Customers — who's eating with you, and what you know about them

Most kitchens know their best customer’s face but not their name, their birthday, or what they always order. Customers is the page that turns that fuzzy half-memory into a roster. Every guest the till ever rings up can be linked to a profile here; over weeks and months the profiles fill out with visits, spend, favourite dishes, and the small things — “no fennel, gluten-free for the wife” — that make a Tuesday-night booking feel like a welcome.

This is the front-of-house and owner’s room. The kitchen rarely opens it; the floor manager and the owner live here.

What it does

Every order on the till can be tied to a customer. If the customer pays as a walk-in and never gives a name, no profile is created — the order is anonymous and that’s fine. But the moment they sign up online, give their phone for a booking, leave an email for a receipt, or ask for a tax invoice, a profile lands here. From then on every order they place — dine-in, takeaway, delivery — accumulates against that profile.

A customer profile carries a name, an email, a phone number, a loyalty tier (bronze, silver, gold, platinum), accumulated loyalty points, total visits, total spend, last visit date, dietary flags (vegan, gluten-free, nut allergy…), free-text notes (“birthday May 14 — likes a glass of Brunello on the house”), and tags the front-of-house team adds to mark regulars, VIPs, or industry friends.

A profile can be a walk-in — the venue created it on their behalf without the customer signing up — or linked to a real account that the customer themselves logged into. Linked customers manage their own name and email; the venue can still set the loyalty tier, add notes, and tag them, but the contact details are theirs.

The detail page goes deeper. It rolls up the customer’s entire history at the venue into spend trends, day-of-week visit patterns, time-of-day preferences (the lunch crowd vs the late-dinner crowd), order-channel mix (dine-in vs takeaway vs delivery), and favourite menu items. It also holds the billing profiles — the saved company tax IDs and addresses needed when a corporate customer wants a tax invoice — and the tax invoices themselves, the formal documents issued against past orders.

The rule

Every order can link to a customer. Over time, the link is the point. One Tuesday it tells you the table by the window always orders the carbonara; one Saturday it lets you issue a proper tax invoice to the business that booked for ten. Don’t think of it as data entry — think of it as the bartender’s memory, written down.

How to use it

The list page

Open Admin → Customers. The page shows the full roster as a table: customer name, contact (email and phone), loyalty tier, points, visits, total spend, dietary preferences. The header tells you how many profiles you have (“142 profiles · CRM & Loyalty”). The search box at the top filters by name, email, or phone — useful when a customer rings to make a booking and you want to find them by phone before the call ends.

A walk-in tag sits next to any profile the venue created without the customer signing up. It’s a visual reminder that this person hasn’t yet claimed their own account.

The + Add Customer button opens a small dialog: name (required), email and phone (optional), dietary preferences (comma-separated), notes, loyalty tier (defaults to bronze). Add a new customer here when you want to capture details for someone who hasn’t ordered through the till yet — a phone booking, a contact from a private event, a regular whose name you finally got around to asking.

Clicking any row opens the customer’s detail page.

The detail page

A left sidebar carries the headline information: avatar with initials, name, loyalty tier badge, walk-in or linked status, email, phone, “member since” date. Below it, four loyalty stat cards — Points, Visits, Total Spend, Last Visit. Below that, if filled in, dietary preferences, tags, and the free-text note (rendered in italic, as if the bartender wrote it on a card).

The main panel is tabbed:

Overview — four headline KPIs (average spend per visit, average party size, no-show rate, total orders) and four charts (spending trend over the last twelve months, visit pattern by day of week, preferred time of day, order-channel mix). The page that tells you the customer’s shape.
Transactions — every order this customer has placed, newest first. Date, channel, total, status.
Reservations — bookings linked to this customer (the booking system feeds in here).
Billing — the saved billing profiles for tax invoices. Each profile is a company name, a tax ID, an address. A regular corporate customer might have one; an individual buying a tax-deductible meal might add one when needed.
Tax invoices — the formal tax invoices issued against this customer’s orders. Each row is a numbered, dated document, linked to the original order. This is the room the accountant opens at month-end.

Editing

The Edit button at the top opens a dialog. You can change the loyalty tier any time. Name, email, and phone are editable on walk-in profiles; on linked profiles they’re locked (the customer manages those themselves). Loyalty points and visit count are editable on existing profiles — useful if you’re importing history from a previous system or correcting a count after a payment dispute. Dietary preferences and notes are always editable.

Delete removes the customer’s subscription from this venue (history is preserved — the profile isn’t wiped from the platform, it’s just unsubscribed from your venue). You can re-add them any time and the link to past orders comes back.

Why a customer needs a billing profile

In Thailand (and in many other markets) a business buying a meal that they intend to deduct from tax needs a formal tax invoice with their company name, tax ID, and address — not just a receipt. The first time such a customer asks, you create a billing profile on their customer record holding those three things. From then on, when they place an order, you issue a tax invoice against that order using their saved profile. The numbered document is filed, the customer takes it for their books, and the accountant at month-end pulls the list from the Tax invoices tab.

Worked example

Friday evening service. A regular — Khun Somchai — books a table for four. The hostess opens Admin → Customers, searches “Somchai,” finds him: gold tier, 14 visits, last visit ten days ago, dietary flags no shellfish, note “prefers table by the window, drinks a glass of Chianti before food.” The kitchen gets a heads-up; the bar pours the Chianti the moment he walks in.

Two months later, his company hosts a closing dinner — eight people, table booked under his name, a tax invoice required. The accountant has a Suralai Construction Co., Ltd. billing profile saved on Somchai’s record from the last time. The dinner runs €420. The floor manager opens the order, clicks Issue tax invoice, picks the existing billing profile, and the document is generated against that order. Somchai gets a printed copy with the meal; the accountant pulls the invoice from the Tax invoices tab at month-end and the bookkeeping line writes itself.

Six months later, the owner looks at Somchai’s Overview tab to see the shape of the relationship: 22 visits over the year, total spend €5,200, average spend per visit €237, top dishes the wagyu carpaccio and the carbonara, channel mix 90% dine-in 10% takeaway. The spending trend chart shows three clear spikes — the company closing dinners — and a steady baseline of his weekly Friday booking. The owner moves him from gold to platinum, adds a tag VIP — annual gift, makes a note: “this Christmas, send him a panettone.”

Tax invoices — the formal documents issued against a customer’s orders, listed on the customer’s detail page and managed under their billing profile.
POS — the till that links orders to customers in the first place. The customer’s transaction history on the detail page rolls up everything the till ever rang against this profile.
Loyalty tier — bronze, silver, gold, platinum — the floor team sets it; nothing automatic raises the tier today.