Someone moved Sunday's last booking time to 7:30pm. Nobody can remember doing it, nobody knows what it was before, and the first you heard about it was a guest asking why they couldn't book at eight. If more than one person touches your settings, you have had this conversation.
The Activity Log is the answer to it. It records every change anyone makes to your venue's configuration: who made it, when, what the value was before, which screen or tool they were using, and in most cases a button to put it back.
One line per change, not one line per field
The log reads like a sentence. "Tom Whitfield changed Thursday, Last booking 9:30pm to 9:00pm." "Priya Raman created the closure Boiler repair, no hot food." You can scan a fortnight of changes in about ten seconds without decoding anything.
That is deliberate. We record what someone meant to do rather than what the database did. Saving a session can rewrite dozens of rows behind the scenes, and a change log that reported all of them would be useless. You get one entry with the settings that actually moved.
What's covered today: opening times, closures, special dates, sessions, session categories, coupons, guest types, booking tags, deposit systems, deposit reduction rules and table chains. We're adding more of your setup to it as we go.
Where the change came from
Settings don't only change in the admin panel. They change in the setup wizard, through the AI assistant, over the API, from the partner portal, on a kiosk, and occasionally from one of our scheduled tasks tidying up after itself. The "Where from" column tells you which, and the small line underneath names the exact screen or tool.
Filter to AI assistant and you get everything the assistant changed on your behalf, in one list, with the tool it used for each one. Filter to Command line and you're looking at the automatic housekeeping we run overnight, like clearing out closures whose date has passed.
Above the list there's a search box, filters for source, record type, person and date range, and a CSV export. The export honours whatever you've currently got filtered, so "everything Tom changed to our opening times in July" is a search and a download rather than a support request.
Open a row and see what moved
Click any entry and it opens to the field level: every setting that changed, the old value in red, the new one in green, labelled with the same words as the form you edit. Times are shown as times, days as days, on and off as On and Off. You are not reading raw column names.
Put it back
Every entry that can be undone has a Revert button. Press it and you get a preview first: what will change, in the same before and after format, so you can see the effect before you commit to it.
Rollback isn't a reverse database edit. We saved the settings exactly as your admin panel had them at that moment, and rolling back replays them through the same form and the same validation you would go through by hand. If the change wouldn't be allowed today, it doesn't happen.
It looks before it leaps
Most of the work went into the cases where undoing something isn't as simple as it sounds.
If somebody has edited the same record since, you get told so, by name, with their change listed, and the button changes to "Revert anyway" so you can't do it by accident.
Sessions get a further check. Before a rollback goes through we test what it would do to your availability, and if it would close a time slot that guests can currently book, we refuse and tell you why. Reducing capacity never throws an error, it just quietly stops people booking, which is exactly the sort of thing you'd rather find out about now than on Saturday night.
Deposit systems are recorded but not rollbackable, on purpose. Restoring one would rewrite the rules that decide what a guest gets charged, and that is not something we want happening from a one click undo.
Rollbacks are themselves entries in the log, and are themselves revertable, so an undo you didn't mean is one more click to fix. Nothing is ever deleted from the history. The original entry stays where it is and gets marked as rolled back. Changes can be rolled back for 90 days.
History on the record itself
Sometimes you don't want the whole venue, you want one closure. Records that are covered by the log carry a History button, which opens the change history for that record on its own, newest first, without leaving the page you're on.
It's on closures and in the session editor today, and it turns up on each new screen as we add that part of your setup to the log.
When we change something, you see it too
If you ask our support team to fix something and we go in and change a setting, that shows up in your log like anyone else's change, with a BookingNinja Support badge on it.
We thought about hiding those and decided against it. If we've touched your venue you ought to be able to see exactly what we touched, and roll it back yourself if you don't like it.
Who gets to see it
The Activity Log is free on every plan. There's no add-on and no upgrade prompt.
Access is controlled by two permissions in Team & Permissions: one to view the log, and a separate one to roll changes back. Reverting also requires permission over the thing being reverted, so someone who can't edit your opening times can't undo a change to them either. Give your whole team read access and keep rollback to yourself, if that's how you'd rather run it.
We keep entries for two years.
One thing it isn't: this is about your venue's setup, not your bookings. The history you already see on an individual booking hasn't changed and isn't going anywhere. The Activity Log is the other half, the one that answers "why is the terrace closed on the tenth".
Where to find it
It's in the sidebar under Team, Activity Log, next to Team & Permissions. There's nothing to switch on and nothing to configure.
It started recording the day it went live, so it won't have your back catalogue in it. Give it a fortnight of normal trading and then go and look. If you've been running a venue with several people in the settings and quietly hoping nobody breaks anything, the list is usually longer than you'd guess.
We're adding more of your configuration to the log over the next few releases. Tell us which part you'd most like it to cover next.