Sixteen things went live this week. Not one of them was our idea.
Every item below started as a message from a venue: a support ticket, a reply at the bottom of a longer thread, a "this is probably not possible, but…". Some were asked for on Saturday and shipped on Monday. One had been sitting on the list since April.
We keep a register of these requests, ranked by how many separate venues have asked for the same thing. This week we worked through the top of it. Here is what came out.
Someone who can see the diary without being able to change it
A venue wrote in wanting a team member to have sight of the booking list without the ability to add or edit anything. That combination did not exist. Grant nothing and they hit a permission error on every page; grant booking access and they can also cancel, move and refund.
View Bookings is now its own permission. It opens the booking list, the gantt, the floor plan, the advanced view, the live feed, the history and the print sheets, and it stops there. Every button that writes is gone, and every write is refused by the server as well as hidden in the interface, so there is no clever way round it.
QR Check-in arrived alongside it, for the case where someone should be able to scan guests in on the door and do nothing else.
If your team members already have booking access, nothing has changed for them: the old permission now carries both new ones automatically. You only need to touch this if you want to give someone less than they have today.
Membership cards that have a number on them
A gaming venue pointed out that memberships had no card number. Staff could not look a member up at the counter, and there was nothing to check before applying a member discount to a walk-in.
Every member now has a membership number, issued per venue and sequential from one. Existing members were backfilled automatically, in the order they joined, so nobody had to be re-issued. You can search the members list by number, and each member has their own page with their plan, their payment history and their bookings on it.
Memberships in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet
A number is only worth having if the member has it on them. So the card itself now goes in their phone.
From their member area, a member taps Add to Apple Wallet or Add to Google Wallet and the card saves next to their boarding passes and coffee loyalty cards. There is no app to install, nothing to print or post, and no hunting back through their inbox for the welcome email.
The front of the pass carries the plan they are on, their membership number and whether the membership is currently active. The back carries their name, your venue, the date they joined, what their plan gets them, and a link straight into their member area to change a card or switch plan.
There is a QR code on the pass, and it encodes the membership number, so it scans at your check-in screen exactly the way a booking QR does. The number is printed underneath it for the times the scanner will not cooperate and somebody reads it out instead.
This is the part that changes what a membership feels like to own. A membership that lives in a welcome email is one your member forgets they have. A card sitting in their phone's wallet, surfacing when they walk through your door, is one they remember they are paying for — which is the difference that matters when the renewal comes round.
There is nothing to switch on. Every existing member picked up a number and a pass in the backfill, so your members can add theirs today.
Billing that is not monthly or annual
A games shop wanted to sell a quarterly membership. Plans could only be billed monthly or yearly, so the answer was no.
Membership plans now have a Custom billing frequency: pick any number of months from two to twelve. Quarterly is three, half-yearly is six, and if you want to bill every five months for reasons of your own, that works too. The renewal date, the proration when someone switches plan, the booking allowances that reset each period, and the wording your guests see all follow the cadence you set.
Custom fields in the order you want them
Custom fields were listed alphabetically, always. One venue had worked around it by putting "1. ", "2. " and "3. " at the front of their field names so the booking form came out in a sensible order.
There is now a Reorder button on the custom fields page. Turn it on, drag the cards into the order you want, and that order is what guests see when they book. Conditional fields follow their parent field rather than needing their own position.
Your existing order was preserved on the day this went live, so nothing moved under anyone. If you have been using number prefixes, you can drop them now.
The same venue asked for somewhere guests could actually write. Every custom field was a single-line box, which is fine for a postcode and hopeless for a list of children's names and ages, or a paragraph about a dietary requirement. Text area is now a field type, and it gives guests a proper multi-line box.
A long table that only exists at dinner
Table chains let you define two or more tables that get booked as one. A games café asked whether a chain could belong to a single session, because their long table works for evening events and gets in the way at lunch.
Chains can now be restricted to the sessions you choose. Leave the field empty and the chain behaves as it always has, available everywhere.
Knowing the moment a payment link is paid
When you send a guest a payment link from a booking and they pay it, the money arrived and nothing told you. Stripe's own email lands eventually, and it does not say which booking it was for.
There is now a Payment Link Paid trigger. It fires whether the guest paid through Stripe or Square, and it can email you, text you, notify you in the app, hit a webhook or post to Discord. The message carries the booking reference, the date and time, the guest's name, the amount and what the link was for. There is a ready-made version in Notification Templates if you would rather not build one.
The service sheet, with the things that matter on it
The daily print sheet had a fixed set of columns. A venue asked for allergies on it, which is a reasonable thing to want on the piece of paper that goes to the kitchen.
Allergies, Booking tags and VIP are now three more columns you can switch on in Print View Settings, and drag into whatever position suits your service.
An add-on that needs two days' notice
Back in April, a brewery explained that their add-on needed lead time the session did not. Advance notice was a session-level setting, so the only workaround was to build a whole separate session for the bookings that included it. We said we would log it properly. This is us getting to it.
Add-ons now have their own Advance Notice Required. Leave it blank and the add-on follows the session's rule as before. Set it, and guests booking inside that window see the add-on greyed out with the reason, rather than wondering where it went.
If a guest moves their booking closer than the notice allows, the add-on comes off with an explanation instead of silently staying on an order you cannot fulfil.
And the rest
Eight more, each from a specific venue asking a specific question:
- Turn the feedback email down for regulars. A board-game café made the point that someone who visits twice a week should not get a feedback request every time. You can now set a minimum gap between feedback emails per guest, and guests have an unsubscribe link of their own that does not touch their marketing preferences.
- Past events stay on the events page. An event used to vanish the moment its last date passed, which is unhelpful when people are still looking for the thing they went to last Saturday. Recent events now stay visible for the rest of the month.
- Nudge things on the floor plan with the arrow keys. Objects could only be moved by dragging. Arrow keys now move the selection one unit at a time, or a full grid step with Shift held. Holding a key down counts as one undo.
- Per-item notes on pre-orders actually work. The switch that turns off the "special requests" box on an individual menu item had been saving correctly and never reaching the guest, so the box appeared on everything. It does what it says now.
- Featured event listings can sort themselves by date. Instead of ordering them by hand and watching the list drift out of sequence, you can tell a listing to sort by next date.
- New session dates can post themselves to Discord. A venue running a community server asked whether new dates could land there without retyping. They can, with the session name, dates, time and a link straight to the booking page. (The same request covered Facebook, which we have not built. It is still on the list.)
- A new order pops up wherever you are in the admin. A venue with several tabs open all day wanted the new-order alert to reach whichever page they happened to be looking at. It does now, for QR orders, POS, delivery and collection.
- Booking-write permissions are enforced server-side. Not a request, but worth saying: while building the read-only tier we went through every booking-editing route and made each one check permission for itself, rather than trusting the interface to have hidden the button.
How something gets on this list
There is no form, and there is no voting page. Requests get logged when you mention them: on a support ticket, on WhatsApp, on a phone call, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely. They go into a register that tracks how many separate venues have asked for the same thing, along with what we told you and whether we owe you an answer.
That ranking is genuinely how the order gets decided. Two venues asking for the same thing beats one venue asking loudly.
So if you have been working around something for months and assumed it was just how the software is, tell us. It is quite often a smaller job than it looks, and this week is what that looks like when the list gets worked through.