What Capacity Management does
Capacity Management stops your online channels from accepting more work than your kitchen can produce. It divides your opening hours into time slots and caps how much each slot can hold. Once a slot is full, customers on your ordering website and mobile app simply aren't offered that time — they see the next slot with room instead.
It also handles very large orders: if a single order is bigger than one slot can hold, the customer is offered a later time that gives your kitchen enough slots to finish it, along with a "Large order — this will take approximately X minutes" message.
Note: Capacity Management currently applies to your ordering website and mobile app. POS orders (walk-in and phone) are not limited yet — POS support is coming in a future update.
Where to find it
You need to be at Store level (a store selected in the switcher at the top of the page).
- Go to Setup > Online Ordering > Capacity Management.
- Turn on Enabled.
- Choose your settings (explained below) and save.
Choosing your settings
Time slot — the length of each slot, from 5 minutes to 4 hours. Most kitchens work well with 15 minutes. Your customers' selectable pick-up and delivery times follow this interval.
Limit by — the type of cap:
- Orders — caps how many orders can land in each slot. Simple, and right for most stores: if your kitchen can comfortably start 6 orders every 15 minutes, set 6.
- Products — caps how many items can land in each slot. Right for kitchens with a production bottleneck, such as a pizza conveyor oven that can only take 20 pizzas per 15 minutes.
Orders per slot / Products per slot — the cap itself, matching your chosen limit type. Set it from what your kitchen genuinely produces in one slot at full tilt, not the quietest shift.
Products that count (products limit only) — pick which items count towards the cap. If your bottleneck is the pizza oven, select only your pizzas: a customer ordering 3 pizzas and 5 drinks uses 3 of the slot's capacity, not 8. Leave the selection empty to count every product.
Note: With the products limit, the cap must be greater than 0 before it takes effect.
What changes for your customers
Once enabled, three things change on your website and app:
- Full slots disappear. Customers only ever see times your kitchen can serve. When earlier slots are full, a "We're busier than usual — earliest available time is HH:MM" message explains why.
- Large orders get honest times. An order bigger than one slot is offered a completion time spread across enough slots, with a "Large order" message showing roughly how long it takes.
- ASAP is replaced by "Earliest available". Because every order must fit a slot, the ASAP button is replaced with the first free slot, pre-selected and labelled "Earliest available — [time]". For a small order at a quiet time this is effectively ASAP.
See Busy-time messaging and large orders on your ordering website for exactly what customers see.
Worked example: pizza conveyor
Your conveyor oven fits 20 pizzas per 15 minutes:
- Set Time slot to 15 minutes.
- Set Limit by to Products.
- Set Products per slot to 20.
- Under Products that count, select all your pizzas (and nothing else).
A customer ordering 100 pizzas now needs 5 slots, so the website offers them a time about 75 minutes out instead of quoting your standard prep time — and your 7pm rush can't book more pizzas per slot than the oven holds.
Troubleshooting
Customers say there are no times available at all. Every remaining slot for the day is full — or your caps are set too low. Check today's order volume against your per-slot limit; if you're turning away orders your kitchen could serve, raise the cap.
The ASAP option disappeared from my website. That's expected with Capacity Management enabled — see point 3 above. Turning Capacity Management off restores the ASAP/Schedule choice.
Large orders aren't getting the extended time. The "large order" behaviour only works with the Products limit type, because that's how the system knows one order exceeds a slot. With the Orders limit, a 100-pizza order counts as a single order.
Phone orders are still coming in during full slots. Orders taken on the POS aren't limited by Capacity Management yet. Until POS support ships, staff taking phone orders should keep an eye on the kitchen before promising times at peak.