Your venue
The menu, events, opening hours and booking rules, plus what belongs to your venue details and to the people who have access to it.
Upload your menu from a PDF
#Your menu shows on your venue page and in the app. The quickest way in is a PDF, because we read it and you only check it.
- Open Menu.
- Click Upload menu (PDF) and pick the file.
- Wait. Reading takes a few tens of seconds and, while it runs, nothing is saved.
- When it finishes you get a message saying how many categories and dishes were extracted. Check them.
- Click Save.
- Open Menu, from the bottom bar.
- Choose the PDF upload and point at the file.
- Press nothing further. The app saves what it read by itself, on the spot.
- Read the menu on screen and correct whatever came out wrong right now, because it is already public.
- Open More and choose Menu.
- Upload the PDF and wait for the read.
- Check the dishes and save.
From the dashboard and from the Pro workspace, the guest sees nothing until you save. In Lite there is no such step: what came out of the PDF saves itself, so the menu goes public the second the read finishes, mistakes and all. After that it looks the same to everyone, in the app straight away and on haila.md within about a minute. No notification goes to anyone.
- In the dashboard, Menu only appears for venues on the Pro plan. On Lite, the menu is worked on from the app.
- PDF files only, and 10 MB at most. A photo of your menu will not do.
- The read is not perfect and does not pretend to be. If the PDF is a faint scan, or the text sits in awkward columns, it can come out empty, with a message saying no dishes were found. Then you add them by hand.
- Uploading a new PDF replaces what is on screen; it does not add to it. If you already have a good menu and only want to change a few prices, do not upload the PDF again.
- From Lite, uploading publishes outright. No confirmation, no draft, no step back: the old menu is replaced by whatever the read produced, good or not. So upload a PDF from Lite only when you have a minute to look at the result immediately, never in the middle of service.
- The Pro workspace behaves differently: there it asks first whether you are replacing the menu, and what you accept lands only in the editor until you press Save. And because Lite is open to everyone, the same person at the same venue gets an editor that publishes by itself on the Lite Menu tab and one that asks first in the Pro workspace. Watch where you are uploading from, not only what you are uploading.
Fix what the PDF read got wrong
#In the dashboard and in the Pro workspace, what you see after the read is a proposal, and your check is the only thing standing between a wrong price and your public page. In Lite nothing stands there: the menu is already published, so the check is no longer an approval but a repair.
- Stay on Menu after the read, without saving.
- Look at the figures at the top first: Categories, Dishes, Average price and No price. A high No price count usually shows exactly where the read stumbled.
- Open each category and correct the names and prices that do not match.
- Delete rows that are not dishes, headings or footnotes caught by mistake.
- Click Save only at the end.
- Open the menu straight after the read. It is already saved and already public, so hurrying is worth it.
- Go through the categories one by one and correct the wrong names and prices.
- Delete rows that are not dishes.
- Save. Each save replaces whatever is public at that moment.
- After the read, go through the categories under More, then Menu.
- Correct what does not match and delete what is not a dish.
- Save.
From the dashboard and from the Pro workspace, the guest sees none of the corrections while you have not saved, and until then the old menu stays on their page. From Lite it is the other way round: the menu that came out of the read is already theirs, mistakes and all, and each correction reaches them only when you save.
- A dish with no price saves, and reaches the guest with no price. The screen tells you so with the No price figure. If you do not want that, set the price or delete the row.
- Every category and every dish needs a name. A nameless row stops the save.
- A price cannot be negative, and the menu cannot be left empty.
- A hundred categories at most.
- On the phone, if someone else saved the menu meanwhile, your save is stopped so their work is not lost. Reload the screen and make your changes again.
Change a dish, a price or a category
#Prices move, dishes come and go. You do not need a fresh PDF for a small change.
- Open Menu.
- Type straight into the field you want to change: the category name, the dish name, the price in lei or the short description.
- Add category and Add dish for what is missing, Remove dish for what you no longer serve.
- Move up and Move down change the order, which is the order the guest reads.
- Click Save.
- Open Menu and tap the dish or category.
- Change the name, the price or the description, or add a new dish.
- Save.
- Open More, then Menu.
- Change the dish or category, or add a new one.
- Save.
Once you save, the guest sees the new menu in the order you set: in the app straight away, and on the haila.md page within about a minute. Nobody is notified, not even guests holding a reservation for tonight.
- Prices are written in lei. It is the only currency the menu has.
- While you have unsaved changes the screen says so. Leave without saving and you lose them.
- There is no history and no undo. A deleted dish comes back by being typed again.
- You edit in one place and it shows everywhere. There is no separate menu for the website and for the app.
Publish your menu changes
#It is worth knowing exactly what the save button does, so you do not go looking for a second one that does not exist.
- Finish your changes in Menu.
- Click Save.
- Wait for the confirmation that the menu was saved. That is all.
- Finish your changes in Menu.
- Save.
- Finish your changes under More, then Menu.
- Save.
Saving is publishing. A guest opening your venue in the app sees the new menu straight away, and the haila.md page catches up within about a minute. It passes no review on our side.
- There is no separate publish button and no draft state. What you saved is public.
- Unlike events, nobody checks the menu before it shows. So read the prices again before you save, not after.
- Saving writes the whole menu, not only the row you touched.
Why Menu only appears in the dashboard on the Pro plan
#Two dashboard sections belong to the Pro plan: Menu and Guests. At a venue on the Lite plan they are not in the venue bar at all.
They are not hidden to push you towards Pro on screen. They are hidden because the save is blocked further down, in the permissions: show you the section and you would fill in a form that failed on every save. Better absent than lying to you.
On Lite, the menu is worked on from the app
The phone app carries Menu in the bottom bar, with the PDF upload and dish editing, on both plans. So a Lite venue keeps its menu current from the phone rather than from the dashboard. If the save errors there, write to us rather than pressing on: it means your account permissions do not line up with the venue plan.
The rest of the dashboard is the same on both plans: Today, Reservations, Events, Loyalty, Reviews, Insights and Settings.
The guest sees no difference at all. Their menu looks the same wherever you wrote it.
Create a one-off event
#A concert, a tasting, a themed night. The event shows to guests in the app, with its seats, and is booked straight from there.
- Open Events and click New event.
- Under Type choose One-off.
- Write the Title and Description in Romanian. Romanian is required; Russian and English fall back to the Romanian text if you leave them empty.
- Set the Date, Starts and Ends.
- Fill in Seats, if you are capping numbers, and Cancel up to (hours) before.
- Add Tags, comma separated, so guests find it more easily.
- Save.
- Open Events, from the bottom bar, and start a new one.
- Fill in the title, description, date and times.
- Set the number of seats, if you are capping it.
- Save.
- Open More and choose Events.
- Start a new event and fill in the title, description, date and times.
- Save.
The guest does not see it yet. A saved event goes to us for review and reaches the app only once it is approved. Until then it is yours alone.
- Without a Romanian title and description it will not save. The date and start time are required too.
- Leaving Seats empty means no cap on numbers. That is the dashboard rule: in Lite, a one-off event requires Seats, written as a number from 1 to 500. The Pro workspace requires it too, but sets no upper limit.
- Events work the same on both plans. This is not a Pro section.
- Three figures sit at the top of the screen: Scheduled, In review and Seats booked. They are the fastest way to see whether something is stuck unapproved.
Create a repeating event
#For the Friday jazz night or the Sunday brunch there is no point building a new event every week.
- Open Events and click New event.
- Under Type choose Repeating.
- Instead of a date, tick the Days of the week it runs on.
- Set Starts and Ends, the same for every day you ticked.
- Fill in the rest as for an ordinary event: title, description, seats, tags.
- Save.
- Open Events and start a new one.
- Choose the repeating type and tick the days of the week.
- Set the times and the rest of the detail, then save.
- Open More, then Events.
- Start a new one, choose the repeating type and tick the days.
- Save.
The guest sees one event, carrying the days it runs on, not one per week. Like an ordinary one, it reaches them only after approval.
- The times are the same for every day you tick. If Friday starts at 20:00 and Sunday at 12:00, you need two events.
- It has no end date, and you cannot stop it yourself. Once approved, an event can no longer be edited, its state cannot be changed and it cannot be deleted. When a series has to stop or move, write to hello@haila.md.
- Seats are counted per occurrence, not once across all of them.
- Built on the phone, a repeating event ends up with no seat limit at all: the Seats field only appears there for one-off events. To cap seats on a series, build it in the dashboard.
Add photos to an event
#An event with no photo gets lost in the list. The first photo is the cover, which is the only one someone sees before opening it.
- Open the event, at Photos.
- Click Add photos and pick the files.
- Arrange them with Move left and Move right. The first one is the cover.
- Remove photo takes out one you do not like.
- Save the event.
- Open the event on the phone.
- Pick the photo from your gallery.
- Save.
- Open the event under More, then Events.
- Add the photo and save.
The guest sees the cover in the events list and the rest of the photos when they open it. Like everything else in the event, they show only after approval.
- A photo can be 25 MB at most, and images only. A PDF or an oversized file is refused on the spot.
- The screen tells you the photo limit, underneath them. Once you reach it the add button stops appearing.
- On the phone you set one photo, in Lite and in Pro alike. Several, with a cover and reordering, only happen in the dashboard.
- The order only matters for the cover. The rest all show anyway.
Submit an event for review
#An event does not reach guests on its own. It goes through a review with us, and you are the one who starts it.
- Finish the event: title, description, date, times, photos.
- Click Submit for review.
- The event moves to In review and carries that label in the list.
- Wait. You get a notification when it is approved.
- Finish the event on the phone.
- Submit it for review.
- Follow its state in the events list.
- Finish the event under More, then Events.
- Submit it for review and follow its state in the list.
The guest does not see it while it reads In review. From the moment it is approved it appears in the app, among your venue events, and can be booked. The approval notification goes to you, not to them.
- A person here does the review, when they get to it. There is no deadline, no reminder and no expiry, and nothing tells you an event is sitting there. Submit in good time, and if the date is close while it still reads In review, write to hello@haila.md.
- If we reject it, the event moves to Rejected and the reason is written on it, in the list. That far and no further: a rejected event cannot be edited and cannot be submitted a second time. You read the reason and build a new one from scratch. You cannot delete it either, so it stays in the list.
- The filters at the top, All, In review, Published and Rejected, are the fastest way to find whatever is left hanging.
- The menu goes through no review at all. Only events do.
Edit an event while it is in review
#While it reads In review the event is still yours: no guest has seen it, so it can be changed freely.
- Open Events and filter by In review.
- Click Edit on the event.
- Change what needs changing: title, description, date, times, seats, photos.
- Save.
The Lite app does not edit an event once it is submitted. It builds one and submits it, and that is all. Open the event in the dashboard, under Events, or on Android in the Pro workspace.
- On Android only. On iPhone and iPad the Pro app has no event editing at all, so open the dashboard there.
- Open More, then Events.
- Pick the event that is in review, change it and save.
The guest notices nothing, because they never saw the event. The review runs against the last version you saved, not the one you first submitted.
- Only an event sitting in review can be edited. A rejected one is shut as firmly as an approved one: you read the reason and build a new event. The old one cannot be repaired.
- Once approved, the copy is frozen. So your last chance to change anything freely is while it sits in review.
Why an approved event can no longer be changed
#From the moment an event is approved its copy is locked. The screen puts it briefly: approved, the copy is frozen.
The reason is simple. An approved event is public: guests can see it, and some have already taken a place at it. A title or a time changed quietly afterwards would mean someone turns up to something other than what they booked.
What to do if it really must change
Write to hello@haila.md. If the event moves or is cancelled, tell us quickly, because somebody has to warn the people who took a place: the app does not warn them by itself. The list is with you, inside the event, but it holds only the name, the party size and the state of the reservation, with no phone number and no button to send a message. The numbers are under Reservations.
The review is not a formality put there to slow you down. Events land in the app beside the events of other venues, so we look at them beforehand, exactly as we look at your venue page.
Read who is coming to an event
#The night before, you want to know how many people you have and who they are, so you can set the room.
- Open Events.
- On the event, click View guest list.
- The top line says how many guests are confirmed.
- The list carries each name and the state of their reservation: Pending, Confirmed, Seated or Completed.
- Open Events.
- The event card shows how many seats are taken out of the number you set. That is all the app gives: a count, with no names.
- For the list with names, open the dashboard.
- Open More, then Events.
- See how many seats are taken. The Pro app has no name list either.
- For names, open the dashboard.
The guest never learns you read their name and receives nothing. Reading the list changes no reservation.
- An event reservation is an ordinary one and behaves the same: you accept it, close it, mark a no-show. You will find it under Reservations too, not only here.
- A row reads Guest when the reservation arrived without a name, not because the person has no HaiLa account.
- The View guest list button only appears after the first reservation. At an event with no seats taken there is nothing to open.
- The list carries the name, the party size and the state of each reservation. It carries no phone number, and no button to send a message. To call someone on it, look them up under Reservations.
- An empty list shows a message saying there are no reservations yet. It does not mean something broke: the button appears after the first reservation, but the list counts only live reservations, so if all of them have since been cancelled the button stays on show above an empty list.
- Event reservations are billed like any other, by the channel they came from.
Set your opening hours
#Your hours decide what times a guest is offered. A day marked closed has no times at all, however hard they look.
The guest sees your hours on your venue page and is offered booking times only inside them. A day marked closed shows to them with no free time at all.
- The last bookable time is not your closing time. The average time at table is taken off it, so the party gets to eat. Through the widget and the API the sum is a different one, a fixed margin before closing, an hour and a half by default, so the last time offered there can differ.
- Hours belong to the venue, so changed in one place they apply everywhere: in the dashboard, in the apps and on haila.md.
- Times are written with a colon, 18:00. Any other format is refused on save.
- Changing your hours does not touch reservations you already accepted outside them. You still see those and close them yourself.
- At the top of Settings sits a note saying your venue details, meaning the name, address, phone, cuisine, description and photos, are held by HaiLa and that you write to us for any change. For the dashboard that is true: none of them is edited from here. From the Pro app the name, address, phone and cuisine can be changed after all. The description and the photos are changed from no app at all, so for those write to hello@haila.md.
Set how much notice you need
#If you would rather not find out at 19:55 that six people are coming at 20:00, this is the setting that closes the last minutes.
- Open Settings and choose Booking rules.
- In Book at least (min) ahead, write the number of minutes you need.
- Click Save.
- Open More, then Settings.
- Go into the booking rules and set the minimum notice.
- Save.
- Open More, then Settings.
- Go into the booking rules and set the minimum notice.
- Save.
The guest stops being offered times inside your window, in the app. They are not told why; those times simply do not appear.
- Set it from the Lite app rather than the dashboard if you want it working everywhere. The value written in the dashboard is honoured when a reservation is submitted, but the time list on haila.md does not read it: the guest sees a free time and is refused at the last step. Written from the Lite app, the time drops out of the list as it should.
- It is written in minutes, from 0 to 10080, which is a week.
- Even at 0, HaiLa never offers a time less than two hours away. Below that threshold you take the reservation yourself, by phone.
- The filter applies to every day, not just today. A 24-hour notice also cuts tomorrow morning.
- Booking rules also holds Average time at table, from 15 to 1440 minutes, Largest party online, from 1 to 100 people, and Table assignment, By hand or Automatic.
Set how far ahead guests can book
#With no limit, someone can hold a table eight months out, on a date you know nothing about yet.
The dashboard does not carry this setting. It is not hidden; it simply does not exist here. It is set from the Lite app, under Settings, and the value then applies everywhere, haila.md included.
- Open More, then Settings.
- Tap Booking horizon. Under the title it says how many days ahead guests can book right now.
- Choose the number of days, from 1 to 365. The default is 30.
- Save.
The Pro app does not carry it either. On Android, switch to the Lite workspace of the same venue and set it there. On iPhone, install the Lite app: it accepts Pro plan venues too, for exactly this kind of errand.
The guest is offered no dates beyond your limit. For them the calendar stops there, with no explanation.
- From 1 to 365 days.
- The limit does not touch reservations already accepted beyond it. You keep those.
- It is the only booking setting missing from the dashboard. The rest are set from there.
Block a date so nobody can book it
#For a day taken over by a private party, a week of building work, or a night with a closed event, without touching the hours you show.
- Open Settings and choose Blackouts.
- Set From and Until, the start and the end of the period.
- Under Blocked channels tick Customer app. If you run a widget on your site, tick Widget as well.
- Click Add period.
- Remove takes out a period that no longer applies.
- Open More, then Settings.
- Go into the blackouts and add the period.
- Save.
- Open More, then Settings.
- Go into the blackouts and add the period.
- Save.
The guest is offered no times inside the closed period, in the app and on haila.md. Your opening hours still show unchanged, so they do not learn you closed, only that there is nothing to pick.
- Customer app is the tick that counts. It takes the times out of the list, so the guest never even sees them. If you are unsure what to tick, tick everything: you close more, never less.
- Widget stops reservations through the widget on your site, but only on submit. The times stay on show and the guest finds out at the last step, through an error that explains nothing to them.
- Reservations you already accepted are untouched. The period stops new requests; it does not cancel old ones. So look at that day and cancel by hand whatever you can no longer take.
- Your team can still enter reservations for the closed period, from the app. A blackout is for the channels where the guest books on their own.
Add or remove someone from your team
#A new manager needs access, and someone who has left should no longer have it.
- Open Settings and choose Team. The panel is in English.
- Write the email address of the person and send the invitation. It is valid for 7 days.
- The list shows the invitations still waiting and the people who already have access.
- Take anyone who no longer works with you off the list, so the list stays right. Their access does not stop here; read below.
- Write to hello@haila.md for the account of the new person. Read below for why.
The phone apps do not manage the team. It is done from the dashboard, under Settings, Team.
The Pro app does not carry it either. Open the dashboard on the web, under Settings, Team.
The invited person gets the email, opens the link and sets a password. The account is created, but it lets them in nowhere: the dashboard sends them to the guest page and the apps keep them out. And in the other direction, someone taken off the list carries on signing in as before. So this screen keeps the record, not the access: to grant it and to take it away alike, write to hello@haila.md. Your guests learn nothing of any of this.
- The dashboard invitation does not yet lead to a working account. It is a known problem on our side, not something you or the invited person got wrong. Do not blame the password, and do not send it ten more times.
- Accounts we make work normally, on every screen. Send us the name, the email and the role, and the account is ready the same day.
- Only the owner manages the team. A booking administrator who opens the section gets a message saying they do not have permission, in English too. That is not an account fault, it is their role.
- The form offers one role and one only, booking administrator. You cannot invite a second owner, cannot resend an invitation, and cannot change a role once it is set. For any of those, write to us.
- Taking someone off the list does not cut their access. It removes them from your own record and nothing more: they still sign in, to the dashboard and to the apps, with the same rights. The same goes for switching them to suspended. When someone leaves you, write to us the same day and we cut the access, all the more so if they left on bad terms.
- Both roles see the rest of the dashboard identically, Billing included. Team is the only section that behaves differently.