The restaurant library
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Practical guides, tool comparisons, and the research behind them. Start with a question, a job, or the name of a tool.
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649 results to explore
- Glossary
Average check
Average check is total sales divided by the number of guests (or the number of tickets), showing how much a typical customer spends per visit.
- Glossary
Average unit volume (AUV)
Average unit volume (AUV) is the average annual sales generated by a single location, a headline benchmark for how a concept performs per unit.
- Glossary
Back of house
Back of house (BOH) is everything behind the kitchen doors: the cooks, prep, dish pit, receiving, and storage that produce the food and control food and labor cost.
- Glossary
Backlink
A backlink is a link from another website to yours, and it both passes ranking authority to your site and can send real referral traffic from diners.
- Glossary
Break-even point
The break-even point is the level of sales at which total revenue exactly equals total cost, so the business makes neither a profit nor a loss.
- Glossary
Churn
Churn is the rate at which guests stop coming back, the quiet loss of regulars that erodes revenue even when new customers keep walking in.
- Glossary
Citation
A citation is any online mention of your restaurant's name, address, and phone number (NAP), whether or not it links to your site, and consistent citations strengthen local search ranking.
- Glossary
Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who click a link out of everyone who saw the message or listing it appeared in.
- Glossary
Cloud POS
A cloud POS is a point-of-sale whose software and data live on remote servers reached over the internet, rather than on a computer locked inside the restaurant.
- Glossary
Commissary kitchen
A commissary kitchen is a licensed, often shared commercial kitchen used for prep, production, catering, or delivery brands, rather than for serving guests on site.
- Glossary
Comps
Comps are items or checks given to a guest at no charge (complimentary), typically to fix a mistake, recover a bad experience, or extend hospitality.
- Glossary
Contribution margin
Contribution margin is a menu item's price minus its variable cost, the dollar amount each sale contributes toward covering fixed costs and, once those are covered, profit.
- Glossary
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the share of visitors who complete a desired action, such as placing an order or booking a table, out of everyone who had the chance to.
- Glossary
Cost of goods sold (COGS)
Cost of goods sold (COGS) is the direct cost of the food and beverage you actually sold in a period, the ingredient half of your Prime cost.
- Glossary
Covers
Covers is the number of individual guests served in a period, one cover per person, used to measure volume and plan staffing and prep.
- Glossary
Customer data platform (CDP)
A customer data platform (CDP) unifies guest information from all your systems into a single profile per person, so you can actually see and act on who your regulars are.
- Glossary
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total profit a guest brings over the whole span of their relationship with you, not just what they spend on one visit.
- Glossary
Customer relationship management (CRM)
Customer relationship management (CRM) is both the software and the practice of storing guest information and using it to build repeat business across the whole customer lifecycle.
- Glossary
Demand forecasting
Demand forecasting is predicting how many guests, orders, or specific menu items you will need to serve in a coming period so you can staff and buy accordingly.
- Glossary
Drive-thru AI
Drive-thru AI is voice AI applied to the drive-thru lane, taking a guest's spoken order at the speaker and sending it to the kitchen without a staff member on the headset.
- Glossary
Dynamic pricing
Dynamic pricing is adjusting menu or item prices based on demand, time of day, day of week, or channel, rather than holding one fixed price for every situation.
- Glossary
Email deliverability
Email deliverability is the share of the emails you send that actually reach the inbox, rather than the spam folder or a bounce.
- Glossary
EMV (chip card)
EMV is the chip-card standard that authenticates a card with an embedded chip instead of a magnetic stripe, shifting fraud liability and shaping POS hardware.
- Glossary
Expeditor (expo)
The expeditor, or expo, is the person at the pass who calls and paces tickets, coordinates the stations, and checks every plate for accuracy before it leaves the kitchen.