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Industries

Hospitality software development

A multi-site restaurant, bar or pub group runs on a stack of systems that were never designed to talk to each other: an EPOS platform per estate — often Lightspeed, Toast, Square, Zonal or Tevalis, sometimes a mix of two after an acquisition — a reservations system such as OpenTable, ResDiary or SevenRooms, order feeds from Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat arriving as separate tablets bolted to the pass, and stock and labour management in Fourth or Nory that rarely reconciles cleanly against what the till actually rang through. Each system is competent at its own job. None of them was built to give a general manager or an operations director a single, trustworthy view across a group of sites.

We build the software that sits across that stack: reservation and cover management platforms that handle table turn-time, deposits and waitlists properly; EPOS and aggregator integration layers that inject Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat orders into a single kitchen queue and keep menus and pricing in sync across sites; and multi-site operations dashboards that turn labour percentage, wastage, stock variance and daily sales into a flash report a regional manager can act on before lunch service the next day, not a fortnight later when the numbers are cold.

None of this replaces the EPOS or the reservation platform a site already runs. It connects them, normalises what comes out of them, and adds the layer of cover optimisation, order routing and group reporting that a single-site tool was never asked to provide. The regulatory context — PCI DSS scope on card data, Natasha's Law allergen labelling, licensing hours, and the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act on tronc — is built into the data model rather than bolted on as an afterthought once an auditor asks a question nobody can answer quickly.

Where it breaks

The problems described in the sector's own language

Bookings, walk-ins and deposits are managed in three disconnected places

A reservation comes in through OpenTable or ResDiary, a walk-in is logged on a paper waitlist at the host stand, and a deposit taken for a large party sits in a separate payment record that nobody reconciles against the no-show it was meant to protect against. Table turn-time — the single biggest lever on covers per shift — is never measured because the data needed to measure it lives in three places at once.

Delivery aggregator orders arrive on three separate tablets

Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat each supply their own tablet at the pass, each with its own accept-and-print workflow, and kitchen staff during a busy Friday service are physically running between three screens rather than working from a single order queue. A site going offline on one aggregator because a tablet lost signal is common, and nobody notices until a customer complains that their order was never accepted.

Menu and price changes have to be made in five systems by hand

A price change, a new allergen note, or a seasonal dish coming off the menu has to be updated in the EPOS, the online ordering site, and separately in the Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat merchant portals, each with its own item structure and its own delay before the change goes live. It is common for an item marked as sold out on the EPOS to still be orderable on an aggregator an hour later.

Labour percentage against sales is reviewed a week after the fact

Rotas are built in Fourth or Nory against a sales forecast, but the actual labour percentage — wage cost as a proportion of net sales, the single figure that most directly drives site profitability — is only known once payroll closes the week, by which point an overstaffed Tuesday cannot be corrected, only noted for next time.

Stock variance and wastage are tracked inconsistently across sites

Some sites run a disciplined daily stock take against theoretical usage calculated from EPOS sales; others check stock weekly or not at all until a variance becomes large enough to notice. Without a consistent group-wide method, a head office finance team cannot compare site performance or spot a site with a systemic wastage or, less comfortably, a stock control problem.

End-of-day reconciliation is a manual, per-site chore

Closing a site's till, matching card processor settlement against EPOS Z-reads, and accounting for aggregator commission deductions is done manually, per site, often by a duty manager staying late, and errors surface only when a bank reconciliation fails weeks later rather than the same night.

Regulatory context

What the sector has to satisfy

PCI DSS
Any system that touches card data — the EPOS itself, a booking platform taking deposits, or a reporting layer that stores transaction detail — sits inside PCI DSS scope. We design integrations to keep card data within the EPOS and payment gateway's existing PCI-compliant boundary, pulling only tokenised or aggregated transaction data into reporting and reservation systems rather than raw card data.
Natasha's Law and FSA allergen labelling
The Food Information (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2019, commonly known as Natasha's Law, require full ingredient labelling on food prepacked for direct sale, and FSA allergen guidance requires the fourteen listed allergens to be identifiable on any menu, whether printed, on an EPOS screen, or on an aggregator listing. Menu and allergen data needs to be held once and pushed consistently to every surface it appears on.
Licensing hours
Permitted hours for alcohol sale vary by premises licence and by local authority, and can differ from site to site within the same group. EPOS and till-lockout logic needs to reflect the specific licence conditions of each site rather than a single group-wide default, particularly for groups that have acquired sites with different licence histories.
Tronc and the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act
The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 requires qualifying tips, gratuities and service charge to be allocated fairly and transparently, and paid to staff without unreasonable deductions, typically administered through a tronc scheme. The data feed into a tronc system — service charge and tips by site, shift and staff member — needs to be accurate and reconciled from EPOS and card processor records, not estimated at the end of the week.

Integration surface

The systems we connect to, named

EPOS

LightspeedToastSquareZonalTevalis

Reservations

OpenTableResDiarySevenRooms

Delivery aggregators

DeliverooUber EatsJust Eat

Stock and labour

FourthNorypayroll export formats

Payments

card processor settlement filesPCI-compliant payment gatewaystokenised card data

Reporting and communication

group finance systemsSMS and email confirmation servicesMicrosoft Entra ID

Solutions

What we build in this sector

Reservation platform development

Cover management, table turn-time optimisation, deposit and no-show charging, waitlist handling and walk-in seating built around how a busy service actually runs.

Explore reservation platform development

EPOS integration

Aggregator order injection from Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat, menu sync across sites, price banding by location and end-of-day reconciliation against card settlement.

Explore epos integration

Multi-site operations dashboard

Labour percentage against sales, wastage and stock variance, site league tables and a daily flash report a regional manager can act on the next morning.

Explore multi-site operations dashboard

Engagement shapes

Typical scope, duration and budget band

Discovery and scoping
Two to four weeks. Mapping of current EPOS, reservation and aggregator setup across the estate, identification of data gaps between sites, and a phased estimate. Fixed fee, credited against the build.
Single-module build
A reservation platform or an EPOS integration layer for a group of four to ten sites. Typically 12 to 18 weeks. Indicative band £250,000 to £400,000.
Multi-site operations dashboard
Labour, stock and sales reporting built across an existing EPOS and payroll stack. Typically 10 to 16 weeks. Indicative band £220,000 to £380,000.
Combined programme
Reservation platform, EPOS integration and operations dashboard delivered in phases for a larger group. Typically 7 to 12 months. Indicative band £500,000 to £950,000.
Managed run
Post-go-live support covering aggregator API changes, EPOS vendor updates and a defined change budget, priced as a monthly retainer.
How discovery and scoping works

Questions

Frequently asked

Do you work with independent restaurant groups, or only large multi-site chains?

Most of our hospitality work is for operators running somewhere between four and forty sites — large enough that spreadsheets and a single EPOS dashboard no longer give management a reliable group-level view, but not so large that they run their own in-house engineering function. A single-site restaurant rarely needs bespoke software; a forty-plus site chain usually already has one. The gap in between is where we work.

Can you build on top of our existing EPOS, or do we have to replace it?

In almost every engagement we integrate with the EPOS already in place — Lightspeed, Toast, Square, Zonal or Tevalis — rather than replacing it. Replacing an EPOS estate mid-service is disruptive and rarely justified when the actual gap is reporting, reservation handling or aggregator order routing sitting on top of the till, not the till itself.

How do you handle delivery aggregator order injection from Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat?

Each aggregator exposes its own order webhook or polling API, its own menu format, and its own rules for rejecting an order when a site goes offline. We build an injection layer that normalises orders from all three into a single format before they reach the EPOS or kitchen display, so kitchen staff see one consistent order queue regardless of which platform it came from, and menu availability toggles push back out to all three consistently.

What do you build to support Natasha's Law and FSA allergen labelling?

Natasha's Law (technically the Food Information (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2019, with equivalents across the UK) requires full ingredient labelling on food prepacked for direct sale. We build allergen and ingredient data as a structured, versioned part of the menu — held once and reused across EPOS, online ordering, aggregator menus and printed labels — so a recipe change to an allergen-bearing ingredient updates every surface it appears on rather than requiring someone to update four systems by hand.

Do you handle tronc and the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act requirements?

We integrate with existing tronc administration and payroll processes rather than replacing statutory tronc schemes, but we do build the data feed a tronc system needs — service charge and tip totals by site, by shift and by staff member, reconciled from EPOS and card processor data — so the fair and transparent allocation required under the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 is based on accurate underlying figures rather than an end-of-week manual count.

How is a hospitality software engagement priced?

A single-module build such as a reservation platform or an EPOS integration layer for a group with four to ten sites typically starts at £250,000. A combined reservation, EPOS integration and multi-site operations dashboard programme for a larger group runs higher, delivered in phases so each module is live and earning its keep before the next is built.

Tell us what your systems are doing wrong.

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