Solutions / Bars & taprooms
Bars & taprooms
At peak, the bottleneck is not the pouring. It is taking the orders.
Guests order the next round from their table and the ticket lands on the bar screen, so your team pours instead of refereeing the queue.
Ordering £19 a month flat · screens included
Sound familiar?
Saturday night, three deep at the bar, and the people at the back give up before anyone hears their order.
Why it hurtsA person has to take every order, so throwing staff at the queue hits diminishing returns exactly when 2026 wage costs make each extra shift-hour dearest. The queue caps what a good night can take.
"If I'm lucky to make 10% EBITDA I have to generate £230,000 more a year in sales just to stand still" - Heath Ball of the Red Lion & Sun, Highgate, on the 2026 wage rises, in the Morning Advertiser.
Why it hurtsWage and National Insurance rises land whether or not the room can physically serve more. When the costs are fixed and rising, orders taken per staffed hour is the only number left to move.
The keg kicks mid-shift, and the chalkboard is wrong until somebody finds the chalk.
Why it hurtsSIBA counts 45% of independent breweries running a taproom now, and ranges rotate constantly. An out-of-date list keeps selling the beer you just ran out of while hiding the one you tapped in its place.
A day with VenueDeck
Saturday, 9:05pm
The scrum at the bar is three deep and somebody is shouting over the music about whose turn it is. The team splits attention between pouring and order-taking, and the people at the back drift off to their tables without ordering at all.
What happens insteadThe table orders the round from a QR and pays there and then. Tickets land on the bar screen in order, the team just pours, and the scrum thins to the people who actually want to stand at the bar.
The product behind it: Order & Pay at Table
6:40pm, mid-shift
The pale ale kicks halfway through the evening and the seasonal stout goes on in its place. The chalkboard, the printed list and the laminated card are all wrong now, and nobody has a spare minute to fix any of them.
What happens insteadThe QR tap list updates from a phone in seconds: the dead line hidden, the new keg live with its ABV and price. Every list on every table is right again before the next order.
The product behind it: QR Menus & Catalogues
Half-time
The whistle goes and the whole room wants a round in the same fifteen minutes. It is the surge no rota can staff for: too short to hire for, too valuable to lose.
What happens insteadOrders queue up digitally from the tables before the rush lands, tickets pace onto the bar screen, and the collection screen calls each round as it is poured instead of re-forming the queue.
The product behind it: Kitchen & Collection Screens
The numbers
net hospitality venue closures per day across the UK in the first quarter of 2026
Source: CGA by NIQthe rise in the average pub's yearly energy bill once government relief ended
Source: BBPA / Frontier Economics, via The Catererof pub-goers prefer streamlined ordering - digital ordering, pre-booking or orderly queues - and 34% would rather order from the table by app or website
Source: NIQ / ZonalWhat it costs for a bar or taproom
Ordering is £19 a month flat with no commission per round, and the bar, kitchen and collection screens behind it are included with no per-screen fees.
The live tap list starts at £0 on the free catalogue tier: your range, your prices and what is actually pouring, behind one QR. Prove that on the tables before anything costs a penny.
For scale: at 2026 wage rates, £19 a month is under two hours of one person's time, and it takes orders all night, every night.
Ordering £19 a month flat · screens included
Straight answers
- Can people really self-serve alcohol from their phones?
- Ordering, yes; handing over, no. Under the Licensing Act 2003 a responsible person still approves every alcohol sale, exactly as at a supermarket self-checkout. Digital ordering speeds up the ordering and the payment - it does not remove the human age check, and we will not pretend otherwise.
- Will the team lose out on tips?
- Tip prompts are part of the payment flow, and the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 requires tips and service charges to go to staff in full however the payment was taken. More rounds served per hour means more transactions in the pool, not fewer.
- Our wifi is patchy at the best of times.
- Then that comes first, honestly. Connected ordering needs decent coverage where your customers sit, and a venue running on a home-grade router should treat proper wifi as a genuine prerequisite - a one-off fix, not a reason to stay on shouted orders forever.