Bar and Lounge Software

Start with the honest part, because it decides whether the rest of this page is worth reading.

tasteck fits a lounge with table service, staff assigned to guests, and regulars worth knowing by name. If you run a high-volume standing bar where nobody sits down and every guest is anonymous, a good POS will serve you better and cost less. We would rather say that here than three weeks into a trial.

For everything between those two poles, the argument is below.

tasteck is a booking and analytics system for night venues, built by people who ran them for sixteen years and grew from ¥200 million to ¥1.2 billion a year. Every other product in this category was built by a software company.

The slow Tuesday problem

Every venue has nights that lose money, and almost none of them know by how much.

The reason is that costs are counted monthly and revenue is counted nightly. A Tuesday that took a small amount looks like a small win rather than the loss it was, because the staffing, the rent and the licence never appear on its side of the ledger.

Nightly contribution = revenue that night
                     − staff cost that night
                     − consumables that night

Rent and fixed costs stay out. They are not the decision — you are paying them whether you open or not. What this shows is whether opening was better than not opening.

Run it for a month, by weekday. The usual outcome is that one or two nights are structurally negative, and the fix is a shorter shift or a later open, not a promotion.

Revenue per head, against itself

A total tells you nothing. The pair does.

Revenue per head, vs the trailing 8-week median for that weekday
Heads, vs the same median

Revenue alone cannot distinguish a busier, poorer night from a smaller, better one. Split it by head and the answer arrives in one line — and the two moving in opposite directions is the signal that something changed in who is coming, not how many.

Weekday-matched, always. Comparing a Wednesday to last Saturday is comparing two different businesses.

Pour cost, measured properly

Pour cost drifts, and the difference between a bad month and a real problem is only visible against your own trailing figure.

Variance = expected usage from what was sold
         − actual usage from stock counts

The number by itself means nothing without a run of months behind it. One count is noise. Three months of counts is a baseline, and a step change against that baseline is worth investigating.

tasteck breaks settlement out by line — the item-level revenue side of that equation is a query rather than an estimate. The stock side is your count, and it needs to be a real one, on the same day of the week, by the same method.

Who comes back

This is where a lounge differs from a bar, and where the money is.

A guest record that persists across visits gives you returning guest share — the fraction of tonight's guests who have been in before. A room with rising revenue and falling returning share is renting its growth from marketing, and the rent goes up every month.

Guests are classified — first-time, early-repeat, steady, surge, top-tier — each split into active or lapsed. Regulars do not stop coming; they stretch the interval. Someone who came weekly and now comes monthly is on the way out, and that shows up here well before it reaches the takings.

Staffing to demand, not to habit

Availability is submitted through the system in 30-minute blocks. Two things fall out of that.

One, the rota can follow the demand curve rather than the shape it has always had. Most venues over-staff the first hour and under-staff the two hours that produce the bookings.

Two, the submission itself is a record. Someone quietly narrowing their availability is visible two to four weeks before they resign — which is the only window in which anything can be done about it.

What it does not do

It is not a POS, does not process payments, and does not run a cash drawer. It does not do stock counting or supplier ordering — the variance calculation above needs your count, and the product supplies only the sales side.

And as said at the top: if your guests are anonymous and your volume is high, this is not the right tool. The value here is concentrated in the guest record, and a venue that cannot attach a guest to a visit will not get it.

The output no one else produces

tasteck outputs the maximum you can spend on each marketing channel next month, as an amount in your currency.

Not a chart. An amount. The lifetime value of the guests each source actually delivered, times your target margin, minus a reinvestment reserve — per channel, per month.

Most venues judge a channel on what a first visit cost. That is the wrong number and it favours exactly the wrong channel: a source delivering cheap first visits that never return is worse than one delivering expensive first visits that do. The difference only appears when revenue is attributed to a guest for their whole life as a customer rather than to their first night.

Measured against every vendor listed on Japan's principal nightlife-industry directory, nothing else in the category outputs it.

Ask it from ChatGPT

tasteck connects to ChatGPT over MCP. Ask your numbers as a question and the answer comes back in the chat — which weekday is running negative, what returning share did last month, which channel is under its ceiling.

The same interface is callable from anywhere rather than being tied to one assistant.

Multi-language is built in — the operating surface itself, with your language set during onboarding.

Pricing

Up to 2 venues    from $34 / month
10 venues         from $100 / month
25 venues         from $200 / month

Billing is per venue, not per head. Thirty days free on every plan, cancel any time.

→ Pricing and Contact

Questions we get

We do not take bookings. Most people walk in. Then the booking side is idle and the guest record is what you are buying. Whether that is worth it depends on whether your regulars are identifiable at all — if the bar staff know them by name, the system can too; if nobody does, it cannot.

Our POS already reports revenue by item. Most do, per night. What they generally cannot do is carry a guest across visits, which is what returning share, lifetime value and channel attribution all require. The two are complementary rather than competing.

Can we start with just one thing? Yes, and the one we would pick is the nightly contribution figure by weekday. It takes a month to produce and it is usually the one that changes a decision.

How long does setup take? Venue, price structure, staff. Most of it is one sitting. What takes longer is deciding what you want to measure, and that is worth doing before rather than after.