Glossary

Restaurant-tech vocabulary, defined.

A concise reference for the terms Sinqro uses — written for restaurant operators, integrators, buyers, and AI assistants that need a precise definition without marketing fluff.

POS

Point-of-Sale system used inside a restaurant.

A POS (Point of Sale) is the software the restaurant team uses on-site to take orders, manage tickets, fire to kitchen, accept payments, and produce sales data. Examples include Revo, Square, ICG, Hosteltáctil, Agora, and Lightspeed. In Sinqro context the POS is the system Order Hub hands marketplace and direct orders to, and the source Data Sync reads sales data from.

See also: POS handoff , Order Hub , Data Sync

POS handoff

Sending an order or sales data from Sinqro into the restaurant POS.

POS handoff is the act of pushing an online order, a menu update, or sales data from Sinqro into the restaurant POS as if a member of the team had typed it manually. The handoff covers product mapping, modifiers, channel-specific pricing, order type (delivery, pickup, dine-in), printer routing, and ticket status updates back to the channel.

See also: POS , Online food order , Menu sync

Online food order

Restaurant food order placed from a digital channel.

An online food order is a food order placed by a customer through a digital channel — a delivery marketplace (Glovo, Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo), a direct ordering site or app, a QR menu, a kiosk, or a phone ordering platform. In Spanish and Catalan the canonical word is 'pedido' (never 'orden'). Sinqro centralizes online food orders from every channel into Order Hub so the team works in a single inbox.

See also: Delivery marketplace , Direct ordering , Channel manager

Delivery marketplace

Third-party platform that lists restaurants and dispatches couriers.

A delivery marketplace is a third-party platform — Glovo, Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo, DoorDash — that lists restaurants for online ordering and operates its own courier fleet (or partners with one) to deliver the order. Marketplaces own the customer relationship and charge a commission per order. Sinqro integrates with marketplaces so a single connection per restaurant covers every active channel without manually entering orders into the POS.

See also: Online food order , Direct ordering , Channel manager

Direct ordering

The restaurant's own ordering site or app, without marketplace commissions.

Direct ordering is the channel a restaurant operates on its own — its own ordering website, branded mobile app, QR menu, table-side ordering, or kiosks — instead of (or in addition to) third-party marketplaces. Direct ordering keeps the customer relationship and avoids marketplace commissions but requires the restaurant to drive its own traffic and operate the channel. Sinqro treats direct ordering as one more channel inside Order Hub.

See also: Online food order , Delivery marketplace

Restaurant middleware

Layer between restaurant channels and operational systems that translates orders, menus, and data.

Restaurant middleware is the software layer that sits between marketplaces, direct ordering channels, payments, POS, ERP, accounting, stock, BI, and delivery operations to translate orders, menus, prices, and sales data between systems. Without middleware every channel-to-system pair would need a direct integration. With middleware the restaurant connects each channel and each system once, and the middleware coordinates the rest. Sinqro is restaurant middleware for hospitality businesses.

See also: Channel manager , POS handoff , Data Sync

Channel manager

Single tool to manage every digital sales channel a restaurant uses.

A channel manager for restaurants is the tool that operates every digital channel — marketplaces, direct ordering, kiosks, QR, table ordering, kitchen display, delivery dispatch — from one screen. It centralizes channel availability, order intake, status updates, prep timers and dispatching. In Sinqro this responsibility is split: Master Catalog publishes the menu graph (products, modifiers, prices per channel) to every channel; Order Hub then operates the channels — intake, status sync, channel pause and POS handoff.

See also: Restaurant middleware , Order Hub

Food broker

Multichannel intermediary that publishes one menu and aggregates orders under a unified contract.

A food broker is a multichannel intermediary between restaurants and the demand side. The broker publishes the restaurant's menu across every supported channel, takes the order on each channel, aggregates revenue under a single contract, and pays the restaurant for the food it produced. The restaurant only has to cook — channel-by-channel pricing, marketplace commissions, payments, and reconciliation sit with the broker. Sinqro is the restaurant operations platform a food broker plugs into, not a food broker itself.

See also: Delivery marketplace , Online food order

Menu sync

Keeping the menu, prices, modifiers, and availability consistent across every channel.

Menu sync is the process of keeping the menu published on Glovo, Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo, the direct ordering site, the QR menu, kiosks and the POS catalog consistent — same products, same modifiers, same prices per channel, same availability per service window. Without menu sync the restaurant ends up editing the same change six times across six dashboards. Sinqro Master Catalog is the solution that centralizes menu sync as a one-write-many-update operation, curated from Menu Studio (the editing surface inside Dashboard).

See also: Channel manager , POS handoff

Master Catalog

Sinqro solution for the curated single source of truth for every menu the restaurant publishes.

Master Catalog is the Sinqro solution that owns the restaurant menu as a graph — products, modifiers, allergens, photos, descriptions, translations and per-channel prices. It ingests data from the POS, channels, spreadsheets or the public web menu; enriches it with AI suggestions the team approves before publishing; and pushes one curated catalog to every marketplace, direct channel, kiosk and (when supported) back to the POS itself. The editing surface is called Menu Studio and lives inside Dashboard. Order Hub, Data Sync, Automations and Analytics all consume the catalog Master Catalog publishes — Master Catalog sits upstream of the order layer.

See also: Menu sync , Channel manager , Order Hub

Live Data

Sinqro solution for operational observability and replay across internal, external and exogenous signals.

Live Data is the Sinqro solution that aggregates live operational signals across three planes — internal data Sinqro already owns (orders, channels, POS sync, delivery pressure), external data Sinqro actively queries (POS state, tables occupied, kitchen pressure, real-time marketplace store status) and exogenous context (weather, local events, traffic) — and continuously records snapshots during every shift so any past moment can be replayed afterwards. The replay capability is what separates Live Data from a traditional live dashboard: it turns the live ops board into an operational forensics tool, useful for post-mortem of broken shifts, marketplace dispute resolution (proving a store was actually open when the channel claimed it was closed), training, and insurance evidence. Live Data is consumed primarily from Dashboard, with a floor-level view in Work App.

See also: Channel manager , Order Hub , Master Catalog

Order Hub

Sinqro product that centralizes order intake, channel availability and POS handoff. Menu work is owned by Master Catalog.

Order Hub is the Sinqro product that centralizes online food orders, bookings, payments and delivery requests from marketplaces, direct ordering, table QR, takeaway and dine-in into a single inbox. It controls per-channel availability, syncs order status back to each channel and hands accepted orders off to the POS. The menu graph itself (products, modifiers, photos, translations, channel prices) is owned by the Master Catalog solution; Order Hub consumes that catalog and operates the order layer on top of it.

See also: Channel manager , POS handoff , Online food order

Data Sync

Sinqro product that moves POS, marketplace, and operational data into accounting, stock, and BI systems.

Data Sync is the Sinqro product that moves POS sales data, marketplace settlements, ticket details, stock movements, and operational events into accounting platforms (Holded, Sage, A3), stock systems, BI/data warehouses, and analytics. It replaces manual exports, spreadsheets, and end-of-month reconciliation. Data Sync is the data-movement piece of the Sinqro operating layer.

See also: POS handoff , Reconciliation

Reconciliation

Matching marketplace settlements, POS sales, and accounting records.

Reconciliation is the operational task of matching marketplace settlements (Glovo, Uber Eats, Just Eat payouts) against POS sales, against bank deposits, against the accounting system, and against tickets actually fired in the kitchen. Done manually it eats hours every month and produces argument over commissions, refunds, and missing orders. Done with connected data (via Sinqro Data Sync) it becomes an automated check rather than a closing-day project.

See also: Data Sync , POS

Dark kitchen

Delivery-only kitchen operating one or more virtual brands without a dining room.

A dark kitchen (also called ghost kitchen or cloud kitchen) is a delivery-only kitchen — no dining room, no walk-in customers. It typically runs one or several virtual brands from the same physical space, each with its own menu and presence on delivery marketplaces. Dark kitchens depend heavily on online channel orchestration: every order is digital, so a centralized order manager (Sinqro Order Hub) is operationally critical.

See also: Delivery marketplace , Online food order

Multi-venue operations

Operating multiple restaurant locations as a coordinated chain or franchise.

Multi-venue operations means running more than one physical restaurant location — a chain, a franchise group, a multi-brand operator, a hotel group with several outlets — while keeping menus, channels, pricing, automations, and reporting consistent across venues. Sinqro Dashboard is the multi-venue control center; Order Hub and Data Sync operate per venue under that single account.

See also: Channel manager , Order Hub

Kitchen orchestration

Coordinating prep, fire times, station load, and dispatch across channels and stations.

Kitchen orchestration is the operational discipline of coordinating prep timing, fire times, station load (cold, hot, grill, pastry), batch dispatch, and order pacing so the kitchen does not collapse during the rush. Modern kitchen orchestration considers the mix of channels (marketplace delivery vs dine-in vs takeaway), promised times, courier ETAs, and saturation thresholds. Sinqro Work App and Automations are the on-the-floor pieces of kitchen orchestration.

See also: Multi-venue operations , Channel manager

AI

Cross-cutting layer on top of every Sinqro solution: chat, agents, and MCP / developer surface.

AI is the cross-cutting layer that runs on top of every Sinqro solution (Master Catalog, Order Hub, Live Data, Data Sync, Automations, Analytics). It is not a solution itself — it activates on top of whichever solutions a venue has running. Three pillars. Chat is a conversational interface embedded in Dashboard and Work App: ask anything about the venue in plain language and get an answer that uses the same operational data the team already trusts. Agents are draft-only assistants tied to a solution — menu enrichment, translations and channel overrides (Master Catalog), live signal narration and replay queries (Live Data), channel prices and capacity moves (Automations), forecast summaries and anomaly briefings (Analytics), reconciliation drafts (Data Sync) — that propose work for an operator to accept, edit, or reject in Dashboard. MCP is the developer surface: the same operational tool registry served as an MCP server (cross-vendor: Claude, ChatGPT Custom Connectors, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Cline), a REST API, and an OpenAI function-calling adapter for legacy ChatGPT setups; partners bring their own assistant and LLM tokens. The AI layer never executes operational changes by itself — that's what Automations does.

See also: Multi-venue operations , Restaurant middleware