are marked and can't be renamed or merged.

Auto-tags refresh as service happens — when a party departs, or a booking no-shows or cancels — and a nightly sweep keeps the whole book honest. The big-spender bar self-calibrates to 1.5× your own group's average spend per cover, so it tracks your price point automatically.

What each rule means (the tags page shows the same descriptions beside each rule):

• first-timer — no completed visits yet; their next visit is their first.
• regular — 10 or more completed visits anywhere in your organization.
• big-spender — averages at least 1.5× your organization's per-cover spend, over 2 or more billed visits.
• frequent-canceller — 2 or more cancellations made inside 6 hours of the booking time.
• no-show-prone — 2 or more no-shows on record; pairs with the no-show risk badge on bookings.

Don't want a rule? On the tags page, Pause rule switches an auto-tag off for your whole organization: its applied tags disappear immediately and the rule stops running. Resume rule turns it back on and re-applies it across the book. You can also create plain (manual) tags from the same page with Add tag.

Smart lists (segments)

A smart list is a saved filter over the guest book — "regulars", "VIPs with allergies", "guests we haven't seen in 90 days". It stays live: guests move in and out as their history changes, so the list is always current, never a stale export.

Build one from the guest book's filter bar (visits, dormancy, birthday month, VIP, allergies, tags) and tap Save as segment — or ask for one in plain English (below). Smart lists appear as one-tap pills on the guest book and in the guest-book rail, and they're available over the API.

Search

The guest book is fully searchable by name, email and phone, so your host can find a returning guest in a couple of keystrokes; anonymized guests are removed from search. Where the natural-language helper is enabled, you can also ask the guest book a question — "regulars we haven't seen in 90 days", "big spenders with birthdays this month" — and save the answer as a smart list in one tap. The list keeps the question that created it, and keeps answering it as your book changes.

What this affects

• The floor and kitchen — allergies and VIP status appear on seat cards and the kitchen display.
• Booking — every reservation is tied to a guest, and blocked guests can't book online.
• Analytics — visit history and spend roll up per guest, preserved even after erasure.

What affects this

• Completed visits build a guest's history and recorded spend.
• Marketing consent captured at booking time is stored with the guest.