Bookings

Taken at the counter or read from your own website — never both — with the fee that holds a table and comes off against a game pass.

How do online bookings reach the till?

CoinOp reads a booking feed from your own website, so reservations made online appear beside the walk-in queue on the same screen. A party due about now raises an alert on whichever screen somebody is standing at, and their session starts on the table they were promised.

One diary, not two

Settings → Bookings → Where bookings come from

A venue takes bookings on its website or takes them at its counter. CoinOp asks which, and it is one or the other, because two diaries for one floor is a table free on the site and promised on the phone with neither screen able to see the other.

• Online — read from your booking page and from ggLeap. Staff cannot write one down here, because the website is the diary.
• At the counter — staff take them on the Waiting screen. Nothing is polled from a website, so a feed left configured sits idle rather than fighting with them.
• Not taking bookings — no booking queue and no button to make one. Game passes and the rest of ggLeap are unaffected.

Taken at the counter

Waiting → New booking

The same conversation you have on the phone, in the order you have it: what, when, how long, how many, who. CoinOp asks the floor what is actually free as those answers arrive, so the tables offered are the ones that can be promised rather than a list to be disappointed by at the end.

1. What — the kind of thing being booked. A kind with one station of it does not ask how many; a cinema room is one room.
2. When and how long. Both are required — a booking with no end is a table nobody can plan around.
3. Which ones. Tables already booked for that time are refused by name. Tables somebody is playing on now are shown greyed, so staff can see which one and why.
4. Who, and the fee if the venue charges one.

Gaming PCs sit in the same picker as the tables, because a venue thinks of them as one list — “what can I book at eight”. Underneath, a table is written down in CoinOp and a PC is reserved in ggLeap, which is where the machines are actually managed: a PC held only in CoinOp is one ggLeap will happily sell again. If ggLeap can only hold three of the four asked for, CoinOp books those three and says so, rather than quietly booking four.

A table somebody is on

CoinOp knows a table is occupied. It does not know when an open-ended session will end. At eight in the evening every table is busy, so refusing every occupied one would mean no bookings could be taken for tomorrow — and offering one for twenty minutes’ time promises a table somebody is sitting at.

So the venue answers it: a table in use is not free for the next so many minutes. Inside that window an occupied table is not offered. Beyond it, it is offered as normal, because tonight says nothing about tomorrow. Zero offers them always.

The fee to hold one

One figure, charged per table, the same for every booking taken here — so nobody is typing a price at a counter with a customer on the phone. Zero if this venue holds tables for nothing.

Read from your website

CoinOp does not replace the booking form on your website and does not want to. Whatever you already use — your own page, a booking product, a form that emails you — keeps running. What CoinOp does is read it, so the bookings appear in front of the staff who have to honour them.

1. Your website exposes one read-only address listing upcoming bookings.
2. CoinOp reads it every few minutes.
3. A booking for a station CoinOp knows about appears against that station, with the name, the time and the size of the party.
4. If the customer paid a deposit or the full amount through Stripe, that money is in the day’s takings — so the till’s figures match the bank without anybody reconciling by hand.

Only money Stripe actually took is booked as revenue. A fee ticked as paid in your site’s admin is a note that a member of staff handled cash, not a payment CoinOp can find in a payout, and it is not counted as one.

The exact shape of the feed, with examples, is in the booking feed specification. That page is written for whoever runs your booking page rather than for whoever runs the venue.

Only the kinds you have marked as bookable take bookings. A cinema room is bookable; a walk-up console usually is not.

The fee, waived against a game pass

Settings → Bookings → Which passes waive a fee

A venue charging a fee to hold a PC usually means it as a deposit: the customer arrives, buys their session, and the fee comes off. CoinOp does that on the till by itself. Ring up the pass on the booking’s tab and the fee appears as its own negative line — Booking fee waived — rather than as a discount, because filing it under discounts would read as a member of staff giving money away at the door.

• A fee is waived whole or not at all, and each pass absorbs one. Three passes against four bookings waives three fees; the fourth is still owed.
• You choose which passes count — by category, and by a minimum price if you want one — so a venue selling controllers and session passes out of the same ggLeap catalogue does not find itself waiving booking fees against a controller.
• Take the pass off the tab and the credit comes off with it. A fee cannot outlive the pass it was waived against, and cannot be waived twice.

When they arrive

The number on the Waiting button counts the bookings and the queue together, and it keeps counting while staff are on the floor screen or the till — so a booking arriving at a counter nobody is watching is still seen. A party due about now raises an alert on whatever screen is in front of somebody, with the name, the time and what they booked; starting their session from it puts them on the table they were promised.