OpenTable: How to Create a Covers Summary from the Reservation List
OpenTable is the most used restaurant reservation tool in the world. According to their website OpenTable “is the world’s leading provider of online restaurant reservations, seating more than 25 million diners per month via online reservations across more than 45,000 restaurants.” The program has a variety of online tools which simplify the reservation process and give you (the restaurant) the ability to control reservations and view helpful reports.
However, one report which is missing which we Chefs find very useful is a covers summary report like the one shown. I want to see how many covers are coming in during each reservation time slot, and how many big tops I have at what times. And I want it in a short, easy to read summary, not a detailed breakdown. Although this report is available on the OpenTable iPad App, it is not available on the computer desktop website version.
The video below shows the steps to follow. In a nutshell you export the list from OpenTable to Excel, remove the info you don’t need, highlight the info, create a pivot table (sounds hard but it’s super easy!), organize the data, print! Once you have the technique down it takes about 1 minute to do this.
Create a Covers Summary of Reservations in OpenTable
Here are the steps for how to create a summary of reservations by time from your OpenTable restaurant home screen:
- click on Shift Overview in the left side menu
- click Export on the Shift Overview page (top right corner)
- double click the Excel download (bottom left corner of your browser)
- in the Excel sheet which opens, go to the bottom of the page. Highlight all the cells which say “Cancelled”. Delete these rows (be sure to delete the rows, not the column.)
- now highlight all the columns except for Time and Covers. Delete all the highlighted columns so that only the info about reservation time and covers remains.
- if you want to include a listing of large tops then add them in the same row as the time they are associated with (see the video) and add a title to the top of each column which has a large top listed (such as Lg Tops1, Lg Tops2, etc)
- highlight all the info
- go to the top nav bar and click the Insert tab
- click Pivot Table
- click OK (it automatically selects the range you have highlighted)
- on the right side top box click the check-box for TIME, SIZE, and whatever you named your other column/s
- on the right side lower boxes leave TIME in the left side box but move all other items into the right side box which has Sum of SIZE in it
- if you added additional columns and dragged them into this right side box (Values) then your column items will say “Count of …” You need to change these to “Sum of ..” so click on the arrow and select Value Field Settings then select Sum in the pop up window and click OK
- Now you have a summary of all covers by time frame and a list of large tops according to time frame (if you chose to do those extra steps.)
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