December is the month where the kitchen’s capacity and the customers’ timing fall out of step. Everyone wants the same Friday, the same lunch hour, the same two days before Christmas. If you take those orders as they come, you’ll spend the month either turning people away or making promises you can’t keep. If you take them in advance, you can plan a month that’s busy on your terms.
That planning starts now, because the office party organiser books in October, and the family doing a Christmas Eve collection wants to know by mid-November that it’s sorted. Here’s how to set your storefront up to take December’s orders early, and keep them within what the kitchen can do.
Open advance booking
If your storefront only takes ASAP orders, nobody can book for a date, so the first step is to switch scheduling on. In Settings → Ordering → Timing & Scheduling:
- Set Timing Mode to ASAP & Scheduled, so normal orders carry on while people can also book ahead.
- Set Maximum Advance Booking to +30 days. The default is two hours, which is fine for a Tuesday and useless for Christmas.
- Set Minimum Notice Required to match what the kitchen needs for a big order. For platters that need a day’s prep, Tomorrow or 2 days is honest.
Customers then see Select Time on the menu and pick from 15-minute slots on any date you’re open within the window. Slots are only generated from your opening hours, so a day with no hours set offers nothing.
Cap the slots
This is the setting that makes advance booking safe rather than scary. Slot Capacity limits how many scheduled orders can share one 15-minute window, separately for collection and delivery. Once a slot is full it disappears from the picker, and if two people race for the last space the second is asked to choose another time.
Work it out from the kitchen, not from optimism. If you can comfortably plate six large orders in a quarter of an hour on top of walk-in trade, the cap is six. Christmas is when “we’ll manage” becomes “we didn’t”, and a cap of six that fills by the 10th of December is a far better outcome than twelve orders at 12:30 that all go out late.
ASAP orders aren’t counted against the cap, so a full lunch slot doesn’t stop someone ordering a sandwich now.
Decide what can be booked
Not everything should be available in advance, and some things should only be available in advance. Each product has two switches in its Availability section: Available for ASAP orders and Available for scheduled orders.
- A party platter or a Christmas dinner box is scheduled-only. Nobody can order it for now, which protects the kitchen from a surprise 40-person order at six on a Thursday.
- The everyday menu stays available for both.
- A dish that doesn’t hold well, or that you don’t want to prep in bulk, can be ASAP-only, so it never ends up in a 30-order slot.
If a customer switches a cart between ASAP and scheduled, anything not available in the new mode is removed with a message saying why, so there’s no way to sneak a platter through the ASAP path.
Mark the closures now
Nothing undermines a December booking system faster than a customer booking for a day you’re shut. Put your holiday dates in under the location before you open booking, not after. A date marked closed produces no slots. A partial day (open until two on Christmas Eve) removes just the slots after that time. Recurring holidays apply every year, so the ones you set now are done for good.
Delivery zones with their own hours need the same treatment. A zone that’s open until eleven in its settings will offer eleven o’clock slots on a night you planned to finish at nine.
Price it properly
December orders are bigger and more work, and the pricing should reflect that without feeling like a surcharge:
- Bundles for the office lunch (a set number of sandwiches, sides and drinks at a fixed price) are easier to order and easier to prep than forty individual choices.
- A minimum order value on delivery, set per zone, makes sense when you’re sending a driver out on a day you’d otherwise be flat out in the kitchen.
- A service charge on large orders is normal in December, and better set up as a charge that shows clearly on the storefront than added on the invoice afterwards.
Card payment is taken when the order is placed, the same as any other order, so a booking made on the 3rd is paid on the 3rd. That’s your deposit, and it’s why scheduled orders rarely no-show.
Tell people it’s open
A booking system nobody knows about takes no bookings. The people most likely to book early are the ones who already order from you, so this is the moment the customer list earns its keep:
- One email in early October: “Christmas platters and parties are open for booking. Here’s the menu, here’s the link, slots are limited.”
- The promotional bar at the top of your storefront pointing at the Christmas category.
- A mention in every message you send customers in November, because the people who already order from you are the most likely to book.
Office organisers in particular are looking in October and have usually decided by the first week of November. Being bookable in early October puts you in the running for orders that would otherwise have gone to whoever answered the phone first.
Run the month off the Scheduled tab
Once the orders are in, the Scheduled tab on the Orders page is December’s to-do list. It lists every active order whose time is still ahead, with the booked time in the Expected column, and flags anything that’s run late. The kitchen display shows a countdown on each ticket, changes colour in the last five minutes, and marks a ticket late once the time passes.
Run through the next day’s scheduled orders each evening. It’s old-fashioned and it works: the prep list for Thursday is the Thursday orders, in slot order, and the kitchen can start on the platters at eight in the morning knowing exactly what’s needed by one.
If a customer needs to move an order, agree the new time with them and edit the expected time on the order. They can’t reschedule themselves once it’s placed, which is intentional; December slots are too scarce to let them shuffle about unsupervised.
The result
A December where the big orders arrived weeks ago, the slots filled to a number you chose, nothing was booked for a day you were shut, and the kitchen knew each morning what the day held. It’s not glamorous. It’s the difference between a profitable month and a survivable one, and it’s about an hour’s set-up in October.