Nightlife Operations Glossary

One page rather than a hundred stubs. Where a term has a formula, the formula is here — a definition without one is usually a definition you cannot act on.

Two vocabularies meet in this industry: the words a Western floor uses, and the Japanese-origin words that arrived with the format. Both are below, because an operator running a hostess-style room in London needs the second set, and a Japanese operator reading about a bottle-service club needs the first.

Guests and repeat custom

Returning guest share — the fraction of a night's guests who have been in before.

Returning share = guests tonight who have visited before ÷ guests tonight

A room with rising revenue and falling returning share is renting its growth from marketing.

Repeat rate — of the guests who came for the first time in a period, the fraction who came again within a defined window. The window has to be stated or the number means nothing.

Lifetime value (LTV) — total revenue a guest produces across their whole life as a customer, not their first visit.

LTV = average spend per visit × visits per period × expected lifetime in periods

The single number that separates a good acquisition channel from a cheap one.

Cost per acquisition (CPA) — what one new guest cost.

CPA = spend on a channel ÷ new guests that channel delivered

Judging a channel on CPA alone favours exactly the wrong channel — the one delivering cheap guests who never return.

Guest segmentation (CPM — customer portfolio management) — classifying guests into bands rather than treating them as one pool. tasteck uses five: first-time, early-repeat, steady, surge, top-tier, each split into active or lapsed.

The lapse line is 90 days without a visit. Top-tier guests do not stop coming; they stretch the interval, so a decline shows here before it reaches revenue.

Guest rank — a shop-defined tier (regular, VIP, and so on) used for pricing, priority and comps. Distinct from segmentation above: rank is what you decided, segmentation is what the behaviour shows.

Walk-in vs booking — a walk-in decided in the last few minutes; a booking decided days ago. They are different businesses in the same room, with different lead times, different cancellation behaviour, and different marketing.

No-show — a booking that was confirmed and never arrived.

No-show rate = no-shows ÷ confirmed bookings

The distinction from a cancellation matters: a cancellation freed the slot, a no-show did not.

Nomination and assignment

Nomination (shimei, 指名) — a guest asking for a specific staff member. It is not one thing.

Collapsing the three into one flag is the most common measurement mistake in this format. A guest counted as "nominated" for picking a photo looks identical to one returning for the fourth time by name.

Nomination rate = requested-by-name bookings ÷ total bookings

Mix photo picks into the numerator and the number rises while its meaning disappears — it starts rewarding good photography rather than good service.

Free-to-named conversion — of the guests the house assigned to a staff member, the fraction who came back asking for them by name.

Conversion = free-seated guests who returned by name ÷ free-seated guests assigned

The most useful number a floor manager has, because the house controls the input.

Accompaniment (douhan, 同伴) — a guest meeting a staff member before opening and arriving together. Usually priced and commissioned separately.

Do-not-assign (NG) — a recorded rule that a particular guest and staff member are never paired. The reason belongs with the record; without it, the rule survives the person who made it and nobody can review it.

Favourite — a guest-side marker, set by the guest, distinct from a house-side nomination record.

Stage rotation — the order in which entertainers appear. Operationally a scheduling question and, in practice, a fairness question. A rotation nobody can review is a rotation everyone suspects.

Money on the floor

House fee — what an entertainer pays the club to work a shift, in formats where staff are independent rather than employed. Money flowing in, not out.

Tip-out — a share of an entertainer's earnings paid to DJ, house mom, security or bar. Rules vary enough between clubs that no system can encode them honestly.

Comp — an entry, drink or table given away. A comp is only assessable against what the guest then spent; without a guest record joining the two, a profitable comp and a loss look identical in the night's takings.

House account — a running tab a guest settles later. An asset until it is not.

Bottle service — a table sold with a minimum spend, usually bottle-led. Time to first bottle is the operational number that predicts the table's total.

Table minimum — the floor price for occupying a table, whether or not the guest reaches it.

Extension — time added to a booked session, priced separately. The least elastic price on most menus, because the decision to stay was made before the price was quoted, and usually the oldest.

Course — a defined package of time and price. The unit most bookings are made in.

Option — a priced add-on to a course.

Settlement (payoff, 精算) — the end-of-period calculation of what the house keeps and what each staff member is owed. tasteck breaks it out by line — course, extension, nomination, option, cosplay, area, hotel, additional, discount, channel fee, other — each split into the amount, the house share and the staff share.

Pour cost — the cost of what was poured against what was sold.

Variance = expected usage from sales − actual usage from stock counts

Meaningless on its own. One count is noise; three months of counts is a baseline, and a step change against that baseline is worth investigating.

Shrinkage — the gap between what should be there and what is. The word covers theft, over-pouring, breakage and miscounting, which is why the number alone never names a cause.

The floor and the door

Door — where entry, guest list, comps and refusals are decided. The highest-leverage two hours in most rooms, and usually the least instrumented.

Door conversion — of the people who arrived without a booking, the fraction admitted.

Floor manager — the person assigning tables and staff in real time. In most venues the assignment lives in their head, which is why it cannot be reviewed.

Revenue per head — revenue divided by guests, compared against the trailing median for the same weekday.

Revenue per head = revenue ÷ guests, vs the trailing 8-week median for that weekday

Read alongside head count, never alone: the pair separates a busier-and-poorer night from a smaller-and-better one.

Nightly contribution — whether opening beat not opening.

Contribution = revenue − staff cost that night − consumables that night

Rent and fixed costs stay out; you pay them either way.

Dispatch and outcall

Dispatch (haisha, 配車) — assigning drivers to runs and tracking their state. Requested, confirmed, dispatched, arrived, returning, done.

Turnaround — the time from the phone ringing to someone arriving. Three clocks, not one:

Phone to confirmed   dispatcher availability and how fast the board reads
Confirmed to depart  driver positioning and who is free
Depart to arrive     distance and how the run was assigned

The middle one usually holds the most loss and is the cheapest to fix — it is not a driving problem, it is knowing who is where without making a phone call.

Driver mobile — the driver's screen. Assigned run, arrival, return. Deliberately almost nothing else; a screen used while working has to be operable in seconds.

Staff mobile — availability submission, schedule, clock in and out, guest notes.

Bookings, records and systems

Booking (order, 受注) — one reserved session, carrying the guest, the staff member, the course, the nomination type, options, and the source the guest came from.

Self-booking — a booking the guest made themselves rather than by phone or through staff.

Guest note — free text kept against the guest record and visible to whoever serves them next. The difference between a regular being recognised and being re-introduced.

Shift — a submitted and confirmed block of availability. In tasteck, submitted in 30-minute blocks by staff themselves, which means the submission itself is a record — someone quietly narrowing their hours is visible weeks before they resign.

Shift-weighted retention — retention counted by shifts worked rather than by heads.

Retention = shifts this month by people also here last month ÷ total shifts this month

Headcount retention lies in a room where a few people carry a third of the floor. Weighting usually moves the number fifteen to thirty points.

Channel / medium (baitai, 媒体) — a source guests arrive from: a listing site, a promoter, an ad, a referral. Recorded on the booking, or the attribution cannot be reconstructed later.

Channel ceiling — the maximum worth spending on a channel next month.

Ceiling = LTV of guests that channel delivered × target margin − reinvestment reserve

An amount, per channel, per month. The figure you can take into a renewal conversation.

CTI — computer telephony integration. The caller's number reaches the booking screen before the greeting, so a returning guest's history is on screen while you talk.

Call history — inbound calls with timestamp, number, and whether they converted. Answer rate cannot be computed without it, and an unanswered call leaves no other trace inside the business it failed to reach.

Link key — a short code that ties a guest's messaging account to their record in the system.

Where these are used

• Nightclubs — door, tables and bar as three businesses
• Hostess clubs — nomination types and rotation
• Strip clubs — house fees, stage rotation, VIP rooms
• Outcall and dispatch — the three clocks
• Bars and lounges — slow nights and pour cost
• Features — what each screen holds

On benchmarks. No target values appear on this page. We do not have a dataset broad enough to publish them, and every figure above varies enormously by city, format and price point. Each formula is written to compare a room to its own trailing median, which is the only benchmark that describes it.