Restaurant tech stack audit: keep it, fix it or bin it

Most restaurant tech stack audits start and end with a spreadsheet of subscriptions. That tells you what you pay. It doesn't tell you what to do next. A useful audit judges every system against three tests: how it holds up on a full Saturday night, what it does with your guests, and what it costs you to leave. Then each system gets one decision: keep it, fix it or bin it.

This guide walks through all of it. It works for a single site and for a group of twenty, and it takes an afternoon, not a consultant.

Step 1: List every system, including the ones nobody owns

Start with the obvious ones: the till, the booking system, the rota and the accounting software. Then go looking for the rest. Every hospitality business has systems that arrived with one manager and outlived them:

the free booking widget still sitting on an old version of the website
the ticketing site used for the quiz night and the wine dinner
the guest Wi-Fi box on a separate contract, which nobody has logged into for a year
the email tool that still bills monthly because the list lives there
the review app a GM trialled and never cancelled

For each system, fill in one row:

Column	What to record
What it does	In one line, in operator words
Who uses it	Floor, kitchen, GM, head office, nobody
Monthly cost	Including add-ons, SMS credits and payment fees
How it's priced	Flat, per site, per cover, per transaction, per message
Contract end	And the notice period, which is usually the date that matters
Where its data goes	Nowhere, one-way into another tool, or two-way

The pricing column is the one people skip, and it matters most. A flat monthly fee stays the same when you grow. A per-cover fee grows with you, so a busier December costs you more for the same software.

Step 2: The Saturday night test

Every system looks brilliant in a demo. The honest test is 8.30pm on a full Saturday, with a two-top waiting and the kitchen three tickets behind.

Don't ask head office how a system performs. Ask the people using it at the pass, on the door and behind the bar. Three questions per system:

Does it keep up? Slow screens, frozen card terminals and a booking page that times out on a busy night all count against it.
When it breaks, who fixes it, and how fast? A support line that answers on Monday is no use on Saturday.
What's the workaround? This is the telling one. The paper diary behind the host stand, the notebook by the till, the WhatsApp group for allergies: every workaround is your team's verdict on a system, delivered without a meeting.

A system that fails the Saturday night test is costing you more than its subscription. It's costing you covers, speed of service and staff goodwill.

Step 3: The guest test

This is the step most tech stack audits leave out, and it's the one that decides whether your systems are building a business or just running a shift.

Pick one real guest journey and follow it through your stack:

They book a table for four on a Friday.
They arrive, and one of them signs in to the guest Wi-Fi.
They spend £140 on the till.
On Sunday, they leave a four-star Google review.

Now ask: how many of your systems saw this guest, and did any of them see all of it? On Monday morning, could you tell that this booker has been in three times this year, spends above average and just left a lukewarm review? Or does that knowledge sit in four places, each holding one piece?

For most venues the answer is the second one. The booking system knows the name. The till knows the basket, recorded against nobody in particular. The Wi-Fi knows an email address. The review sits in its own inbox. Each tool did its job and none of them knows the guest.

For each system, record which of these it does with guest data:

Keeps it to itself. Data goes in and never comes out.
Pushes it one way. It sends data to another tool but never gets anything back.
Shares a guest record. What it learns lands on the same unified guest profile everything else uses.

The till is the usual weak point. A two-way POS integration sends the booking to the table and brings the spend back to the guest's record. A one-way integration only does the first half, so your best customers look identical to first-timers.

Step 4: The exit test

The best time to find out how hard a system is to leave is before you need to. For each one, check:

Contract length and notice period. Put every notice deadline in the calendar now.
Data export. Can you export your guest list, with marketing consent flags, in a format another system can read? If the answer is "raise a ticket", treat that as a no.
Who owns the guest. Some platforms treat the guests who book through them as their customers, not yours. Read the terms on guest data ownership before you depend on that list.
Fees that scale with success. Per-cover and per-transaction pricing punishes your best months.

A system that is hard to leave isn't automatically a bad one. But you should know that before you sign another year, not after.

Step 5: One decision per system

Now give every row one of three verdicts. Not "maybe", not "review next quarter". One decision.

Verdict	When it applies	What you do
Keep	Passes the Saturday night test, shares guest data properly, fair to leave	Nothing. Renew it with confidence
Fix	The problem is setup, training or an unused feature, not the product	Book a session with the supplier, retrain the team, switch on what you already pay for
Bin	Fails on a busy night, or keeps your guests to itself and can't be changed	Diary the notice date and plan the replacement

Be strict with "fix". Plenty of systems get binned when the real problem is that nobody was shown how to use them. Before you bin anything, ask the supplier to show you what it can do that you aren't using. If the answer covers the gap, it's a fix.

Be equally strict with "keep". A system your team loves on a Saturday night can still fail the guest test. A till that front of house enjoys using is worth keeping. It still needs to give its data back.

Reading the results

Once every row has a verdict, look at the pattern, not the individual scores.

If the bins cluster around the guest, meaning booking, Wi-Fi, marketing, reviews and loyalty all fail the guest test, the problem isn't five bad tools. It's that five tools each hold one slice of the same guest. Replacing them one at a time will reproduce the same gap. That is the point where it's worth asking the bigger question of one platform or separate systems.

If the bins cluster around operations, meaning stock, rotas and reporting, look for tools that connect to your till properly and your team will use.

If almost everything is a keep, well done, and do this again in twelve months. Stacks drift as managers change and new tools get added.

Whatever you find, don't replace everything at once. Order the changes by contract end date, start with whatever fails on a Saturday night, and change one system per quarter so your team is never retraining on everything at the same time.

Where Stampede fits

We make one of the systems you're auditing, so here is where we sit.

Stampede doesn't replace your till. If you're on Square, Stampede's two-way Square integration leaves the till exactly as your team knows it and brings each table's spend back to that guest's profile.

What Stampede does replace is the guest side of the stack: table bookings, guest Wi-Fi, email and SMS marketing, reviews and loyalty. They all run on one guest profile, on a flat monthly price with no per-cover fees. See pricing.

That is the gap this audit most often finds. ART Hospitality found it across eight venues, and their story shows what changed when three suppliers became one guest record.

The checklist

Copy this into a spreadsheet, one row per system:

What it does, who uses it, monthly cost, pricing model
Contract end and notice deadline (diarised)
Saturday night: keeps up / breaks / has a workaround
Guest data: keeps it / pushes one way / shares a record
Exit: exportable with consent / hard to leave / fees scale with covers
Verdict: keep, fix or bin
Owner and date for the next action

FAQs

How often should a restaurant audit its tech stack?
Once a year, and whenever a major contract comes up for renewal. Put the audit a month before your earliest notice deadline, so a "bin" verdict can actually be acted on.

Who should be involved in a hospitality tech audit?
One person from head office to own the spreadsheet, and at least one person from each role that uses the systems: host, bar, kitchen and a GM. The floor team answer the Saturday night test; head office rarely can.

What's the difference between a fix and a bin?
A fix is a problem with setup, training or unused features, which the supplier can solve without you switching. A bin is a problem with the product itself: it fails under pressure, or it won't share your guest data however it's configured.

How to audit your restaurant tech stack: keep it, fix it or bin it