Restaurant booking system with online deposits

What a restaurant booking system actually does

Strip away the dashboards and a restaurant booking system does one job: it lets a diner claim a table at a time you can serve them, without anyone answering the phone. Everything else on a vendor's feature list either serves that job or sits beside it. The pages that rank for this search carry long feature lists, and most of the items fall into five groups. It is worth knowing which of them you need before you compare a single price.

What changes from one tool to the next is how far each group goes, and whether it is in the plan you would actually pay for or sold as an add-on:

• Taking bookings: a button on your own website, your Google listing and sometimes your social pages, open while you are closed.
• Managing capacity: how many covers each time slot can take, so the kitchen isn't hit with thirty plates at 8.30pm.
• Confirming and reminding: a message when the table is booked and another the day before, with a way to cancel.
• Taking payment: the full price of a set menu or an event, a deposit, or a card guarantee, paid when the table is booked.
• Remembering the guest: visits, allergies and preferences, permission to contact them again if they gave it, and a reason to come back, such as loyalty points.

Floor plan and till: separate jobs, often sold together

Two more jobs appear on the same pages and are really separate products. The floor plan is where you drag tables around, merge two fours for a party of eight and seat the couple who walked in off the street. The till, or point of sale, is where orders go to the kitchen and bills are split. Several of the systems that rank for this search bundle one or both: Square, for instance, sells its booking system as part of its restaurant till. Others pitch mainly to restaurant groups with several sites and a manager on every floor.

For one dining room, the question is simpler: what do you already have that works? If the floor is run from a booking book or a tablet at the pass, and the card machine and till are paid for, a system that bundles both asks you to pay for them twice, and to retrain the team mid-season. If you are starting from nothing, or running three sites, a bundle can make sense. Either way, ask for the booking part priced on its own, so you can see what you are paying for.

Commission, per booking or flat fee: how the pricing works

Booking systems charge in four ways, and the headline price mostly tells you which of the four you are looking at. Marketplace apps list your restaurant beside others and take a fee for the diners they send: the table is filled, but the diner was found by the app, and their details sit in its files. Flat subscriptions charge the same every month whatever your volume: Resos, for instance, lists €0, €45, €85 and €125 a month and states on its pricing page that it never charges per booking, per cover or commission.

Capped subscriptions include a number of reservations and charge for each one above it: Tablein's Starter plan was €67 a month with 50 reservations included when we read its pricing page on 25/09/2026. That suits a quiet room and costs more as you fill. And some well-known names publish no price at all: Zenchef's pricing page names its plans without a figure, and ResDiary's homepage shows none either. That doesn't make them expensive, but it does mean you can't compare them until a salesperson has called you.

Two costs sit outside the headline. The first is add-ons: on Resos, online payments (€11.99 a month) and Reserve with Google (€7.99) are listed as extras. The second is the contract. A monthly price on a twelve-month term that renews itself is not the same thing as a monthly price you can stop, and the one Irish review quoted above is about exactly that. Read the notice period before you sign, not on the day you want to leave.

Traxo's pricing is flat: the Pro plan is €100 a month excl. VAT, or €80 on yearly billing, with up to six staff accounts, and the only other charge is 3% on money paid online.

One month, worked through: 45 covers, eight large tables paying ahead

Prices only compare at a real volume, so here is one. Take a 45-cover room that asks for a €10-a-head deposit on tables of eight and over, as in the table above, and books eight such tables in a month: €640 paid online. Every smaller table books without paying ahead. The prices are list prices read on 25/09/2026; the volume is a worked example, not an average for Irish restaurants.

• Resos Plus: €85 + €11.99 for online payments + €7.99 for Reserve with Google = €104.98 a month. The pricing page doesn't say whether VAT is included, or what the card provider takes on the €640.
• Tablein Starter: €67 a month for 50 reservations. A room that takes more than 50 online pays for each extra one, so the total depends on your month.
• Zenchef and ResDiary: no public price, so no sum is possible without a quote.
• Traxo Pro: €80 excl. VAT on yearly billing + 3% of €640 (€19.20) = €99.20 a month; on monthly billing, €119.20.

What the sum says, and what it doesn't

On these numbers, Traxo on monthly billing is not the cheaper option, and on yearly billing the gap with Resos is a few euros. A room that takes no payment online at all pays only the subscription everywhere, which makes the flat tools cheaper still against a capped one; a room with many large groups pays more on any tool that takes a percentage of the money collected.

So run the sum with your own figures, not ours: how many bookings arrive online in a busy month, how many are paid online, in full or as a deposit, and at what amount. Then check what each total covers. Traxo Pro's includes the website the booking sits on, the Google listing kept up to date and a loyalty programme for your regulars; for every other tool, ask what you would still need to pay for separately before bookings can reach you.

Paying ahead and no-shows: what the rules in Ireland say

Money taken at booking, a deposit or a set menu paid in full, changes who carries the cost of a table nobody turns up for. In Ireland, the consumer guidance of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) leaves it to your terms: “Generally, a business does not have to refund your deposit if you change your mind. However, some terms and conditions may allow cancellations and refunds.” The same page tells consumers to read those terms, or ask, before they pay.

That puts the work on your side of the pass. Write down, once, when money paid ahead comes back: cancelled 48 hours ahead, for instance, or never on a set menu for a group. Show the rule on the booking page before the diner pays, and send it again in the confirmation. A rule the diner accepted before paying is one you can point to afterwards; a rule they never saw is an argument at the door.

How much to ask is yours to decide: the CCPC names no amount. A useful pattern sizes it on what an empty table would cost you:

• A fixed amount per head on large tables, where one missing party empties a whole section.
• The full price of a set menu or a tasting evening, paid at booking, where the food is bought in advance.
• A flat sum on exclusive hire, where the rest of the evening is turned away for one booking.
• Nothing on a table for two midweek, where asking may cost you the booking itself.

Eight questions to ask before you sign

A demo shows the features. The questions below show what living with the system will be like, and each one has a plain answer a vendor should be willing to give you in writing. Traxo's answers, for the record: flat pricing, 3% on online payments, no fee per cover, billed monthly or yearly. On cancellation the website and the domain stop with the subscription; your guest records are returned to you on request within 30 days, then deleted. You open your account online in two minutes, then set up your sittings, covers and payment rules, full price or deposit, yourself; a free 15-minute launch call, booked along the way, lets you go through them with us.

Ask every vendor the same eight:

• What will I pay at my real volume, including the add-ons for payments and Google?
• Is there a cap on bookings or covers, and what does each one above it cost?
• Is there a fee per cover or per booking, or a commission on diners you send me?
• How long is the contract, does it renew itself, and how much notice do I give?
• Do diners book on my website, under my name, or on your page?
• Can I cap covers per time slot, not just per evening?
• If I leave, what happens to my guest list, and in what format do I get it?
• Who answers on a Saturday night, during service, when something breaks?