Miners Arms
Two venues, one manager, and a booking system charging £500 a month that still let tables double-book.
annual cost removed
- Trigger.dev
- n8n
- Supabase
- Telegram
- Google Calendar
- Google Business Profile
- OpenAI
- Gemini
- Vercel
Where they were
Two Birmingham venues run by one operations manager. Bookings arrived by phone, by email, through a third-party platform and across the bar itself: four places to look, none of which knew what the others had promised.
What was broken
The booking platform cost £500 a month and still allowed the same table to be sold twice, because nothing reconciled the four sources. Reception cover ran eight hours a day, every day across both venues, simply to answer and record bookings, and the manager spent roughly 12 hours a week on top of that copying them between systems and phoning guests to apologise. Reviews went unanswered and neither venue posted anything.
What we built
- InPhone, web, email, walk-in
- BuiltOne booking queue
- OutNo slot promised twice
A website for both venues, built as the front door the group did not previously have, with reservations taken on it directly rather than handed off to a third party.
One booking queue. Phone, web and email requests land in a single stream and are written to a shared calendar, so every venue is looking at the same availability.
Double-booking made structurally impossible rather than merely unlikely: table writes are queued through Trigger.dev, so two requests for the same table cannot both succeed.
Reservations pushed straight to the team's Telegram as they arrive, so the venue sees a booking without anyone opening a dashboard.
Guest records held in Supabase: visit history, preferences and repeat-guest recognition, so the second visit is not treated like the first.
Confirmations and reminders sent automatically on a schedule, in the guest's language, with a one-tap cancel that returns the table to availability immediately.
A daily covers summary to the manager each morning: what is booked, what changed overnight, and which tables are still open tonight.
A content operation the group did not have before: posts planned, drafted, held for approval and published on a schedule, rather than remembered when someone had a quiet afternoon.
Review handling that replies to guests automatically and escalates anything low-starred to the owners directly, so a bad night is seen the same day rather than a fortnight later.
The £500-a-month platform retired, its data migrated, and its features replaced by the parts of it the venues actually used.
What it did
Measured after go-live, over 4 months.
- Annual cost removed across both venues
- £68,500
- Of that: reception cover, 2,920 hrs at £15
- £43,800
- Of that: booking software fees, a year
- £6,000
- Manager time reclaimed, a year
- 624 hrs
- A year of work running without a hire
- £45,240
- Of work handled a year, all sources
- 6,560 hrs
- Booking accuracy over 4 months live
- 100%
- From first call to live system
- 11 days
"We cut our software bill by £500 a month and stopped paying for reception cover on top of that. It now takes every booking, answers our reviews and runs our social, and that is work we were either paying for or simply not doing."
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