Closed for snow, sickness or Christmas? Change it in one place

The worst snow in years turns up overnight, and the bookings you had are gone by breakfast. Sham Hanifa runs The Cottage in Co. Leitrim. On the Restaurants Association of Ireland podcast, in his Our Members, Their Stories episode, he remembered a December when it dropped to minus 19:

from 60 bookings, dropped to four people. You have to ring them up, sorry, we can't open, staff couldn't travel.

Ringing the bookings is only half the job. Everyone else trying to order from you, on your own site and on every app you sell on, still sees you open and keeps sending orders you can't make. So the morning you've got the least time is the morning you have to go round four different screens and switch yourself off on each one.

The apps are worth keeping. They put your food in front of people who'd never have found you. But each one is another place that has to be told you're shut, and a snowed-in Tuesday is exactly when you don't have a spare ten minutes to do it.

Change it in one place

With Rowbo you set a closed day, or shorter hours, once. Your own site updates the moment you do it, so it stops taking orders for the day and shows your real hours to anyone who looks. Bringing that same change across to Uber Eats is what we're connecting now, founding shops first, so before long the one change covers your site and that app together. Deliveroo still needs you to set it in their Partner Hub for now, so that's the one you'll do by hand until we've connected it too. We'll tell you straight which apps a single change reaches, so you always know what's still on you.

What to do the day it happens

You can act on all of this today, snow or no snow.

Can't open at all? Set the day closed in Rowbo so your site stops taking orders, pause your shop on Uber Eats, and set the closure in Deliveroo's Partner Hub. Then ring the orders already in, the way Sham did, so nobody's left waiting on food that isn't coming.

Short-staffed rather than shut? Sickness is the one you can't plan for. Duane runs Grosvenor Fish Bar in Norwich. On the Bite Britain podcast, episode 4, he put staffing as the hardest part of the job:

people get sick, you know, people go on vacation

When you're a person down you don't always have to close. Narrow your hours in Rowbo and shorten or pause delivery on the apps for the night, and the counter keeps going at a pace the people you've got can actually cook. Turning delivery off for a few hours while collection stays on is often the difference between a hard night and a closed one.

Plan the Christmas closure now

The festive break is the one closure you can see coming, so it's the easiest to get right. Set your Christmas and New Year dates and hours in Rowbo now, while it's quiet, and put the same dates into Uber Eats and Deliveroo's Partner Hub in the same sitting. Do it in November and you're not standing in the kitchen on Christmas Eve working out which screen still thinks you're open.

If customers can order ahead, set the closed dates before you share the link, so nobody pays for a collection on a day you're shut.

One place to keep it straight

This is the same idea as the rest of Rowbo. Your Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders arrive on one orders screen alongside the orders you take yourself, worked from one menu you change once. Your hours and your closed days belong in that same one place, so "we're shut today" is one job, not four, done from your phone before you've even left the house.

See how ordering works, or tell us your business name and we'll show you your own menu on it.