Frequently asked questions

The big marketplaces (OpenTable, Resy) charge per-cover commissions and own the guest relationship. Covered is a flat £49/month with zero per-cover fees. Your guests book directly with you, your customer data stays yours, and you can export it at any time. Compared to ResDiary, Covered includes floor plans, service-stage tracking, pre-orders and customer insights in the same plan — no add-on modules to unlock.

Yes — sign up at covered.technology/signup and you get 14 days free, with no card required up front. You have the full platform during the trial: bookings, floor plan, pre-orders, CRM, reports. When the 14 days end you add a card to continue at £49/month from your Settings → Billing screen. Don't add a card and the account winds down quietly — your data stays available for export for 90 days if you want to come back later. Annual plans still get a pro-rata refund inside the first 30 days, no questions asked.

Most restaurants are live within an afternoon. You can import your floor plan, opening hours and booking policies yourself from the dashboard — there is no mandatory consultant or onboarding fee. If you would like a hand, we offer a free 30-minute onboarding call.

Yes. We support CSV import for future bookings and a guided importer for OpenTable and ResDiary exports. Historical guest records (names, preferences, notes) also come across so you are not starting from zero on day one.

You own your data. At any time you can export bookings, customers and floor plans as CSV or JSON from Settings. If you cancel, we keep your data available for download for 90 days, then permanently delete it. We never sell or market to your guests — that's a hard rule.

No. Covered runs in any modern web browser — Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox — on a laptop, tablet or phone. Most teams run front-of-house on an iPad and the back office on a laptop. We do not sell or require proprietary hardware.

Yes. Covered provides an embeddable booking widget for your own website, plus direct integrations with Google Reserve and Instagram "Book Now" buttons. All bookings flow into a single inbox with no cross-channel double-bookings.

Stripe is our default processor for deposits, card-on-file and no-show fees — it is the fastest to set up and works in the UK out of the box. Square is supported for venues already on the Square ecosystem. Card fees are passed through at cost; Covered does not take a cut.

Yes. You can require a deposit, a full pre-payment, or a saved card on-file per booking type (for example: card-on-file for Friday dinner, no deposit for weekday lunch). Charges for no-shows are one click from the booking detail screen.

It means exactly what it says: Covered never charges a per-cover fee. You pay £49/month whether you do 100 covers or 10,000 covers. The only money your payment processor (Stripe or Square) takes is the standard card processing fee when you actually charge a guest — and that goes straight to them, not to us.

The service view works offline for the current shift. You can still seat tables, mark courses, and capture covers. Once connectivity returns, Covered syncs everything back to the cloud automatically. You will not lose a service to a dodgy router.

We ship updates weekly, rolled out gradually behind feature flags so nothing changes in the middle of your Friday service. Material changes are announced on our Updates page, and breaking changes are communicated by email with at least 30 days notice.