Core concepts & glossary

Eighty-Six is built from a handful of pieces that connect to each other. Once you can see how they relate — a service period holds time slots, a time slot is booked against a table, and a table lives on your floor map — the rest of the CRM falls into place. This page is a plain-language map of those pieces, plus a glossary you can come back to any time.

Before you begin

Everyone can read this page — it is a reference, not a setting. What you actually see inside the CRM depends on two things: your plan (which features are included) and your permissions (what your role is allowed to do). The restaurant owner has every permission and sees everything; team members see only the sections they have been granted. So if a term below describes a screen you cannot find, you are either not on a plan that includes it or have not been given the permission — ask your owner.

The big picture

Start at the top and work your way down.

Organization

Your company or account. It can hold more than one restaurant. Use the switcher at the very top of the sidebar to move between restaurants and organizations.

Restaurant

A single venue. Almost everything you configure — floor map, service periods, menu, booking page — belongs to one restaurant. If you run two venues, each keeps its own separate setup.

The building blocks

Inside a restaurant you set up your floor and tables, your schedule of service periods and time slots, your menu, and your public booking page. Guests then make bookings, which become your day-to-day work on the live map.

The Setup entry in the sidebar walks you through these in a sensible order: restaurant profile, service periods, floor map, time slots, menu, booking page, invite your team, and finally publish your booking page.

The CRM at a glance: navigation on the left, your live floor map on the dashboard.

Finding your way around

Your main navigation lives in the left sidebar. Depending on your plan and permissions you will see entries such as:

• Dashboard — opens your live floor map for the current service.
• Bookings — the reservation list, calendar, and waitlist, plus the Schedule panel where you set up service periods, time slots, and blocked dates.
• Customers, Loyalty Program, Team, Menu, Booking Page, Analytics, Dynamic Links, and Settings — each has its own section in these docs.

If the sidebar is collapsed to a narrow strip, click the arrow to expand it and reveal the labels.

How a booking fits together

This chain is the idea most of the CRM is built around. Reading it top to bottom explains why the pieces exist.

1. A service period — say Lunch — defines a window when you take bookings, on the days of the week you choose, with an optional Max covers cap for the kitchen.
2. Inside that window you create time slots — the actual start times a guest can pick, each with a limit on how many bookings it can hold.
3. A guest picks a date and a time slot for a party of a certain size — a number of covers.
4. The booking is placed against a table from your floor map that is big enough to seat the party.
5. Through the service the booking moves through statuses: Pending, then Confirmed, then Seated, then Completed — or Cancelled or No Show.

Open Schedule from Bookings to see service periods and the time slots inside each one.

If a time slot is already full, a guest can join the waitlist, and you can offer them a table when one frees up.

Glossary

Come back here whenever a word is unclear. Terms are grouped by the part of the CRM they belong to.

Your account and team

• Organization — the account your team signs in to. It can contain one or more restaurants.
• Restaurant — a single venue, with its own map, schedule, menu, and booking page.
• Role — a named set of permissions given to a team member. The owner role holds every permission.
• Permission — a single thing a role is allowed to do, such as reading bookings or updating the map. If you lack one, you see an Access Denied message on that screen.
• Team member — a person with access to your restaurant. You add them from Team, either by email invitation or with a temporary password.
• Position — a job that staff can be scheduled for, such as Server, Chef, or Host.
• Shift — a scheduled block of work for a team member on a given day. Shifts are built into a weekly rota under Team.

Your floor

• Floor map — a 2D plan of a room with your tables arranged on it. You can draw one by hand or use Generate from Image to let the assistant build one from a photo, drawing, or blueprint.
• Active map — the one floor map currently in use. When you activate a map, it becomes the plan your live view and bookings work against.
• Live map — the real-time view on your Dashboard. It shows table status during service, with quick actions to Sit, Free, Book, mark a No Show, and more. You manage your floor maps from its Configure Maps button.
• Table — a seat block on the map. Each table has a number, an optional display name (for example Window Seat), and a minimum and maximum capacity.
• Cover — one guest, or one seat. A party of four is four covers. Service periods can cap the total covers your kitchen handles.
• Grey area — a restricted zone on the map, such as a kitchen, hallway, or pillar, where tables are not allowed to sit.

A floor map with tables placed. Each table carries a number and a minimum and maximum capacity.

Your schedule

• Service period — a named service window like Lunch or Dinner, active on chosen days, with a start and end time and an optional Max covers cap. A lunch service might be one window, or split into several turns.
• Time slot — a bookable start time inside a service period, with its own limit on how many bookings it can take. You can add slots one by one or Generate a whole set at a chosen duration.
• Blocked slot — a date or time you mark as unavailable for bookings, for a reason like a private event, maintenance, or a holiday. Blocks can repeat daily, weekly, or monthly.
• Availability — the live picture of what is still bookable. It reflects your service periods and time slots minus existing bookings and any blocked slots.

Bookings and guests

• Booking — a reservation. It carries a date, time slot, party size, an assigned table, and the guest’s details. Its status is one of Pending, Confirmed, Seated, Completed, Cancelled, or No Show.
• Waitlist — the queue of guests waiting on a fully booked slot. Entries move through Waiting, Offered, Accepted, Expired, or Cancelled.
• Customer — a guest record built automatically as bookings come in. It keeps their contact details, visit history, no-show count, and any notes you add.
• Loyalty program — an optional scheme that rewards regulars, for example a discount or free item after a set number of completed bookings.

Your public presence

• Booking page — your customer-facing page, where guests choose a date and time and reserve. It lives at an address like /book/your-restaurant. Publish it to go Live, or unpublish it back to Draft.
• Dynamic Links — reconfigurable links behind a QR code. You can re-point a link, give it a label, and track how often it is scanned, all from one place.
• Analytics — a read-only view of how your restaurant is performing: booking totals, busy days and time slots, cancellations, and where your bookings and page visits come from.

Your menu

• Menu — a set of categories and dishes you can show on your booking page. You can keep more than one menu, such as separate Lunch, Dinner, and Drinks menus.
• Category — a section of a menu, like Starters or Mains. A category can hold subcategories.
• Dish — a single item on the menu. In the Menu builder these are called Items; each has a name, description, and price, with optional price variants.
• Label — a small coloured tag with an icon that you attach to dishes, for things like Vegetarian, Spicy, or allergen information.

Where to go next

Set up service periodsDefine your lunch, dinner, and other turns.

Add time slotsCreate the bookable start times inside each service period.

Draw your floor mapPlace your tables and set their capacities.

Roles and permissionsDecide what your team members can see and do.

Related

• Switching restaurants
• Managing bookings
• Your booking page