Floor intelligence guides
Restaurant occupancy tracking: see the curve you are staffing against
Ask a GM when the restaurant is busiest and you get a feeling. Ask the POS and you get sales by hour, which lags the room: a check closed at 9 was occupied since 8. Occupancy, tables in use hour by hour, is the curve your staffing, pacing and reservations should be built on.
What occupancy answers that sales cannot
Sales per hour tells you when money was rung in. Occupancy tells you when seats were full, which is a different and earlier fact. The gap between the two curves is itself informative: full tables with lagging sales points at kitchen or service pace, while empty tables during your supposed peak points at the door. Occupancy also splits usefully by zone: the patio can be dying while the bar is packed, and a single sales number hides it.
Decisions the curve improves
- Staffing: schedule bussers and runners against table-turn peaks, not gut feel, and send cuts home when occupancy, not the clock, says so.
- Reservation pacing: if seatings bunch at 8:00 and your kitchen drowns, the curve shows how much to stagger.
- Promotions: point offers at the shoulders the curve reveals, instead of discounting hours that fill themselves.
- Layout: tables that stay empty while the room waits are a layout complaint written in data.
How to track it without being creepy
Occupancy is a count, not an identity. You need “table 7 occupied from 8:04 to 9:12”, never who sat there. The manual method is an hourly tally sheet at the host stand for two weeks, which is workable and mind-numbing. Door counters count heads, not seats, so they miss how long anyone stayed. Cameras already see every table; the discipline is choosing software that extracts states and counts while refusing identity: no facial recognition, faces blurred on screen, video processed inside your building. That line is where TableWave’s privacy approach lives.
From curve to action, automatically
TableWave builds the occupancy record as a by-product of running your floor: every seated, waiting and reset event from your existing CCTV becomes part of a nightly recap and, on the Pro plan, a live analytics view with money-on-the-floor estimates. You get the curve by zone and by hour without anyone tallying anything, alongside the alerts that act on it in real time. Plans are on the pricing page; a 30-day pilot gives you two weeks of baseline and two weeks with alerts on, so the first decision the curve informs is whether to keep the system at all.
Questions owners ask
Is this the same as people counting?
Related but more useful for a dining room. Door counters give entries per hour; table-level occupancy tells you which seats were used, for how long, and where the room jams. For staffing and pacing, the table view is the one you act on.
Can I get the curve without cameras?
Yes: a host tally sheet, hourly, for two weeks, split by zone. It costs attention rather than money and degrades on busy nights, which are the nights you care about. It is a fine way to decide whether the question matters to you.
Does occupancy tracking identify guests or staff?
Not with TableWave. It detects anonymous shapes at tables, keeps table events like “seated at 20:14”, blurs faces on screen and does no facial recognition. The analytics are about seats and minutes, never about who.
Which plan includes the analytics?
Every plan shows the live floor and keeps table events. The live analytics dashboard, nightly recap, money-on-the-floor view and the 14-day payback report come with Pro and Multi-Location; the comparison table on the pricing page has the full split.
Prove it on your own floor
The 30-day pilot is paid, on purpose: you cover your plan’s setup fee, we install in person, and you read your own payback report before any monthly billing starts.
The install is $1,500. If it earns its keep in 30 days, your first month’s on us. If it doesn’t, we take it out and you owe nothing more.
Prices in USD, before tax. Setup is non-refundable once installed; monthly starts only if you continue.