Frequently asked questions
Straight answers, in owner language. Anything not covered here — the contact form on the homepage 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 live feed. 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 dimensions of your business (item-level margin, labor against sales, waste and spoilage, revenue and dayparts, guest retention), computed from your own numbers and synthesized into one plain-language briefing. 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?
Item-level sales (checks and order lines), menu items with costs, and labor shifts — the standard exports in your POS reporting section. No new hardware, no new logins for staff, and nothing changes about how your restaurant runs.
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, 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 — and most of the time it never touches AI at all. ROME’s analysis — the Profit Leak Audit, the briefing, menu engineering, forecasts — is computed by our own analysis engine on our own infrastructure, with no AI involved. AI enters when you ask questions: Ask ROME sends only the small slice of computed results needed to answer that one question, scoped to your restaurant. We use Anthropic’s Claude under their commercial API terms, which prohibit using customer data to train their models; inputs are retained only short-term for safety monitoring, not kept and not sold. Your data is never shared with other restaurants, and 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. Let’s talk →
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.
How fast is setup?
Setup is an export, not an installation: once your POS exports are in hand, ROME’s onboarding pipeline validates and ingests them, and your first Profit Leak Audit is generated from that data. The best way to start is the contact form — the team walks you through it.
What POS systems do you support?
ROME is POS-agnostic by design. If your point-of-sale can export your sales data — and every major system can — ROME can use it. Our pipeline normalizes any POS export into the intelligence model; building your system’s mapping is part of onboarding. SpotOn has a ready-made mapping today; for anything else, see the export guides, send a sample export, and we’ll confirm fit in one email.
How do I see a demo?
The fastest look is the sample Profit Leak Audit — a full public walkthrough of what ROME finds on a sample restaurant, no access needed. The live guided demo (the full product on a realistic sample restaurant — sample data, real product) is access-by-code: request one through the contact form and we’ll set you up.
Can I try it without sending you my data?
Yes — ROME has an in-browser audit mode that runs the analysis locally on your machine; your raw rows are never uploaded. There’s also a live guided demo of the full product running on a realistic sample restaurant (sample data, real product) — access is by code through the contact form.
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 also measures outcomes after you act, so you see what actually worked.
Still curious? Ask the chat bubble on the homepage — it answers from the same facts this page is built on — or tell us about your restaurant.