Understand actual and estimated revenue
Where every revenue figure in Seatingly comes from, why some are labelled Estimated, and how to make your estimates trustworthy.
Every revenue figure in Seatingly carries a label telling you where it came from. That label matters — an estimate built on a good average is genuinely useful for comparing channels, but it is not the same thing as money that has been through a till, and we will never present one as the other.
The order Seatingly picks a revenue figure
For each booking, Seatingly uses the best source available, in this order:
No POS integration exists yet
We list transaction revenue first because that is where the model is heading, not because it is switched on. Until a POS or payment integration ships, no figure in your reports comes from a till. If a report shows Actual, it is a booking value stored in Seatingly.
What the labels mean
- Actual — the figure comes from a real value recorded against that specific booking.
- Estimated — the figure is calculated from the average you configured, applied to the booking.
Revenue type is also a column and a filter in Reports → Bookings (/app/reports/bookings), so you can see exactly how much of a total is estimated before you quote it to anyone.
Configure your averages
Averages are set in Marketing → Insights (/app/marketing/insights). Which field you see depends on your business type.
How to work out a defensible average
Take total revenue for a recent normal month, divide by the number of guests served (restaurants and cafés) or the number of appointments completed (salons and clinics). Avoid holiday months and one-off events — they will skew every campaign report you run for the rest of the year.
A worked example
A café sets an average spend per guest of 14. A tracked Instagram campaign produces the following:
Every revenue number in that table is Estimated. It is still a perfectly sound basis for deciding whether to run the campaign again — as long as everyone reading it knows what it is.
When figures show “Not available”
Anything with a zero denominator shows Not available rather than a misleading zero. The usual causes are no marketing spend recorded for the campaign, or no confirmed bookings yet in the period you are looking at.
Using estimated figures responsibly
- Estimates are strongest for comparison — channel against channel, month against month — because the same average is applied to all of them.
- They are weakest as absolute claims. Do not put an estimated total in a bank submission or an investor deck without saying it is an estimate.
- Review your average at least twice a year, and after any significant price change.
- Changing the average affects how figures are calculated going forward; it does not rewrite the tracking attribution stored on past bookings, which is immutable.
To see these figures in context, read Measure booking ROI in Marketing Insights. To pull the raw rows into a spreadsheet, see Export booking and campaign reports.
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