🍽️ FoodPulse Help Center
Restaurant network analytics. See your performance vs comparable restaurants — without anyone seeing your data.
Getting started
How do I connect my POS?
Settings → POS Connection → pick your provider (Square, Toast, Clover, Lightspeed, Revel, Aloha, Oracle Micros). OAuth or read-only API key. ~10 minute setup. We pull historical 90 days on first sync, then real-time after.
How long until I see benchmarks?
Initial sync of 90 days completes in ~30 minutes. First benchmarks appear once your DMA + category cohort has 8+ restaurants (k-anonymity threshold) — usually instant in metropolitan markets, may take days in rural / smaller markets.
What does "DMA" mean?
Designated Market Area — Nielsen's market boundary. There are 210 DMAs in the US (NYC, LA, Chicago, etc.). FoodPulse uses DMA as the geographic scope for benchmarking.
Reading your dashboard
What do the percentiles mean?
If your restaurant scores 73rd percentile on dinner revenue, that means you outperform 73% of comparable restaurants in your DMA + category. Percentile is the most useful metric — absolute numbers vary too much across markets.
Why are my dinner numbers different from my POS?
FoodPulse normalizes daypart definitions across POS providers (Square's "PM" might not match Toast's "Dinner"). We use a standard daypart cut: breakfast 6-10am, lunch 11am-2pm, dinner 5-9pm, late-night 9pm-2am. Some POS reports might bin differently.
How are menu items benchmarked?
By category (e.g. "burger" vs "burger" cohort, not "burger" vs "salad"). Items map via natural-language matching to canonical food categories. You can adjust mappings in Settings → Menu Categorization.
Privacy + data sharing
Can other restaurants see my data?
No. Cross-tenant aggregation requires 8+ restaurants in a cohort (k-anonymity). No individual restaurant's data is identifiable. We see medians, percentiles, and distributions — never individual rows.
Can I opt out of contributing to benchmarks?
Yes. Settings → Privacy → Opt out of cohort contribution. You still see your own data + market-wide benchmarks (broader than category). You can re-opt-in anytime.
Tip data + employee performance — is that aggregated?
Tip data: aggregate-only, anonymized. Employee performance: visible only to YOU; never aggregated into the cohort.
Multi-unit features (3+ locations)
How do cross-location rollups work?
Settings → Locations → group locations into territories or brands. Dashboards show per-location, territory, brand-wide rollups. Outlier alerts flag any location performing > 1.5σ off the brand average.
Manager alerts?
Configure thresholds per metric (e.g. "alert me if any location's lunch revenue drops 15% week-over-week"). Slack + email + in-app notifications.
Support
How do I get help?
- Email support@cloudfran.com — typical response 1 business day.
- Multi-Unit+ tier: dedicated CSM + analyst office hours every Thursday.
- Enterprise: same-day SLA + custom-cohort consultation.