Pause your subscription for a seasonal closure

If your restaurant closes for part of the year, you do not have to cancel and start over. You can pause your subscription: billing stops for the period you choose, and your account, settings and booking history stay exactly as they are.

Pausing works on monthly and yearly subscriptions. It is not available on the Annual All-Access plan, which is prepaid for twelve months, so write to us if you are on that plan.

This is the billing side of closing down. Switching your booking page off for the closure is covered below, and how Resos pricing works covers the plans themselves.

Only the account owner can pause. Other users see the button, but the action is refused.

You can start a pause once every twelve months. The clock runs from the day your last pause started, not from a calendar year, and it does not matter how long that pause lasted. If you have already paused inside the last twelve months, the Pause subscription button still appears; you only see the refusal after you pick a duration and confirm, as an error saying a subscription can only be paused once in 12 months.

How to pause your subscription

1. Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → Account → Billing.
2. Click Pause subscription.
3. Choose how many months to pause, from one to ten. The screen shows the date billing restarts.

A pause always needs an end date, and the longest you can set yourself is ten months. If you need longer, write to hi@resos.com and tell us the month you expect to take bookings again. An approximate month is fine, as long as you give us one.

Turn off your booking page as well

This is the step restaurants miss. A paused subscription restarts automatically when three or more bookings are created in the counting window, whichever comes first with your pause end date. The window is the last 30 days, or the day your pause started if that is more recent, so the count never reaches back to before the pause. Bookings from the app, the API and your booking page all count, so a handful of guests using your old link can put you back on billing while you are closed. Imported bookings and table blocks are not counted.

The check runs every few hours rather than the moment a booking lands, so billing restarts shortly after the third booking, not instantly.

Before your closure starts, go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Managing bookings → New online bookings → Disable booking page & widget.

That switch covers your booking page and your widget straight away, and it takes you out of the daily update we send Google. Google can still show slots until that update runs, so a Reserve with Google booking can arrive in the meantime, and it counts towards the three. The switch does not stop bookings sent in over the REST API, or bookings from Reserve with Facebook and Instagram, and those count too. If you use any of them, turn the integration off for the closure as well.

What a pause does and does not do

• You keep access to your account and can log in as normal during the pause.
• No new subscription charge is taken while the pause runs.
• An invoice issued before you paused still stands, and reminders for it keep going out. Write to us and we will review it.
• On a yearly subscription a pause stops billing the same way it does on a monthly one, but it does not refund the year you have already paid for. If you want to know exactly where a pause leaves your renewal date, ask us before you start it.
• A pause applies to one subscription. Pause from inside each restaurant’s own dashboard, otherwise the ones you missed keep being invoiced. The pause screen does not name the restaurant, so check the restaurant switcher first if you manage several.

Tip: Pause rather than leaving an unused subscription active. An active subscription keeps trying to charge your card, which means a run of failed-payment emails and, eventually, a restricted account.

When the pause ends

Billing resumes automatically on the date the pause ends. Re-enable your booking page and it takes reservations again.

You cannot cancel from the Billing page while the pause is running: the Cancel subscription button is hidden and replaced by Reactivate subscription. If you decide not to reopen, reactivate first and then cancel, or write to us before the pause end date. See how to close or delete your account.

If you forgot to pause before closing

Your subscription renews at the end of every billing period until you pause or cancel it, so a closed restaurant with an active subscription is still billed. A period that has already started is not refunded. The one exception is our 90-day money-back guarantee: if you are still within 90 days of your first payment, write to us and we refund the full amount.

If you have been charged for months while you were closed, email hi@resos.com from the address the account is registered to, and tell us when you closed. Writing from that address is how we confirm the request comes from the account before we look at the invoices.