Tradeinit: a restaurant that asks its software how the night went
QR ordering and pay at table, with Flexi built in. How a restaurant owner went from a dashboard opened late at night to a question asked every evening.
The business
Tradeinit runs table service for restaurants, the first of them in Camden, London. Guests scan a code at the table, order from their phone and pay at the table. The kitchen sees tickets as they arrive; the till sees every order and every payment. Tradeinit is a product we build and run, so every order of every night is already stored properly.
The problem
Stored properly is not the same as useful. The numbers live in a dashboard. Owners open it late at night, after close, and click through to answer the questions every owner has: what sold, how tonight compared with last week, which hour was the crush. On busy nights the dashboard does not get opened at all, and the next day's decisions are made by feel.
What we built
Rather than another report, we built Flexi into Tradeinit. An owner links their restaurant to Flexi once. From then on, a question in chat, or in Telegram from the sofa, is answered from Tradeinit's own live data: a sales summary for any day or range, the top items, how the tables moved, and revenue by hour.
Nothing was copied out of Tradeinit and nothing changed for the staff. The restaurant stays the system of record; Flexi is the way to ask it things.
An evening with it
How did we do tonight, and what should we push tomorrow?
Flexi checks the night's sales and the top sellers, then answers in one message: the total and the order count, how that compares with the same night last week, the busiest hour, the three best-selling items, and a suggestion drawn from what people ordered together. In the demo on our platform page that suggestion is a curry-and-lassi pairing, because most curry orders added a naan and few added a drink.
What changed
- The question gets asked every evening, because asking takes ten seconds and the answer arrives where the owner already is.
- Comparisons come for free. Tonight against last Thursday is part of the answer, not a second report.
- Promotions are decided from what sold, not from a hunch, and the owner can ask a follow-up in the same thread.
- The dashboard is still there for the accountant and for the monthly review. It stopped being the only way in.
What is next
Reminders for the owner on WhatsApp when a night beats or misses the usual, more questions answered from the same data, and the same pattern for the other software we build. The pattern is not unique to Tradeinit: once our team has built Flexi into a system, the same kind of question works there too.
If you run a restaurant, Tradeinit is available today. If you run something else and want your software to answer questions, talk to us.