The words the industry uses — covers, turns, no-shows, prime cost — defined the way they’re actually used on a Pakistani restaurant floor. Each one stands on its own; link to any of them.
Reservation management system (RMS)
The software a restaurant uses to take, confirm and seat bookings — the replacement for the paper diary and the endless WhatsApp scroll. A good RMS holds the floor plan, the day's covers and each guest's history in one place, so the host answers “can you fit six at nine?” from a screen, not from memory. Seated RMS is our version, built for Pakistani dining rooms.
Cover
One seated guest. A table of four is one booking but four covers, and covers — not bookings — are how restaurants measure a night, because revenue follows people, not tables. “We did 180 covers on Saturday” says more than any count of reservations. Multiply covers by average spend per head and you have the evening's revenue.
Party size
The number of guests on a single booking. In Pakistan the most common party is four, and the long tail of sixes, eights and “the cousins came too” outweighs the couples — a pattern we charted in Dinner Comes in Fours. Party size drives everything downstream: the table mix you buy, the turn times you quote, and how often two tables get pushed together mid-service.
No-show / no-show rate
A booking that never arrives and never cancels. The no-show rate is the share of reservations that end that way, and it is the quietest tax in the industry: the table sat empty while walk-ins were turned away at the door. Confirmations, reminders and deposits for large parties all push the rate down — we published a no-show playbook for Pakistani rooms.
Table turn (turn time)
One complete use of a table — seat, serve, pay, reset — and the time it takes. If dinner turns average ninety minutes, a four-top can seat three parties in an evening; if they run two hours, it seats two. Restaurants that measure turn times by party size quote waits honestly and stop promising tables they don't actually have.
Waitlist
The queue a full restaurant runs for guests willing to wait — increasingly digital, with each party added by phone number and messaged on WhatsApp the moment their table is ready. A live waitlist lets guests wait from the car or the market instead of crowding the doorway, and gives the host a fair, visible order to seat from.
Walk-in
A guest who arrives without a booking. Walk-ins fill the gaps reservations leave, but a room run entirely on them is a room run on hope — busy nights overflow while quiet nights stay quiet. Strong operations blend the two: reservations to anchor the night, then walk-ins and a waitlist to fill whatever is left.
Guest history / guest CRM
The running record of a guest's visits, spend, preferences and no-shows, keyed to something stable — in Pakistan, almost always the phone number. It is how a restaurant remembers that this caller is a Friday regular, or a serial no-show. Analytics turns that history into decisions; we wrote about what the reservation book forgets without one.
Booking confirmation & reminder
The message pair around a reservation: a confirmation when it is made, and a reminder the day before or the day of. In Pakistan both increasingly travel by WhatsApp, where they get read within minutes. Together they are the cheapest no-show lever a restaurant has — and the first thing worth automating, because a guest who taps “confirmed” at four rarely vanishes at nine.
Review gating
Asking guests how their visit went, then steering only the happy ones toward Google while diverting complaints to a private form. It violates Google's review policies — profiles caught doing it can have reviews filtered or removed. The compliant route is asking every guest and fixing the unhappy visits fast; here is how to grow reviews without gating.
Service recovery
Fixing a bad guest experience before it hardens into a lost regular or a public one-star review. The window is short: hear about the cold karahi the same evening and you can apologise, replace or comp; read about it on Google a week later and you are doing damage control. Feedback tools like Seated GSS exist mostly to open that window.
Guest satisfaction survey (GSS)
A short post-visit survey — often a single tap on WhatsApp — asking how the meal went. Done well it reaches every guest rather than a self-selected angry few, giving management a running read on food, service and value, branch by branch. Seated GSS is our take on it, currently in pilot with early partners.
Average spend per head (average check)
Total food-and-drink revenue divided by covers: what the typical guest spends in one visit. Tracked over time it shows whether guests are quietly trading down — fewer starters, shared mains — even while the room stays full, which is exactly what reservation books showed as the rupee slid. Watch it in real, inflation-adjusted terms, not just nominal rupees.
Prime cost
Food and beverage cost plus total labour cost, taken together as a share of sales — the two big expenses an operator can actually control. They trade off against each other: a prep-heavy menu shifts cost into labour, ready-made shifts it into ingredients. Watching the pair as one number, alongside everything else it takes to open, keeps a menu honest.
Food cost percentage
The cost of the ingredients on a plate as a share of its selling price — and, across the whole menu, the ingredient bill as a share of revenue. In an economy where ingredient prices move monthly, a menu priced last quarter can quietly lose money now; we walked the numbers in what it costs to open in Lahore.
Booking channel
Where a reservation comes from: a phone call, a walk-up, an Instagram DM, a booking widget — and, dominating Pakistan, WhatsApp. Channel mix matters because each channel carries its own no-show rate and its own workload, and a book that mostly arrives by chat needs software that meets it there. We charted WhatsApp's takeover of the paper book.
Missing a term you keep hearing? Write to us at hello@seated.pk and we’ll add it.