ROME Intelligence
Frequently asked questions
Straight answers, in owner language. Anything not covered here — the Book a walkthrough form on this page reaches the team directly.
What is ROME Intelligence?
ROME is a restaurant intelligence platform: it turns the point-of-sale data a restaurant already has into findings, forecasts, and a ranked action plan for recovering margin. It’s built for independent operators and multi-location groups — the back-office numbers team most restaurants don’t have on staff.
What is a Profit Leak Audit?
The audit pinpoints where margin is leaking — underpriced plates, mis-portioned costs, soft dayparts, over- and under-staffing — and ranks every fix by the dollars it returns. Every figure traces to real checks. The numbers it reports are defined in our restaurant metrics glossary.
How does it work?
Four CSV exports your point-of-sale already produces — sales/orders, order items, menu & costs, labor shifts — flow into ROME; insights come out. The more regularly data flows in, the sharper ROME gets — a one-time report is a photo; regular data is a standing feed, updated as each day's export lands. Our export guides show exactly what to pull from your POS.
How does ROME analyze my data — is it AI?
Both, in the honest order. Your findings come from ROME’s analysis engine — deterministic calculations across the six lenses of your business (margin, labor, waste, revenue, retention, and The Briefing that ties them together), computed from your own numbers. The same inputs produce the same answers, with the math shown. AI comes in on top: Ask ROME is the conversational advisor that answers your questions in plain English, grounded in what the engine computed. The sample Profit Leak Audit shows exactly what that output looks like.
What data do you need from me?
Four standard exports from your POS reporting section: sales/orders (the checks), order items (the line items on each check), menu items with costs, and labor shifts. No new hardware, no new logins for staff, and nothing changes about how your restaurant runs.
Which lenses need more than the four exports?
Three. Margin and Waste need your plate costs, and Retention needs guest identifiers in your POS (loyalty, reservations, or card tokens). Without them those lenses wait; the others run on the four exports, and the forecast is enabled per restaurant once it is validated against your data.
Is my data safe?
Sales data is stored in an access-controlled database encrypted at rest. Guest personal details (names, emails, phones) get an extra layer of field-level AES-256 encryption, with keys held outside the database. Your data is never sold and never shared with third parties for their own use — you own it, full stop — and each restaurant’s data is isolated from every other customer’s. Full details: Data Practices and the Privacy Policy.
Does the AI see my guests' personal information?
No. ROME’s AI features answer from aggregates — segments, totals, percentages. No guest name, email, or phone is ever sent to an AI model.
Is my data used to train AI? Does the AI keep it?
No, it is not used to train AI — and most of ROME’s analysis never touches AI at all. The Profit Leak Audit, the briefing, menu engineering, and forecasts are computed by our own analysis engine. AI enters when you ask Ask ROME a question: it sends the AI provider the computed results it is grounded on plus the conversation so far, scoped to your restaurant, never raw database access, and never a guest name, email, or phone. Two separate things then happen to that conversation. Anthropic (Claude) processes each message under commercial API terms that prohibit training on it, and keeps inputs only short-term for safety monitoring. ROME keeps your conversations with Ask ROME and with the chat on this site, sends each one to the ROME team, and reviews them to improve the product. Conversations are never sold and never shared with other restaurants; our data practices page spells out exactly what we collect and how it’s used.
What does it cost?
Pricing has two parts: a one-time onboarding audit, then a monthly per-location subscription, with per-location discounts for multi-location groups. Specific dollar amounts aren’t published on the site — the team quotes after a short conversation about your restaurant. Book a walkthrough →
Who's behind ROME?
ROME Intelligence is a partnership bringing together more than 20 years of enterprise data engineering and business intelligence experience — the kind of analytics built for national retail brands — with a restaurant industry insider who brings deep operating knowledge from inside the business.
Do I need new hardware or new logins for my staff?
No. ROME works from the exports your POS already produces. No new hardware, no new staff logins, no workflow changes in the restaurant.
What POS systems do you support?
ROME is POS-agnostic by design: it works from the exports your point-of-sale produces, and the pipeline normalizes them into the intelligence model. SpotOn is pre-mapped today. Other systems are mapped during onboarding from your exports — the fastest way to confirm fit is to send a sample export via the Book a walkthrough form, and we’ll confirm in one email. The export guides show what to pull.
How do I see it?
The fastest look is the sample Profit Leak Audit — a full public walkthrough of a real ROME audit on a fictional sample restaurant, no access needed, with a downloadable PDF. The live guided demo (the full product on a realistic sample restaurant — sample data, real product) is access-by-code. To go further, book a walkthrough: the team walks you through a live Profit Leak Audit on data shaped like your own restaurant.
Are the audit's dollar figures guaranteed?
No — they’re estimates of operational opportunity computed from your own data, with the math shown next to every figure. What you capture depends on the actions you take. ROME does not keep a live outcome ledger on customer accounts.
Still curious? Ask the chat on this page — it answers from the same facts this page is built on — or book a walkthrough.