Shipped in August 2026

A short round-up of everything that went live across Stampede in August 2026.

Phone bookings, answered without leaving the floor

Phone bookings shipped on 21 August. Your venue gets its own phone number, and every call is answered by a voice assistant reading the same availability the booking widget reads: your business hours, your turn time, your table and combination capacity, and the close-out times we folded into the day prefetch back on 15 July. It takes the booking during the call, confirms it the way an online booking is confirmed, and writes the full transcript against the booking record, next to the notes field on booking details. Before this, a phone booking was a person job. Someone left the floor, listened, and typed it onto the day planner by hand, and the calls that came in at the wrong moment were not answered at all. The book was only as complete as whoever was nearest the handset, and the detail that guest gave on the phone about a highchair or a nut allergy lived in that person's head until they got back to the screen.

You pick the voice and the accent under Bookings main settings, the config surface we reorganised on 20 July, and there is no new hardware and no new line to install. On a Saturday at 7.40pm, a party of six rings while your floor staff are running mains. The assistant checks what can actually be seated, offers 8.15 because the combination that seats six is still held by turn time at 7.45, takes the name and the allergies, and the booking lands on the day planner as a pill you can drag like any other. The transcript is on the record if the party arrives claiming they asked for the terrace. One honest limit: this is for a table, not a negotiation. A forty-cover Christmas booking with a set menu and a room hire question still belongs in the enquiry pipeline, and the assistant will not pretend otherwise. It is also new, so read a few transcripts in your first fortnight and tell us where it got your venue wrong.

Handover by PIN at the pass

Staff can now switch who is signed in at the pass with a four-digit PIN. One tap opens the pad, four digits submit it, and the new user lands on exactly the view the previous person had open, whether that is the timeline, the floor plan or the booking list. We made this worse before we made it better. The authentication rebuild we ran from February to June brought 2FA, magic-link login, Google OAuth and a bcrypt password migration, which is the right shape for someone signing in on an office laptop and the wrong shape for a tablet at the pass. A shift change meant a full email address, a password, sometimes a second factor, and then whoever took over had to find their way back to the screen the service was actually being run from.

The handover is now three actions: tap the signed-in user, enter four digits, carry on. Say the duty manager comes on at 8:15pm with a party of 14 due at 8:30 and three tables mid-turn. The old sign-in dropped them somewhere generic and they rebuilt the picture while the door was going; the PIN pad hands over the same floor plan, still showing the same tables, and the seat they were about to mark stays where it was. It sits in Bookings, on the same Day Planner surface where we added Venue Music control on 24 July, and it went out on 12 August. Worth saying plainly: a four-digit PIN is a convenience credential for a device behind the bar, not a replacement for the full login on the accounts that change your settings.

Refund deposits from the booking

Shipped 13 August 2026: you can now issue a full or partial refund on a deposit or a cancellation charge from the booking itself. Until now you could not, and our own documentation said so plainly, that refunds were handled by the venue directly. In practice that meant a manager opening the Stripe or Square dashboard in another tab, finding the payment, returning it there, and then going back to the booking to type a note that may or may not have matched what actually left the account. Nothing on the booking recorded the refund, so the balance on it stayed wrong, and the second manager on the next shift had no way of knowing the money had already gone back. Duplicate refunds happen that way. So do refunds nobody can explain three weeks later.

Now you open the booking from the day planner, choose the deposit or charge on it, and refund all of it or part of it with a reason attached. The guest is notified automatically, the balance on the booking updates, and the reason stays on the record. Take a Saturday party of ten at 7.30pm on a five pound per cover deposit. Four of them drop out at four in the afternoon, you refund twenty pounds against the booking, pick the reason, and the guest gets told what is coming back without anyone drafting an email. The refund follows the money out through whichever account took it, Stripe or Square, and both the amount and the reason sit on the booking for whoever looks at it next. It is part of Table Bookings, on any booking type where you already take a deposit or hold a cancellation charge.