Glossary

Every industry has its own vocabulary, and TableStack borrows most of the restaurant's while adding a few of its own. Here's what the words mean when you see them in the app or in these help articles.

The places

• Organization — your business as a whole: the tenant that owns everything and holds the billing account. If you run a restaurant group, the organization is the group. Your guest book lives at this level, shared across every location.
• Venue — one physical restaurant location. A single organization can have many venues; each has its own floors, reservations, and settings.
• Floor — a named area within a venue that you lay tables out on, like "Main Dining," "Patio," or "2nd Floor." A venue can have several.
• Table — a table on the floor plan, with a shape, a capacity, and a position you set by dragging it around the canvas. See Designing your floor.
• Seat — a single place at a table. Seats let you track a party down to the individual chair — useful for allergies and for who ordered what.

The people

• Guest — a person in your guest book: their contact details, preferences, allergies, tags, visit history, and VIP status. Guests belong to the whole organization, so a regular is the same record at every venue.
• Reservation — a future intent to dine: a guest booked a table for a party of a certain size at a certain time. A reservation can be confirmed, changed, cancelled, or no-showed, and it becomes a visit when the party is seated.
• Visit — a party that is physically in the building right now. A visit comes either from seating a reservation or from a walk-in. The key distinction: a reservation is a plan, a visit is real. See The service lifecycle.
• Party member — one person within a reservation or visit. Members carry their own arrival status, so you can track a party as it trickles in rather than treating it as all-or-nothing.
• Cover — one diner, one seat filled. "A party of four" is four covers. Covers are the unit your reports count.
• Waiting party — a party that's partly arrived: at least one person has checked in at the host stand while at least one is still on the way. It's worked out automatically from who's arrived, not a status you set by hand.

The scheduling terms

• Turn time — how long you expect a party to keep a table, often varying by party size. Longer turn times hold tables longer and leave fewer bookable slots. See Scheduling and turn times.
• Buffer — a short gap added after a party leaves before the table is offered again, giving your team time to reset it.
• Pacing cap — a limit on how many covers can be booked into the same time slot, so the kitchen and floor aren't slammed by everyone arriving at once.
• Service period — a defined window when a venue takes bookings (lunch, dinner, brunch). Availability only exists inside your service periods.

Deposits and experiences

• Deposit — a card hold or upfront payment attached to a booking (often for large parties), which discourages no-shows and protects the covers. See Deposits and experiences.
• Experience — a prepaid, ticketed event you sell as a fixed offering — a tasting menu, a wine dinner, a holiday seating — rather than an ordinary reservation. See Creating an experience.

Service and the kitchen

• Course sequence — the ordered list of courses a venue serves, which you configure yourself (two courses by default). A party's meal advances through your sequence, and the kitchen display follows along.
• POS-lite — TableStack's own built-in point-of-sale for tracking a meal from seated to paid, used when you haven't connected an external till. You can instead hand that job to an outside POS like Square or Toast — see How POS integration works.

A note on statuses

You'll see colours and labels on the floor for where each table is (can I seat here?) and where each party is in their meal (where are they up to?). Those are two separate lifecycles on purpose — Table, seat and party statuses explains the colours, and The service lifecycle walks a party from seated to departed.