Two in the afternoon, three tables lit. There is a university right outside the gate and plenty of students walk past at that hour, but few come in: one hour of table time split four ways still feels like money. The usual answer is to drop the price for the whole afternoon band. The trouble is that a time band does not choose people — the office crowd on their lunch break was coming anyway, and now they get the discount too. To aim at the group you are actually missing, the offer has to attach to a person, not only to an hour.
Discount by hour and discount by person are not the same thing
| Attached to a time band | Attached to a person | |
|---|---|---|
| Who gets it | Everyone who opens a table in that band | Only guests placed in the group |
| What staff must do | Nothing, the system deducts it | Pick the guest on the payment screen |
| The risk | Discounting people who were coming anyway | Staff forget to pick, or pick carelessly |
| Can you measure it | Only the total amount discounted | You can see how often each group returns |
The two do not cancel each other out: the time band lifts overall table openings, the customer group keeps people coming back. Hourly pricing has its own article; this one covers the rest.
Three places to attach an offer to a person
- Membership cards and tiers. The guest registers once, earns points on every visit at the accrual rate the club sets, and moves up a tier once there are enough points; each tier carries its own discount. At payment, staff search for the guest and tick the member discount box — nobody has to remember "how much is this one allowed off".
- Preset manual discount levels. The software ships three levels you configure in advance: Regular, Student and Other. A group of students without a card still gets exactly one fixed rate set by the owner, and staff never type an amount by hand.
- Combos. Each combo holds the hours of play included, how many may be sold, the campaign dates, the weekdays and time windows it applies to, and a gift menu drawn from stock. This is where you package a "big group, off-peak" deal of its own.
What else do you sell a group of four
Table time is billed per table, not per head — four people on one table produce the same amount as two. So a group package should not cut deep into the hourly rate; it should bundle things that scale with headcount: drinks, snacks, noodles. Three hours with four bottles of water looks clearly cheaper to the guest, while from the club's side the hours keep almost their full price and the drinks still carry a margin.
At payment, the hours inside the combo are consumed first, down to the second, and only play beyond that is billed by time; the receipt prints the combo amount and the play time on separate lines, so nothing gets mixed up at closing. One thing to remember: a table running on a combo cannot be moved to another table.
Three guards so the discount does not leak
- Decide what happens when offers overlap. A bill that falls inside a discounted time band and belongs to a tiered member only takes one of the two. The club chooses whether the Highest or the Lowest applies, and which sources may join the comparison: table, weekday, member. Settle this before running two campaigns at once.
- Cap the combo. The quantity on a combo is a hard fence: once it sells out the screen says so and nobody can sell another. Pair it with the weekdays and time windows so an off-peak package is not spent on a Saturday night.
- Read the discount report. It separates automatic discounts (from campaigns) from manual ones (pressed by a person). Manual discounts swelling on one particular shift is a question worth asking, and it shows up far earlier than a dip in total revenue.
Two weeks later, sit down with the numbers
Open one package, run it a full two weeks, then open three screens: revenue by hour, to see whether the midday and afternoon band thickened; the member list, to count how many new cards were issued; and the discount report, for the total you gave away. If afternoon table openings doubled and a few dozen membership cards came with it, the package is worth keeping. If openings are flat and only the discount total grew, you are simply giving money back to people who were coming anyway.
Membership cards, preset rates, combos and the reports above are part of Ordersys billiards management software, in the same system as table timing and in-table drink orders. There is a free 7-day trial — set up one member tier and one group combo, then run a test bill and you will see exactly how the software adds and subtracts.
Read more: Selling play-hour combos and pricing by time band for a billiards club to set hourly pricing before you attach person-based offers; and Player membership cards: getting guests to come back to your billiards club if you are considering launching cards.
Ordersys times every table automatically, switches table lights, takes drink orders at the table and reports revenue per shift.
Other news
Bakery management software: production recipes, expiry dates and cakes ordered for a pickup date
A bakery is a small workshop stuck to a shop, so software that only sells still leaves the owner guessing how much flour went into a batch. Declare baked goods as produced items with recipes, sponge and cream as semi-finished goods, receive materials by lot with expiry dates, sell at the counter with barcode labels, and keep every advance cake order in one place.
Software for a hotpot and grill house: building the menu, splitting the kitchen, what to set up before you open
Guests order five or six rounds over two hours, the kitchen runs three stations, and tables turn over once or twice a night. Those three traits decide what to configure in the first week: hotpots and broth flavours as attributes, meat plates by recipe quantity, buffet seats, kitchen and bar printers by product group, advance bookings with a code, and closing the shift at night.
HRM software for restaurant and cafe chains: splitting the work with each outlet
By the third location, three Excel files on three computers no longer answer how many people the chain employs or what it spent on staff last month. One shared record that travels with the person, a table splitting duties between owner and outlet manager, permissions by store, rules configured per branch, and labour cost broken out by outlet.
Flower shop software: bookings by delivery date and wholesale credit
Most of a flower shop's revenue comes from orders booked in advance, stock spoils in two or three days, and restaurant and hotel regulars buy on credit all month. How to put the delivery date, time and card message in the order itself, filter today's deliveries at the counter, sell by the stem while receiving by the bunch, and track wholesale debt with reminders before it falls due.
Managing massage therapist shifts without padded hours
A handwritten timesheet leaves nothing to check at month-end, so it gets signed anyway. Declare shifts in advance, clock in on a branch-tied QR device, then set hours beside the session count for that shift — three common discrepancy signals and how to go from timesheet to hourly payroll.
Pizza shop software: choose-your-own toppings, dine-in and delivery
A dozen pizzas on the menu, but size, crust and toppings push it to several hundred combinations — and the shop sells three channels at once. How to declare attributes, variants and topping groups once, run all three channels on one system, deduct ingredients by recipe, and what not to expect from the delivery side.
Reports on which billiards tables are busy by hour, for staffing shifts
How many staff for a Friday night, and is the table at the back worth keeping — two questions answered by reports, not instinct. The revenue-by-table screen lists even the zero tables, per-table detail carries invoice timestamps, plus three charts for reading hour bands and four things to do after reading them.
Assessing staff productivity by sales and hours worked
The highest sales figure is not necessarily the strongest performer — you still have to divide by hours worked. The two numbers you need first, three ways to turn them into productivity, three rules for comparing like with like, what to measure for roles with no sales, and why criteria must be announced before money is attached.
Per-dish gross margin in a restaurant: making the number trustworthy
What the gross margin on a plate includes and excludes, two ways to get cost into the software (a cost price field or ingredient recipes), four places the number goes wrong, and why you must multiply margin by plates sold to see which dish really feeds the restaurant.
