What do the booking statuses mean and how do I move customers through them?

The booking lifecycle — pending, confirmed, late, arrived, seated, cleared — and the buttons that move customers through it.

A booking normally moves confirmed → arrived → seated → cleared, and the buttons on the booking's action bar change to match its current status.

Which of these buttons exist also follows how much of each visit you record (Settings → Bookings → During service → How your team runs a service): with Just take bookings, the Seat and Mark Arrived buttons don't appear anywhere; with Mark customers as arrived, Mark Arrived shows but Seat doesn't. Buttons that finish a stage — Cleared, Unseat, Undo arrival — always stay available on a booking already in that stage, so a booking seated before you changed the setting is never stranded. Turning the setting back up restores every button.

The statuses

• Pending — an online request waiting for your approval (only when Require manual confirmation is on — or on a special date that approves every booking), a group request from a party bigger than your online maximum, or a customer's change waiting for you. Buttons: Approve and Decline — for a change, Approve change and Decline change, which keeps their original booking.
• Confirmed — locked in. Buttons: Seat, Mark Arrived, plus Cancel (or Delete).
• Late — automatic once a confirmed customer nobody has marked as arrived is past When a customer counts as late. Extra buttons appear: Hold 5m, Hold 15m and No-show.
• Arrived — the customer is here but not yet at the table. Buttons: Seat, and Undo arrival if it was marked by mistake (puts the booking back to confirmed).
• Seated — at the table. Buttons: Cleared, Unseat (not shown for walk-ins), and Extend 5m / Extend 15m / Extend….
• Cleared — the party has left. If a booking was cleared by mistake, Undo clear puts the customer back to seated (it's refused if the table has already been given to another party). Cleared bookings move to the Bookings list's Completed tab.
• Cancelled / No-show — Restore returns the booking to confirmed after checking its tables are still free. If another booking now occupies them, choose an available table or a later time from the alternatives. The selection is checked again when restored. If no suitable place is offered, keep the booking unchanged and edit its date, time or tables before trying again.

Waitlist entries have their own variants (pending, promoted, arrived, late), plus a removed state when staff take a party off the queue with Remove — removed entries vanish from the day's lists and the customer's status page says they're no longer on the waitlist, but they still count in the analytics waitlist funnel. See the waitlist guide.

Timing rules you control

Both live in Settings → Bookings → During service:

• When a customer counts as late — how many minutes past the booked start before a booking is flagged late. Default: 15 mins.
• Clear finished tables automatically — frees a table automatically after its booking ends. Give them an extra defaults to 15 mins. Off means you clear tables manually with Cleared.

You can also have no-shows marked automatically — see the no-show guide.

Where statuses show

Every view colour-codes by status: badges in the list, bar colours on the timeline, and table colours on the floor plan (with a legend). You can customise the colours per status in Settings → Display and layout. If the orange/red late look doesn't suit how you run service, switch off Late highlighting in that view's Display menu — it's display only (per view, per person), so late alerts and automatic no-show marking are unaffected.

When a table is marked Cleared, your turnaround (cleaning) time starts — online slots, staff bookings, walk-in placement and waitlist promotions (including the customer's "table ready" message) all wait for the gap before the table is offered again. Auto-cleared tables get the same gap as manual clears. With turnaround set to 0 there's no gap anywhere.

Related: How do I cancel a booking (and what happens to the deposit)? · How do I mark a no-show (and charge the fee)? · How do I control dashboard alerts and sounds? · How do I customise the dashboard display and quick actions?