ChowNow

Supports modifier groups nested at least three levels deep, each level with independent min/max selection counts and a forced-selection (required) flag.

menu-pricing-nested-modifiers

Modifier groups hang off menu items only. The group add/edit form is enumerated as Name, Description, Minimum/Maximum values, Main Items and Modifiers; the modifier form as Name, Description, Price, Modifier Groups and Classification, with no child-group field. The Copy dialogs confirm the depth of the tree: Copy Category targets Location/Merchant/Menu, Copy Item targets Merchant/Menu/Category, Copy Mod targets Merchant/Menu/Category/Main Item/Modifier Group - the modifier is the leaf. Min/max is real and a minimum of 1 forces a selection ('Minimum: 1, Maximum: 1 means they can only choose one modifier in the group'), but only one nesting level exists, so the three-level bar is not met. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/modifier-groups/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

A single modifier can carry different prices depending on the parent item and the selected size, configured as a matrix rather than by duplicating the modifier.

menu-pricing-modifier-price-by-parent-size

The modifier record's fields are Name, Description, Price, Modifier Groups and Classification - one Price - and ChowNow explicitly promotes sharing that one record: 'You can have a single modifier linked to multiple modifier groups. This way, you only need to create it once!' The modifier group form (Name, Description, Minimum/Maximum, Main Items, Modifiers) and the item form (Name, Description, Category, Price, Modifier Groups, Image, Classifications) contain no per-parent or per-size price override, so varying a modifier's price by parent item or size requires duplicating the modifier. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/modifiers/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports fractional/sectioned modifier placement (at minimum halves, ideally quarters) with independent pricing per section. differentiator

menu-pricing-fractional-placement

Modifier fields are Name, Description, Price, Modifier Groups and Classification; modifier-group fields are Name, Description, Minimum/Maximum, Main Items and Modifiers; item fields are Name, Description, Category, Price, Modifier Groups, Image and Classifications. None carries a placement, section or fraction attribute, and the Menu Editor Overview's full capability list (Create a New Menu, POS Refresh, Categories, Modifier Groups, Modifiers, Bulk Price Updates, Menu Mapping, Publish, Preview) has no sectioned-placement construct. A modifier is either selected or not; halves and quarters cannot be expressed except by naming separate modifiers. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/modifiers/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

The half-and-half pricing rule is operator-configurable among at least two of: charge the higher-priced half, average the halves, or charge each topping at a fraction of full price. differentiator

menu-pricing-half-and-half-rule

The Menu Editor Overview enumerates every function of both the Advanced editor (Introduction, Publish Menus, Create a New Menu, Add New Items using POS Refresh, Create Categories, Create Modifier Groups, Create Modifiers, Bulk Price Updates, Menu Mapping) and the Legacy editor (create/edit item, edit modifier, photos, rearrange categories, hide out-of-stock items). No pricing-rule setting exists, and no half/quarter placement exists to apply one to - modifier pricing is a flat Price per modifier, summed. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/menu-editor-overview/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports modifier quantity tiers (light / regular / extra / double) with a configurable price multiplier per tier, distinct from adding the modifier twice.

menu-pricing-topping-quantity-tiers

Adding a modifier takes Name, Description, Price and Classification; editing adds only Modifier Groups. There is no quantity stepper, tier or price multiplier anywhere in the modifier or modifier-group forms - the group exposes only Minimum/Maximum counts of how many modifiers may be chosen. Light/regular/extra/double with a per-tier multiplier is not expressible; it can only be imitated by creating separate modifiers at separate flat prices. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/modifiers/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Item base price can be defined as a grid across two variant axes (e.g. size x crust/preparation) with a per-cell price override. differentiator

menu-pricing-size-style-matrix

The item add/edit form is enumerated as Name, Description, Category, Price, Modifier Groups, Image and Classifications - one Price field and no variant dimension. ChowNow's own structural description is 'Inside a menu item, you'll often have modifier groups and modifiers', and the modifier record carries a single flat Price. A size x crust grid with a price per cell has no representation; each combination would need its own item or its own flatly-priced modifier. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/menu-items/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Items can define an included-modifier allowance (e.g. three toppings included) that automatically charges only for overage and credits or forbids substitutions per configuration. differentiator

menu-pricing-included-allowance

The only count mechanism is the group's Minimum/Maximum, documented as 'minimum/maximum rules tell your customer how many modifiers they can choose in that group' - 'Minimum: 0, Maximum: 3 means they can choose up to 3 modifiers, or none at all.' Exceeding the maximum is blocked, not charged. There is no included-count field, no overage price and no substitution credit/forbid setting in the item (Name, Description, Category, Price, Modifier Groups, Image, Classifications), group or modifier (Name, Description, Price, Modifier Groups, Classification) forms. Three-toppings-included with paid overage can only be built as free modifiers plus separately-priced ones. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/modifier-groups/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports combo/meal construction where components can be swapped with a price delta, and the system can automatically detect and convert eligible a-la-carte items in the cart into the combo price.

menu-pricing-combos

Combo-style construction is possible through modifier groups: ChowNow describes modifiers as a way of 'adding extra cheese, substituting for non-dairy milk, or bundling in a dessert', groups constrain choices via Minimum/Maximum, and each modifier carries its own Price so a swap produces a price delta. Shortfall: there is no combo/meal entity in the menu model and none appears in the Menu Editor Overview's complete feature list, so nothing detects eligible a-la-carte items already in the cart and converts them to a combo price - the diner must pick the combo item up front. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/modifiers/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Upsell/suggestive-sell prompts can be configured per item and per channel (POS, kiosk, online), and the vendor reports attach-rate on those prompts. differentiator

menu-pricing-upsell-prompts

QR Code Ordering is claimed to include 'digital upsell prompts' and direct ordering copy references optimizing the menu for upsells. No per-channel configuration model and no attach-rate reporting documented; a support search for 'upsell' returns zero articles. https://get.chownow.com/products/q2-feature-release/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

A single 86 action propagates automatically to POS, KDS, the vendor's own online ordering, kiosk, and connected third-party marketplaces, with a documented propagation latency.

menu-pricing-86-propagation

Automated Inventory Sync propagates out-of-stock items AND modifiers from Revel, Omnivore, Genius, Clover, and Square out to ChowNow, DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub. POS-driven only, limited POS list, no published propagation latency, no kiosk/KDS surface. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=inventory · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports per-item countdown/par counts that decrement on sale and automatically 86 the item at zero, with a scheduled auto-restore. differentiator

menu-pricing-countdown-auto-86

ChowNow's 'automated inventory sync and 86ing feature' delivers the decrement-and-86 outcome but not natively: 'Square tracks your inventory levels for each item. When an item's stock reaches 0, it is automatically marked as sold out across all connected platforms. When you add more stock in Square, the item is automatically re-enabled.' Shortfalls: the par/count lives in the connected POS, never in ChowNow, and only for the named integrated POS systems (Square, Clover, Revel, Omnivore, Genius); it works 'only if you are using your POS Menu as your source of truth, or if you're mapping directly through the Menu Editor'; ChowNow's own availability surface is a binary hide toggle ('Tap on Item Availability... Select Items or Modifiers, then tap on the toggle switch'); and restore is triggered by restocking in the POS, not by a schedule, so the claim's scheduled auto-restore is absent. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/automatically-sync-square-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-08-06 adversarially verified

Menus, individual items, and prices can be scheduled to activate and deactivate automatically by day and time in the location's own timezone.

menu-pricing-dayparting

Menus and their availability are schedulable; items and prices are not. 'The menu hours set in Menu Editor will affect the availability of this menu on all the online platforms connected to it.' Menu Editor > Edit Menu > Menu Info > MENU HOURS has a Standard Hours tab (per day, with closed-all-day and open-24-hours options) and a Holiday Hours tab scoped to selected integrations; future Holiday Hours publish automatically at 1am the day before. Withdrawing the earlier 'timezone basis is never stated' leg - the ChowNow Partner API spec states it: the menu `at` parameter is 'ISO-8601 local date-time with NO timezone; it is read as the restaurant's local wall-clock time', a value carrying a trailing Z or offset is rejected with 400 because 'a zoned value would silently resolve against the wrong instant upstream', and the upstream resolves 'to the ONE menu scheduled at the requested time'. Shortfall, now on a stated limitation rather than on silence: per-item and per-price scheduling does not exist - 'If you have menu items that change price depending on the time of day, or the day of the week, ChowNow is unable to display the alternate price at those times. ChowNow will always display the base price at all times of the day.' https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/updating-your-standard-menu-hours-and-holiday-menu-hours/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports distinct price books per channel (dine-in, pickup, delivery, kiosk, each third-party marketplace) including percentage-markup rules applied to a base price rather than manual per-item entry.

menu-pricing-channel-price-books

Withdrawing the grade-D marketing-only leg: the mechanism is documented in ChowNow's own OpenAPI 3.1 spec. The gateway note on GET /v1/restaurants/{id}/menu says the upstream call is made with 'NO cn_channel query param -> base, no-markup pricing (CN-48933)', which establishes that ChowNow's menu service resolves prices against a channel identifier and applies a markup per channel over one base price. The vendor's own description of it is 'a baked-in tool that automatically adjusts menu prices to offset standard fees', managed from one dashboard. Shortfall: this is a single ChowNow-managed fee-offset markup toggled per discovery/marketplace channel, not operator-authored price books - no price-book object, no per-channel percentage-markup rule the operator can set, and no separate dine-in/pickup/delivery/kiosk price sets appear in the spec or in the Menu Editor documentation. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports dual pricing / cash-discount at the item level with the card price displayed as the base price, applied consistently across POS, kiosk, and online ordering, and printed on the receipt. differentiator

menu-pricing-dual-pricing

'We do not accept cash so that all ChowNow orders are prepaid by credit card', and the diner-facing tender list is exhaustive: 'All major credit/debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, AMEX) are accepted. Apple Pay is also accepted if you are using the restaurant's iOS application. All other payment options (Cash, PayPal, Android Pay, etc) are not accepted at this time.' The item record holds one Price. The only per-item-independent fee is a per-location service fee by dollar amount or percentage applied to every order, which is not a cash discount. There is also no POS or kiosk surface and no printed guest check for a dual price to appear on. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/accepting-cash/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Menu changes can be staged as an effective-dated version, previewed before publish, and rolled back to a prior version after publish. differentiator

menu-pricing-versioning-effective-dates

Changes are staged and previewed: unpublished menus show an orange 'modified' status per integration, Menu Editor > pencil > Preview Menu renders the menu 'with your hours and items' and lets you click into an item to see its modifiers, and publishing runs a VALIDATE step then reports per-integration green/blue/red results. Shortfall: there is no named or effective-dated menu version and no rollback to a prior published version - the only undo is in Bulk Edit ('You can undo the last 5 previous updates'), which covers bulk price increases/decreases only, and the only date-effective publish is Holiday Menu Hours auto-publishing at 1am the prior day. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-preview-your-menu/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports a central corporate menu template pushed to locations with field-level governance controlling which attributes a location may override. differentiator

menu-pricing-franchise-hierarchy

Central propagation exists as an explicit copy: Copy Category asks for 'Target Location, Target Merchant and Target Menu'; Copy Item takes Target Merchant/Menu/Category; Copy Group and Copy Mod take Target Merchant plus the destination path. All locations are reached from the Headquarters sidebar in one dashboard and admin users can be scoped to one location or all. Shortfall: the copy is a detached duplicate - no parent template, no push of subsequent changes, and no field-level governance controlling which attributes a location may override. Adding a location is not self-serve either ('Contact your Restaurant Success Manager'). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/menu-categories/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Stores allergen flags and nutrition values per item and publishes them to online ordering and third-party menus, and can derive nutrition from linked recipe components rather than manual entry.

menu-pricing-allergen-nutrition

About the ChowNow Hub / Cuboh menu model, which is the model the CN Dashboard's Advanced Menu Editor writes and which publishes to direct ordering and to DoorDash/UberEats/Grubhub. The Cuboh Connect v0.1 item schema carries one `item_class` string whose documented value set is the six above, so dietary and allergen-adjacent tagging exists at item and modifier level and does reach third-party menus; ChowNow's catering collateral surfaces it as 'dietary badges'. The bound: it is a single-valued classification enum, not a per-allergen flag set, and there is no nutrition, calorie or recipe-component field anywhere - `allergen`, `nutrition`, `calorie` and `calories` return zero over all 278 merchant support articles, all 1,781 source files of the three dashboards, and both OpenAPI documents, and the vendor's own item-edit field list at get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/menu-items/ reads 'Adjust the item's Name, Description, Category, Price, Modifier Groups, Image or Classifications.' Neither spec declares `additionalProperties: false` anywhere, so the specs are used positively only; an item-level nutrition field documented on a ChowNow product page or support article would move this to yes. Quotation: "Valid options are - alcoholic, alcoholic_available_alone, vegan, vegetarian, gluten_free, dairy_free" https://docs.cuboh.com/connect · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Menu items and modifiers can be linked to recipes/bills of materials so that a sale depletes theoretical inventory and yields item-level theoretical food cost. differentiator

menu-pricing-recipe-linkage

No inventory or recipe module; ChowNow lists MarketMan as its inventory partner instead. https://get.chownow.com/partners/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Pushes menus to third-party marketplaces through a certified direct integration (not scraping or a menu-management middleman) and surfaces per-item sync status and rejection errors to the operator.

menu-pricing-3p-menu-push

Centralized menu management pushes items, pricing, and availability to DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub 'with one click' via ChowNow's own (Cuboh) integrations, not a third-party middleman. Menu-mapping troubleshooting articles exist but no per-item sync-status/rejection dashboard is documented. https://get.chownow.com/products/order-aggregation/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports rule-based dynamic pricing where item price varies automatically by time, demand, or channel, with configurable floor/ceiling guardrails.

menu-pricing-dynamic-pricing

'A free-to-use automated feature within the Order Better Network that lets restaurants offset menu prices to protect profit margins... Once your restaurant starts taking Order Better Network orders, Profit Protector can automatically adjust the menu pricing to effectively offset the cost of Order Better Network fees.' Shortfall: the rule is a single channel-scoped fee offset - no time-of-day, day-part or demand trigger, no rule builder, and no floor or ceiling guardrail is published; the markup formula is not disclosed and enabling it requires emailing ChowNow or a Restaurant Success Manager rather than a dashboard setting. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/what-s-profit-protector/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

The POS operates with third-party payment processors of the merchant's choosing (documented list of supported processors/gateways) rather than requiring the vendor's in-house processing. differentiator

payments-processor-choice

Verified verbatim: 'ChowNow requires all of our clients to use our current payment processor.' Stripe confirmed independently by the billing article 'How do I submit required information to Stripe?'. Reinforced by 'We do not accept cash so that all ChowNow orders are prepaid by credit card' — which also independently supports every card-present, offline-payment, split-tender and cash-drawer 'no'. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/order-and-payments-processing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Vendor publishes card-processing pricing publicly (a specific flat rate or interchange-plus markup) rather than quote-only. differentiator

payments-published-rates

Help centre: 'For Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express - the transaction fees are 2.95% + $0.29 per order.' A single flat rate across all four brands with no tiering. The public Restaurant Agreement repeats it per subscription (US and Canada $0.29 + 2.95%; third-party POS integration $0.30 + 2.9%). Merchants cannot substitute a processor - support states 'At this time ChowNow requires all of our clients to use our current payment processor.' https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/credit-card-transaction-fees/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Native dual-pricing / cash-discount mode stores two prices per item and prints both cash and card totals on the guest check and receipt. differentiator

payments-dual-pricing

'We do not accept cash so that all ChowNow orders are prepaid by credit card' (cash tips to a driver excepted), and the diner tender enumeration adds that 'All other payment options (Cash, PayPal, Android Pay, etc) are not accepted at this time.' Items carry a single Price field, so no second price can be stored. Diner-facing totals are an online Order Summary and an emailed confirmation; the only additional line ChowNow can add is a per-location service fee (dollar or percentage) or the optional $0.99 service charge, neither of which is a cash/card price pair. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/accepting-cash/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Surcharging engine automatically excludes debit and prepaid cards via BIN/product-code detection, enforces the network percentage cap, and can be enabled or disabled per location. differentiator

payments-surcharge-guardrails

Two articles enumerate the whole fee-configuration surface: 'You can add a service fee either by amount or percentage of the order, through the ChowNow Dashboard under the Location Info section', and the service charge is a per-location checkbox - Settings > Location Details > Ordering > Edit > 'Enable Service Charge' - adding a fixed $0.99 to website and branded-app orders, split 50/50 with ChowNow and shown in the Order Summary. Per-location enable/disable is therefore satisfied, but nothing else in the claim is: the fee is charged on every order irrespective of card product, there is no BIN or card-product lookup, no debit/prepaid exclusion and no network percentage cap enforcement - and every ChowNow order is a card transaction, so a card surcharge is indistinguishable from a flat fee. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/service-charge-frequently-asked-questions/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

All first-party payment terminals accept EMV chip and NFC contactless including Apple Pay and Google Pay.

payments-emv-nfc

Assessed and unresolved; the prior `no` at grade B rested on a premise that is false. That premise was that ChowNow supplies no payment terminal and every transaction is card-not-present through Stripe. The ChowNow Hub dashboard runs a card-present Stripe Terminal flow: constants/menuCheckout.constants.js declares TERMINAL_PUSHER_ACTIONS with PAYMENT_INTENT_SENT_TO_TERMINAL, READER_ACTION_SUCCESS, READER_ACTION_FAILED and CANCEL_TERMINAL_PROCESS, and utils/kiosk.helper.js registers readers by Stripe registration code against api/v2/storefront/{companyID}/kiosk/terminal/reader. So a first-party payment terminal exists on the Hub kiosk. What this corpus cannot establish is the rubric's actual test - that every such terminal accepts EMV chip and NFC contactless including Apple Pay and Google Pay - because no reader model, no hardware page and no acceptance list is published anywhere in it; the Apple Pay and Google Pay strings in the portal and legacy source trees are diner wallet card types on online orders, not terminal NFC. Inferring acceptance from Stripe Terminal's general hardware capabilities would be a statement about Stripe's products, not ChowNow's. Settled by a ChowNow or ChowNow Hub hardware page naming the reader model or its acceptance methods. ADDENDUM 2026-09-16: CLAIM: all first-party terminals accept EMV chip and NFC incl. Apple Pay/Google Pay. VERDICT: still unknown. NEW SURFACES checked: support.cuboh.com (ChowNow Hub's Intercom help centre; 'As part of our acquisition and partnership with ChowNow, we've launched a New Dashboard'), 105 of 105 sitemap URLs fetched: `EMV`, `NFC`, `contactless`, `tap to pay`, `terminal`, `reader`, `Apple Pay` = 0 pages each (tokenised, word-boundary); `Stripe` 3 pages, all Storefront online-payment setup. get.chownow.com diner_support-sitemap (38) + page/restaurant_support sitemaps: no kiosk/hardware/terminal/reader slug. developer.chownow.com (robots bar now gone, 404) is a partner ordering API with card tokens, no hardware. The diner payment-options page names Apple Pay only 'if you are using the restaurant's iOS application' - an in-app wallet, not terminal NFC. The Hub kiosk Stripe Terminal flow found by a prior pass remains undocumented as to reader model. Retrieved 2026-09-16. || 321st: CLAIM: all first-party terminals accept EMV chip and NFC incl. Apple Pay/Google Pay. VERDICT: still unknown. crt.sh (chownow.com 80 names, cuboh.com 19) probed for /swagger, /openapi.json, /api-docs, /docs, /redoc, /sitemap.xml: no new anonymous spec on any production host (preprod.developer.chownow.com 403 on every path = refusal; reporting-production.chownow.com is a bare Cube.js server banner; docs/dashboard/order.cuboh.com are SPA catch-alls returning the same ~1 KB shell for a nonsense path). NEW SURFACE: updates.cuboh.com, the Cuboh/ChowNow Hub product changelog (Headway), 96 of 96 sitemap URLs fetched 200 with a browser UA (robots.txt is a generic User-agent: * Disallow: / that does not name ClaudeBot). The kiosk launch post says only "New Cuboh Kiosks allow you to have self-ordering without breaking the bank. All orders will print in the kitchen exactly as if a human cashier had taken the order" and links www.cuboh.com/features/kiosk, which now 301s away (Wayback offline 2026-09-17). Controls over the 96 changelog pages (tokenised, case-insensitive): terminal 0, reader 0, EMV 0, NFC 0, contactless 0, tap to pay 0, apple pay 0; stripe 1 (Storefront Payments tab "Stripe integration modal", online). No reader model or acceptance list. Retrieved 2026-09-17. || 329th: 329th: NEW SURFACES, cell still unknown. (1) get.chownow.com is now censused to 100% of every public WP type (posts 198/198, pages 216/216, restaurant_support 277/277, diner_support 37/37, each == X-WP-Total; 728 bodies / 3.28 MB) plus the 184 page-builder pages whose REST content is empty, re-fetched as HTML (1.22 MB) - an enumeration of the product line as 20 /products/ pages, none of them hardware. Over BOTH corpora, tokenised word-boundary controls: EMV 0/0, NFC 0/0, 'tap to pay' 0/0, terminal 2/0 (both poison: a partner's 'SkyTab terminal' and a Toast permission named 'Advanced Terminal Setup'), reader 3/0 (all poison: 'the reader's attention' in blog prose), kiosk 1/0 (a Square printer toggle for 'Online and kiosk order tickets'). No hardware page, no reader model, no acceptance list exists in the vendor's own complete publication. (2) The retired Cuboh kiosk page the 321st could not reach IS recoverable - Wayback works over HTTPS: https://web.archive.org/web/20240225075803id_/https://www.cuboh.com/features/kiosk (13 KB). It is a 'Coming Soon!' leaflet and says NOTHING about payment: card 0, payment 0, EMV 0, NFC 0, contactless 0, reader 0, terminal 0, Stripe 0 on the whole page. Its only hardware sentence is 'Cuboh offers a standing kiosk solution as well as a tablet kiosk ordering system' at '$100 per month (plus a hardware fee)'. A 2024 pre-launch leaflet is not current evidence either way. (3) The operator app's App Store record (ChowNow: Business Manager, id 581010873, v9.0.1, 2026-08-26) is order management only - 'Manage your ChowNow orders, item inventory and restaurant hours on your own iPhone' - and its five screenshots are Order List, Order Detail, Return Item, Item Available, Hours (filenames self-describing, read at 1000x0w). No payment surface. So the Hub kiosk Stripe Terminal flow found in the bundle by an earlier pass remains the only trace of a first-party terminal, and its acceptance methods are unpublished on every surface ChowNow controls. Retrieved 2026-09-18. adversarially verified

Accepts contactless payments directly on a phone (Tap to Pay on iPhone and/or Android tap-to-pay) with no separate card reader. differentiator

payments-softpos-tap-to-pay

Verdict unchanged, absence control withdrawn and the affirmative leg strengthened. The prior note asserted that `tap to pay`, `tap-to-pay` and `card reader` return zero product hits across all 723 WordPress documents; that zero was bounded to the WordPress corpus only, and it is false for `card reader` as a product fact, because the ChowNow Hub kiosk registers and deletes physical Stripe Terminal readers through the quoted endpoint, by Stripe registration code, with a reader device paired to a terminal location. The claim nevertheless fails for a positive reason rather than a null search, on two legs. (1) The Hub's card-present path is explicitly a SEPARATE reader paired to a kiosk terminal location, which is exactly what softPOS on a phone replaces. (2) The ChowNow ordering platform's own transactions are all card-not-present by ChowNow's published definition - get.chownow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Credit-Card-Processing-Fees.pdf says 'Card-not-present, or CNP, refers to any transaction where a physical card is not swiped at the point of sale--including all ChowNow online and app-based orders' - so there is no in-person card presentation on the platform at all. AUDIT-STATED RESIDUAL: this corpus recovers three WEB dashboards; ChowNow's operator iPad app and its branded diner apps are native binaries and are not in it, and Tap to Pay on iPhone is a native-app capability, so the source-tree half of the absence is structurally incapable of censusing it. The verdict rests on the publication silence across 278 support articles, 41 sell sheets, the pricing sheets and the whole legal set - a vendor shipping Tap to Pay would sell it - plus the two affirmative legs above. Overturned by a ChowNow document describing payment taken on the operator's own phone. Quotation: "api/v2/storefront/${companyID}/kiosk/terminal/reader" https://dashboard.cuboh.com/static/js/main.e1fbe2eb.js#utils/kiosk.helper.js · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Vendor ships a handheld that takes EMV/NFC payment at the table, including tip prompt and check splitting, without carrying the card away.

payments-pay-at-table

RE-HOMED and regraded, because the prior citation - a Stripe Terminal reader-registration endpoint - is evidence that card-present hardware EXISTS and cannot carry an absence. The verdict is unchanged and now rests on affirmative documentation. ChowNow's published dine-in payment story is the guest's own phone: the quoted article states the dine-in option is QR-driven and available only in the restaurant, with the operator accepting the order on the ChowNow Tablet, and get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/accepting-cash/ states 'We do not accept cash so that all ChowNow orders are prepaid by credit card.' - so the check is settled by the diner before the staff ever touch it. The hardware side is a first-party contract enumeration rather than a zero: the Tablet and Wireless Printer Terms cover exactly a Tablet and Wireless Printers and no handheld reader, and ChowNow Hub's own card-present hardware is a Stripe Terminal reader bound to the kiosk fulfilment path, where constants/reporting.constants.js declares only 'KIOSK - DINE IN' and 'KIOSK - TAKE OUT'. The platform has no open table check to attach to and no split-check object in any of the three dashboards. What would overturn it: a ChowNow document naming a handheld reader model or a server-carried pay-at-table flow. Quotation: "the Dine-In option is only available to your guest while physically at your restaurant. This is done by the use of QR Codes." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/what-s-different-about-the-contactless-dine-in-ordering-process/ · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Guest can scan a QR code on the printed check or table tent to view and pay the check from their own phone, with the payment closing the check in the POS automatically. differentiator

payments-qr-guest-pay

QR Code Ordering lets guests 'browse menus, place orders, and pay' from their phone at the table, but this creates a ChowNow order routed to the POS — it does not open and close an existing POS check. https://get.chownow.com/products/qr-code-ordering/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports both pre-auth-then-tip-adjust and on-device tip prompt flows, with a documented batch/adjust window and a manager screen for unadjusted tips.

payments-tip-adjust

'Tips are paid out at the end of each business day, along with the rest of your daily disbursements... ChowNow will provide a report breaking out the tips earned each day', and dine-in tips are reconciled by filtering the Accounting Data Report to Dine-In orders. All orders are prepaid by card at online checkout on the diner's own device, so there is no pre-authorization held for later adjustment, no batch/adjust window and no manager screen for unadjusted tips - the only documented post-order money movement is a dashboard refund (full or by item) or a Cuboh-tablet Upcharge, each an arbitrary amount entered with a reason, not a tip adjustment. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/tips/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Configurable tip pooling and distribution rules (by hours worked, sales, role percentage, or points) that produce a per-employee tip allocation exportable to payroll. differentiator

payments-tip-pooling

No labor module; 7shifts is the named team-management partner. https://get.chownow.com/partners/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Card payments can be captured while the internet is down via store-and-forward, with configurable per-transaction and cumulative offline limits. differentiator

payments-offline-store-and-forward

Section 4.5 of the current Restaurant Agreement puts the entire payment path at Stripe, on the diner's side, at the moment the Order is placed; the restaurant never captures a card, so there is nothing on premise to store and forward. This is the document that would carry an offline-capture regime — it specifies a $4,000 Maximum Order Amount, next-business-day settlement, chargeback allocation and PCI responsibility in detail — and it contains no offline, store-and-forward, or per-transaction offline cap language anywhere in its 66,425 chars. ChowNow's own "offline" vocabulary was tested first: every product hit in the help centre means the tablet or the integrated POS lost its internet connection, never a buffered card authorisation. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Vendor publicly documents who bears the loss when a stored offline transaction declines on reconnect, and surfaces a post-reconnect report of failed offline payments. differentiator

payments-offline-decline-liability

There is no offline capture path, so there is no offline decline to allocate. What makes this a citable no rather than a null result is that the current Restaurant Agreement documents payment loss allocation at length — ChowNow assumes consumer chargebacks, with carve-outs for fraud and for chargebacks raised by restaurant-affiliated consumers, plus ACH recovery mechanics — and that same treatment contains no store-and-forward or post-reconnect decline provision and no post-reconnect failure report. The document that would carry the disclosure carries every neighbouring disclosure and not this one. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

First-party gift cards with real-time balance tracking, redeemable across every location in the group and through the online-ordering channel.

payments-gift-cards

About the ChowNow ordering platform. The quoted sentence is exclusive about tender: every ChowNow order is prepaid by credit card, which leaves no redemption path for a stored-value instrument. Corroborating enumerations: the published pricing page's Included Features matrix (read via Wayback, capture 2026-08-31) covers all three plans across an Ordering Suite, a Marketing Suite and an Operations Suite with no gift card row, the identical matrix appears in the 2026 ChowNow Packages Overview PDF, and the site's own product nav lists eleven products with no gift card among them. `gift card` returns zero over all 278 merchant support articles, all 37 diner support articles, all 1,781 source files of the three dashboards, and every readable legal document including the 66,133-char Restaurant Agreement and both Terms of Service; every ChowNow-authored `gift card` hit is blog advice telling operators to run gift-card promotions, with no ChowNow mechanism named. Affirmatively, ChowNow's own Website Upgrade Overview offers Gift Cards only as an optional content page on the SEO website, and get.chownow.com/integrations/givex/ integrates a third-party POS whose own description is 'omnichannel POS, gift card, loyalty and stored value'. Two WordPress documents are password-gated and unread - /legal/restaurant-agreement-v2/ and /restaurant-support/general-refund-guidelines/ - so the legal-set zero is bounded to the readable set; neither is a plausible decider for a gift-card feature, but a ChowNow gift-card product page or support article would overturn this. Quotation: "We do not accept cash so that all ChowNow orders are prepaid by credit card." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/accepting-cash/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

House/on-account tabs with per-account credit limits, running balance, and periodic statement or invoice generation.

payments-house-accounts

'Can I bill my customers later?' is answered 'ChowNow is a prepaid ordering system, therefore all the orders must be process at the time of checkout. This way, you are never in a position where you have made the food but no one comes to pick it up and pay for it.' Reinforced by 'We do not accept cash so that all ChowNow orders are prepaid by credit card.' No account balance, credit limit, running tab or statement/invoice run exists; ChowNow's own workaround for tax-exempt business customers is a promo code, not an account. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/billing-customers-later/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

A single check can be settled with multiple tenders and split by seat, by item, by even shares, or by arbitrary amount, with no hard cap below eight ways.

payments-split-tender

ChowNow publishes a CLOSED tender list for diners: all major credit/debit cards, plus Apple Pay in the restaurant's iOS app, and everything else — cash included — explicitly not accepted. There is no stored-value instrument available to combine with a card: ChowNow sells no gift card (every "gift card" hit in the corpus is generic blog advice about the operator's own gift cards — the wrong-subject trap), and Rewards is a percent-off or dollar-amount DISCOUNT auto-applied at checkout rather than a tender, with the Rewards article stating "No, a diner cannot combine promos." I bounded the split-check absence to the publisher's own manifests — 278 restaurant_support articles (Yoast sitemap 278 == WP REST X-WP-Total 278) and 37 diner_support articles — with zero split-tender or split-check hits in either; all such hits are industry blog copy. The brief's suspicion that a Rewards credit could amount to split tender does not survive. https://get.chownow.com/diner-support/payment-options/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Voids, refunds, discounts, and no-sales require role-based authorization (manager PIN or approval) and write to an immutable audit log identifying the approver.

payments-refund-void-controls

Value unchanged; one clause of the shortfall was wrong and one bound needs stating. The current CN Dashboard does have an adjustment report keyed on APIAdjustment with amount, orderId, type, reason, staffName and createdAt, plus a cancellations report carrying APIOrderCancellationData.cancelled_by, so refunds and upcharges ARE recorded with an actor, a reason and a timestamp and are queryable as a report. The surviving shortfall is the one that matters: Approved By in the refund UI is typed free text rather than an authenticated approver, there is no second-person approval step, no velocity or amount ceiling, and the Hub tablet's refund and upcharge path takes an arbitrary amount with a reason and no approval at all. AUDIT ADDITION: get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/general-refund-guidelines/ is one of exactly two WordPress documents behind a post password and is UNREAD rather than absent, and refunds are this cell's subject, so the authorisation half of the claim is bounded to the readable set - though a refund-guidelines article states when refunds are given, not who may issue them. Bounded to portal.chownow.com v1.68.0; a source file establishes the behaviour, not that ChowNow publishes the report's field list, and the note is right to say so. Quotation: "'APIAdjustment.reason', 'APIAdjustment.staffName'," https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/helpers/reporting.js · retrieved 2026-09-10

In-product dispute/chargeback dashboard that lists open disputes and allows evidence submission assembled from the POS transaction record. differentiator

payments-chargeback-tooling

ChowNow assumes the cost of fraudulent disputes internally and markets '100% Fraud & Chargeback Protection ... without any limits' — a liability shift rather than an operator-facing dispute dashboard with evidence submission. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/order-and-payments-processing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Tokenized card-on-file for a guest profile, reusable across online ordering, phone orders, and in-store, with no PAN stored by the merchant. differentiator

payments-card-on-file

Cards persist on a diner profile - ChowNow tells diners 'If you ever feel uncomfortable having your credit card information stored on the ChowNow platform you can go here to learn how you can remove them' - and the merchant is walled off: 'we never give a restaurant access to your credit card information or the ability to add additional charges to your order once it's been placed'; on the restaurant side ChowNow states card data is 'encrypted and hidden in our admin and merchant processor', with Stripe as processor. Shortfall: ChowNow never describes a token, vault or reuse mechanism explicitly, and the documented ordering channels are the restaurant's website, its branded mobile app, a Facebook plugin and eat.chownow.com only - there is no phone-order or in-store channel for the stored card to be reused in. https://get.chownow.com/diner-support/credit-card-security/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor publishes its deposit schedule and offers a next-day or same-day/instant funding option. differentiator

payments-payout-timing

Verified in the support index verbatim: 'disbursed daily after closing, Monday through Friday. This can take 1-2 business days.' Tips ride the same disbursement. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/order-and-payments-processing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

A single account can route settlement funds to different bank accounts per location or legal entity (separate MIDs or split settlement) under unified reporting. differentiator

payments-multi-entity-routing

Payment processing is per location, not per account: 'Click on Headquarters, then select a location... view the Payment Processing status for this location by navigating to Settings, then Payment Processing', where each location has its own Stripe account with its own 'Business Details' and 'Management and ownership' sections, and the instruction closes 'Repeat these steps for each location until the Payment Processing status is Your Stripe account is active for each location.' Disbursements land daily in 'the bank account you have on file' and reporting is unified under Headquarters. Shortfall: no article states that different locations may point at different bank accounts or legal entities, no split-settlement of a single order is described, and adding a location is handled by a Restaurant Success Manager rather than self-serve. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-submit-required-information-to-stripe/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor provides point-to-point encryption and a current PCI DSS 4.x Attestation of Compliance / P2PE listing available to merchants on request.

payments-p2pe-pci4

'ChowNow is a PCI compliant company with proper certification to acquire, maintain, and protect credit card information submitted on our platform. Credit card information is encrypted and hidden in our admin and merchant processor', and the diner-facing counterpart confirms the restaurant is never given access to card data. Shortfall: no PCI DSS version is named (nothing ties the statement to 4.x), no Attestation of Compliance is published or offered on request anywhere in the 278-article support corpus or the 166 marketing pages, and no P2PE listing exists or could - every order is a prepaid online card transaction processed by Stripe with no ChowNow-supplied payment terminal, so there is no point-to-point encryption instance to validate. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/customer-credit-card-security/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Product includes a native in-house driver module: drivers are first-class entities with clock-in/out, assignment state (in-store / on-run / returning), and per-driver run history reportable from the POS itself (not via a third-party add-on).

delivery-driver-roster

In-house delivery can be configured (zones, fees) but drivers are not first-class entities — no clock-in, assignment state, or per-driver run history. Flex Delivery outsources the driver entirely. https://get.chownow.com/products/flex-delivery/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides a dedicated dispatch/expo screen showing undispatched orders, driver availability, and elapsed time per order, with multi-order run batching (assigning 2+ orders to one driver as a single run).

delivery-dispatch-board

No dispatch/expo screen; Flex Delivery dispatch is automatic to Uber Direct / DoorDash Drive. https://get.chownow.com/products/flex-delivery/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Dispatch includes a live map view with geocoded stops and system-generated route sequencing (turn order optimization) for a multi-stop run, not just a static address list. differentiator

delivery-route-map

The Flex Delivery product page is ChowNow's own full description of its dispatch mechanism, and the mechanism is a hand-off: each order is auto-routed to Uber Direct or DoorDash Drive by courier availability, and the operator's only controls are on/off, the flat-fee split, delivery hours and a zone up to 10 miles. There is no ChowNow-side dispatch screen, no geocoded stop list and no run sequencing, because ChowNow never batches stops onto a run it owns. Absence control over the vendor's own vocabulary agrees: 'route optimization', 'multi-stop' and 'turn-by-turn' return zero across all 723 corpus documents, hitting only generic industry blog advice (best-food-delivery-software-2026, restaurant-technology) whose subject is not ChowNow. Route sequencing is a separate claim from courier tracking and is scored separately. https://get.chownow.com/products/flex-delivery/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Captures live driver GPS position from a driver-facing mobile app and surfaces it back to the dispatch screen. differentiator

delivery-driver-tracking

The operator help centre's own answer for a courier who has not arrived is to telephone the courier company, and if the operator does not know who the courier is, ChowNow support will look up the phone number for them. That is the opposite of live position surfaced to a dispatch screen. ChowNow publishes no driver-facing app: Flex Delivery runs entirely on Uber Direct and DoorDash Drive couriers, and 'GPS' occurs for ChowNow's own product only in mobile-app-prompt-customers-select-location, where it is the diner app picking the nearest restaurant. The order-aggregation page does say driver info is visible in one dashboard, but its subject is third-party marketplace orders and the noun is 'info' (contact/troubleshooting), not position, and no map is claimed. Absence bounded to the publisher's own manifest: 278 of 278 restaurant_support articles (Yoast sitemap total == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278) plus all 37 diner_support articles. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/courier-services/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Delivery areas can be defined as arbitrary map polygons or by drive-time isochrones, not solely as a radius or a ZIP/postcode list. differentiator

delivery-zones-polygon

'Delivery zones can be set up on the ChowNow dashboard by zip code, mile radius and custom polygon. You can set up multiple zones and use any combination of the zone types.' The configuration walkthrough matches: Settings > Location Info > Delivery > Edit > '+ Add Area', where 'Polygon allows you to drop pins on the map for customized zones', Circle gives a mile radius around the restaurant and Zip Code takes a comma-separated list; each area carries its own minimum (and optional maximum) subtotal and a delivery fee by dollar amount or percentage. Drive-time isochrones are not offered, but the claim's bar is arbitrary polygons rather than radius/ZIP alone, and that is met. Separately, dispatch via a partner such as DoorDash Drive is distance-capped at 8 miles. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/delivery-zone-types/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Each delivery zone carries its own independently configurable delivery fee, order minimum, and quoted promise time, applied automatically from the validated customer address.

delivery-zone-pricing

Zone GEOMETRY is configurable but zone PRICING is not. 'Delivery zones can be set up on the ChowNow dashboard by zip code, mile radius and custom polygon. You can set up multiple zones and use any combination of the zone types.' Pricing is documented as a single flat rate, not per zone: 'orders will be priced at a flat $7.98 with a maximum range of 8 miles. You can choose how much of this fee is paid by you or your customer' (recommended diner share $3.99). No per-zone delivery fee, no per-zone order minimum and no per-zone promise time appear in the support corpus. Verified: true https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/delivery-zone-types/ · retrieved 2026-08-09 adversarially verified

Address entry is validated/geocoded against a mapping service at order time and rejects or flags out-of-zone addresses before the order is accepted.

delivery-address-validation

Delivery eligibility is geographic and evaluated in-product: zones are defined by custom polygon, mile radius or zip list with per-area minimum subtotals, and ChowNow's diner Terms of Use state 'ChowNow uses Google Maps and the Google Maps API as part of our online ordering system', so entered addresses are geocoded and matched to a zone before a delivery order can be placed. Shortfall: ChowNow publishes no address verification, normalisation or correction step and no description of what a diner sees when an address falls outside every zone; its own diner article on a mistyped delivery address offers no in-product flag or fix, telling the diner to text ChowNow support instead. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/delivery-zone-types/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Tracks per-delivery driver compensation inputs — mileage or distance driven per run, per-delivery flat reimbursement, and driver-retained tips — and exports them to payroll as separate reimbursement vs. wage lines. differentiator

delivery-driver-comp

ChowNow does not compensate drivers at all. On a Flex Delivery order the tip passes straight through to the courier network, and the restaurant's only artefact is a single 'Flex Delivery Tip' column in the disbursement report. The companion article restaurant-support/tips/ says ChowNow reports the daily tip total and leaves internal distribution to the restaurant. There is therefore no mileage or distance input, no per-delivery flat reimbursement, and no payroll export separating reimbursement from wage lines; 'payroll', 'mileage' and 'clock in' return zero across 278 of 278 restaurant_support articles, hitting only generic blog advice. Bounded to the help centre's own manifest (sitemap total == REST X-WP-Total == 278). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/flex-delivery-tipping/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Provides a driver cash bank / settle-up flow that reconciles cash collected, orders assigned, and tips owed at end of shift, producing a per-driver over/short figure.

delivery-cash-reconcile

There is no cash to reconcile. ChowNow's published policy is that every order is prepaid by card before the food is made, and the only cash the help centre acknowledges is a diner tipping a courier by hand. A driver bank / settle-up flow presupposes cash collected against orders assigned, which cannot arise here, and the couriers are Uber Direct and DoorDash Drive contractors rather than the restaurant's drivers. Bounded to the publisher's own manifest: across 278 of 278 restaurant_support articles the word 'cash' occurs in exactly two (accepting-cash and reason-for-online-payments-only), both stating ChowNow is prepay-by-card only. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/accepting-cash/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Can hand a first-party order to an on-demand courier marketplace (DoorDash Drive, Uber Direct, Nash, Relay or equivalent) natively from the POS, with the courier quote and status returning into the order record.

delivery-daas-dispatch

Value unchanged; the price in the note was stale and internally inconsistent with this record's own delivery-zone-pricing cell, which already says $7.98. ChowNow's 2026 pricing sheets list Flex Delivery as an optional service charged only if selected, at the quoted rate; the $3.99 figure comes from the 2024 US pricing sheet, which is superseded. product.yaml carries $3.99 too and should be corrected. The substance of the yes is untouched: Flex Delivery dispatches first-party orders natively to Uber Direct and DoorDash Drive with no commission, and ChowNow recommends splitting the flat fee with the diner. Quotation: "$7.98/order for Flex Delivery" https://get.chownow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Pricing-Sheet-2026-Affiliates.pdf · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports hybrid dispatch: rules that automatically overflow an order to a DaaS courier when no in-house driver is available, out of zone, or past a wait threshold. differentiator

delivery-daas-fallback

Automatic failover BETWEEN courier networks based on real-time driver availability and response time. Rule-based overflow from in-house drivers to DaaS is not documented, though Flex can run alongside in-house drivers. https://get.chownow.com/products/flex-delivery/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Offers direct, first-party certified API integrations with DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub marketplaces (vendor-owned, not solely resold through Otter/Deliverect/Chowly/ItsaCheckmate middleware). differentiator

delivery-3p-direct-integration

Direct integrations with DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, owned by ChowNow via its 2024 acquisition of Cuboh — no third-party middleware layer purchased separately. https://get.chownow.com/integrations/all/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Third-party marketplace orders inject automatically into the POS as normal tickets that fire to KDS/printers without tablet re-keying or manual accept.

delivery-3p-injection

Sole source is a product marketing page and the researcher labelled it 'claimed' yet still scored 'yes'. The 0.1s and 99.9% figures are unaudited vendor metrics with no methodology. Countervailing evidence: ChowNow/Cuboh is absent from DoorDash's 2026 Preferred Integration Partner roster (Checkmate, Chowly, Deliverect, Otter, PAR, Qu, Square, Stream, Toast, UrbanPiper) — a program explicitly built around injection reliability and cancellation rates — and reviewers report added manual steps post-Cuboh. A marketing-only 'yes' on a weighted differentiator does not clear the bar. https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/doordash-preferred-integrations-program-2026 · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Menu, pricing, modifiers, and photos publish from the POS master menu out to connected third-party marketplaces, including channel-specific price markups, without maintaining a separate menu in each portal.

delivery-menu-push

The quoted 'one click' language is from the Order Aggregation marketing page, not product documentation. ChowNow's actual support library documents per-POS menu setup and mapping work ('How to Set Up Your Square POS Menu for Import', Cuboh menu-mapping troubleshooting), and the dossier's own top complaint is items and modifier options silently disappearing from the live menu. No sync-status or rejection surface is documented. Partial, not yes. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-set-up-your-square-pos-menu/ · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Marking an item or modifier 86'd in the POS pushes item-level out-of-stock status to connected third-party channels in near real time, and restores it on availability (DoorDash requires item and item-option 86ing of new POS partners).

delivery-86-sync

Upheld and strengthened. The dossier cited a search-results URL; real per-POS support articles exist and confirm the behavior: 'How to Automatically sync Square/Clover/Revel/Omnivore/Genius POS Inventory Updates' — out-of-stock items and modifiers propagate across ChowNow, DoorDash, UberEats, Grubhub (Clover/Square articles additionally name SkipTheDishes and Ritual). POS-driven only, as scored. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-automatically-sync-clover-pos-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Store can be paused/deactivated on each connected third-party marketplace from inside the POS with a timed auto-reactivation, rather than only from each marketplace's own tablet or portal.

delivery-store-pause

'The Cuboh Tablet allows you to manage all of your online storefronts from the Integrations Tab.' Under Navigation > Integrations an operator can 'Open or close all of the online storefronts associated with a specific restaurant merchant' or 'Open or close individual online storefronts for all merchants at once'; Toggle by Concept disables one merchant 'across all of its integrated app platforms' and Toggle by Integration disables all merchants on one app. Shortfall: there is no timer - ChowNow describes it as 'best used for temporary situations, say if you close down early for the night' and says normal hours resume when the Integration Status is active again, with a warning to 'wait 30 seconds between turning stores on / off'. No scheduled or duration-based auto-reactivation is documented. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/managing-your-3rd-party-apps-from-the-cuboh-tablet/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Produces a third-party reconciliation report matching marketplace payout deposits to POS-recorded 3P sales, itemizing commission, marketing fees, refunds/adjustments, and identifying missing or unpaid orders. differentiator

delivery-3p-reconciliation

Disbursement Reports 'reconcile payouts with line-item clarity' and comparative analytics benchmark channels. Itemized marketplace commission/marketing fees, refunds/adjustments and missing-order detection are not documented. https://get.chownow.com/products/advanced-reporting/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor exposes integration health to the operator — failed/rejected order injections, connection status per channel, and alerts on failure — rather than failing silently. differentiator

delivery-injection-error-visibility

The support portal includes an 'error message lookup' section and menu-mapping troubleshooting articles, implying surfaced errors; no per-channel connection-health dashboard or failure alerting is documented. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Guests receive a branded order status / driver tracking page or SMS link on the restaurant's own domain for first-party delivery orders, driven by real order and driver state.

delivery-tracking-page

'How can I track my order?' is answered: 'At this time, ChowNow does not have any tracking software capabilities to give you real time updates on your delivery order. However, once the restaurant accepts your order, you will get an order confirmation with the approximate time for pickup or delivery.' The other documented diner messages are confirmation emails and cancellation/partial-refund emails, plus marketing campaigns. No branded status page, driver map or SMS tracking link on the restaurant's own domain is described anywhere, and ChowNow states it never dispatches its own drivers - 'the restaurant's couriers or their delivery company' do. https://get.chownow.com/diner-support/order-issue-delivery-tracking/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Quoted delivery promise times adjust dynamically from current kitchen load, driver availability, and zone drive time, rather than a fixed per-store constant. differentiator

delivery-promise-time

Order Throttling limits orders 'based on 15 minute time slots'; when the current slot fills, 'customers will be automatically presented with the next available time' and full future slots are hidden, so the quoted time does move with accepted volume. Per-order override exists too: with the Custom Preparation Times toggle on, an 'Add Custom Prep Time' button appears for 3 minutes and the resulting fulfilment time (current time + custom prep) is printed and pushed to ChowNow, UberEats, DoorDash, GrubHub and Ritual; otherwise the default prep time is sent. Shortfall: the slot cap and the default prep time are operator constants set from order history, not computed from live kitchen state, there is no driver-availability input, and ChowNow states 'It is not possible to control the delivery preparation time' - the third-party app adds its own driver/delivery time, so no zone drive-time component is modelled. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-manage-order-volume-with-order-throttling-settings/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor documents explicit offline behavior for delivery: whether cash delivery orders, driver assignment, and driver settlement continue during an internet outage.

delivery-offline-behavior

ChowNow documents no offline behaviour for Flex Delivery on any of the rubric's three axes. Cash is answered affirmatively and exclusively - there are no cash delivery orders to continue, because ChowNow accepts none (quoted); a cash TIP handed to a driver is the only cash the platform contemplates. Driver assignment and settlement are not documented for an outage at all: ChowNow's complete published connectivity-failure set - not-receiving-orders, tablet-off-fix, pos-offline-error and successfully-placed-orders - prescribes only reconnecting, calling support, or manually entering the order into the POS, never continued operation. Structurally the question barely arises, since Flex Delivery dispatch is server-side to named Integrated Providers (Uber Direct and DoorDash Drive, per section 2.4 of the current Restaurant Agreement), so it is ChowNow's outage that would matter rather than the restaurant's; the vendor's only delivery-outage article is about COURIER supply, not connectivity. AUDIT UPDATE, which discharges the prior note's own re-run condition: /products/flex-delivery/ was flagged as UNREAD and it has now been backfilled at 8,537 characters; it contains no occurrence of offline, outage, internet or cash, and describes only flat-rate pricing, a 10-mile range and courier reliability. The bound is now a corpus with 17 unread bodies, all forms and confirmation pages bar one marketing page. Quotation: "We do not accept cash so that all ChowNow orders are prepaid by credit card." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/accepting-cash/ · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Vendor ships a first-party, commission-free web ordering site on the restaurant's own branding/domain that writes orders directly into the POS with no per-order marketplace commission.

digital-first-party-web

Direct online ordering plus an SEO-optimized website on the restaurant's own branding, included in all three tiers, with 'no per-order cut' — flat subscription + card processing only. https://get.chownow.com/products/direct-online-ordering/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

The web/app ordering menu is generated from the same POS menu record as in-store — one item edit propagates to all first-party digital channels without a separate digital menu build.

digital-menu-single-source

Menus can be sourced/imported from the POS and mapped (Square import, Cuboh menu mapping), and centralized menu management pushes one edit to all channels. But the ChowNow menu is a separate record requiring mapping, and operators report items and modifier options silently disappearing. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=modifier · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor offers a branded native iOS and Android ordering app (published under the restaurant's own brand in the App Store/Play Store), not only a mobile web page or a shared multi-restaurant marketplace app. differentiator

digital-native-app

Help centre: 'Branded mobile apps (both Android and iOS) are included with our Pro and Premier subscriptions' and 'Apple requires a $99/year fee as part of the Developer Program Membership. Restaurants will need to pay this fee.' A companion article covers design updates (logo, loading screen image, name, colour scheme) at no extra cost, and a further article covers removal of the restaurant's app from the App Store and Play Store on cancellation - i.e. an app listed under the restaurant's own brand, not only the multi-restaurant ChowNow Marketplace app. Tier naming in the help centre is the legacy Pro/Premier pair; current published tiers are Launch/Grow/Elevate. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/does-chownow-publish-restaurant-mobile-apps/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Guests can create an account with saved addresses, saved (tokenized) payment methods, and one-tap reorder of a previous order across first-party channels.

digital-account-saved-payment

Diners hold a ChowNow account that tracks rewards progress and order history across the website, branded app, Marketplace and Discovery Network, and can reorder favorites. Saved addresses and tokenized saved payment are not explicitly documented. https://get.chownow.com/products/rewards-program/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Digital checkout presents configurable or algorithmic upsell/cross-sell suggestions (rules-based add-ons or personalized recommendations from order history), with attach-rate reporting on those suggestions. differentiator

digital-upsell-engine

'Digital upsell prompts' claimed for QR Code Ordering (with a claimed 9% check-size lift). No configuration model and no attach-rate reporting documented. https://get.chownow.com/products/q2-feature-release/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports future/scheduled orders with per-daypart throttling — capacity limits on orders or items per time slot that automatically close slots when the kitchen is saturated.

digital-scheduled-pacing

Scheduled/future orders with adjustable prep and lead times and large-order thresholds. No per-daypart capacity limits or automatic slot closure documented. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=scheduled · retrieved 2026-08-01

Single digital ordering flow supports pickup, curbside (with arrival check-in), dine-in/QR table ordering, and delivery, with mode-specific fees and prep timing.

digital-fulfillment-modes

The prior shortfall, 'Curbside with arrival check-in is not documented', is wrong in its first half and right only in its second. ChowNow documents Curbside as a first-class order type alongside pickup and delivery, with the diner choosing vehicle type and colour at checkout and the vehicle shown on the order detail page and the printed ticket. The current CN Dashboard confirms the behaviour, rendering a Vehicle info row for curbside orders and a Table info row for dine-in in containers/OrderDetails/OrderInfoCard/OrderInfoCard.js, and the legacy app's FULFILLMENT_METHODS constant is curbside, delivery, dine_in, pickup. What is genuinely absent is the digital arrival check-in the rubric names: the confirmation page carries a generic instruction to telephone the restaurant on arrival, and this same article states the curbside experience is not available through Food Ordering with Google, Yelp Ordering, the ChowNow app or branded apps, where the diner must add curbside as a menu item instead. Grade moves C to B on the help-centre citation. Overturned by an in-app arrival notification flow. Quotation: "Curbside will now be labeled as a separate order type, just like pickup and delivery." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/curbside-ordering-everything-you-need-to-know/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports guest-facing QR scan-to-order and/or scan-to-pay at the table that opens or attaches to the existing POS check, including splitting and tipping.

digital-qr-table

Value unchanged, but the prior note's first clause was false and its provenance claim does not reproduce. 'QR Code Ordering ships on all tiers' is contradicted by ChowNow's own 2026 pricing sheets: in the LAUNCH / GROW / ELEVATE feature table on this sheet, and on the sibling 2026-ChowNow-Packages-Overview.pdf, the QR Code Ordering row's Launch cell carries a single non-check glyph where every all-tier row carries nothing extractable, and exactly six feature rows carry it - QR Code Ordering, Automated SMS Marketing, On-Demand Email and SMS Campaigns, CSV Upload For In-Store Diners, Third-Party Order Aggregation, and Centralized Menu Management. AUDIT CORRECTION to the provenance: the prior note said the glyph is an EN DASH, U+2013, confirmed by byte inspection. Byte inspection shows a single byte 0xAD in the PDF text layer, not the three UTF-8 bytes of U+2013, so the character identification is wrong even though the reading is right. What actually proves the column alignment is the Automated SMS Marketing row, which extracts as glyph, then '2,000 credits', then '5,000 credits' - three cells for three tiers with the glyph in the Launch position - so the glyph occupies the LAUNCH cell and means not-included. QR Code Ordering is a Grow-and-above feature. The rest of the prior verdict stands: guests scan, order and pay from their own phone; the order does not open or attach to a POS check; splitting and tipping behaviour is undocumented. I deliberately did not quote the table cell, because a feature-matrix cell is not quotable prose, so the citation is the sheet itself at grade C. https://get.chownow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Pricing-Sheet-2026-Affiliates.pdf · retrieved 2026-09-10

Vendor ships a self-order kiosk running the same menu and modifier logic as the POS, with accessibility-compliant UI and unattended EMV payment. differentiator

digital-kiosk

The prior rationale, 'No kiosk product in the product line or pricing table', is false as to the product. The ChowNow Hub dashboard (formerly Cuboh, dashboard.cuboh.com) ships a first-party kiosk manager: config/router.config.js declares a '/manage/kiosk' route loading containers/ManageKiosk; constants/kiosk.constants.js enumerates its views (LOCATION, READERS, STORE_CODE, FAQ); this file registers, lists and deletes Stripe Terminal readers against the quoted endpoint and cancels checkout sessions at api/v2/transactions/checkout-sessions/cancel; constants/reporting.constants.js declares KIOSK, 'KIOSK - DINE IN' and 'KIOSK - TAKE OUT' as fulfillment types; and hooks/useProvideStorefrontAndKiosk.jsx gates the kiosk on a merchant having live menus AND terminal readers set up. It is not Cuboh-only residue: the CURRENT CN Dashboard (portal.chownow.com v1.68.0) maps a 'kiosk' order source to the Cuboh logo in config/logos.js and reports on 'APIOrdergroup.kioskConvenienceFeeProcessedAs' in helpers/reporting.js. Shortfall that keeps this at partial rather than yes: unattended card payment is present (Stripe Terminal), but nothing in this corpus establishes an accessibility-conformant kiosk UI, and the kiosk runs the ChowNow Hub Storefront menu, not a POS menu (ChowNow is not a POS). Overturned by a published accessibility conformance statement, or by a ChowNow kiosk hardware or pricing page. Quotation: "api/v2/storefront/${companyID}/kiosk/terminal/reader" https://dashboard.cuboh.com/static/js/main.e1fbe2eb.js#utils/kiosk.helper.js · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports group ordering: a shareable link where multiple participants add their own items to one order under a per-person or total spend cap, with split or single payment.

digital-group-ordering

About the ChowNow direct-ordering and catering product. ChowNow's documented answer to a group meal is one orderer placing a large order from a catering storefront with serving-size guidance and a hosted inquiry form, not a shared cart. AUDIT ADDITION, because a blog sentence alone is affirmative but not exclusive: the closed enumeration that carries this is ChowNow's own published ORDERING SUITE row set on the 2026 pricing sheets - Direct Online Ordering Tool, SEO Optimized Website, Branded Mobile App, Commission-Free Marketplace, Discovery Network, Catering, QR Code Ordering - which is the complete ordering product list sold on any tier and contains no group or shared-cart product; the 11,036-character integrations catalogue at get.chownow.com/integrations/all/ names no group-ordering partner either. `shareable link`, `group cart`, `share a cart`, `split payment` and `spend cap` each return zero over the whole corpus in both boundary modes, including all 278 merchant support articles, all 1,781 source files and both OpenAPI specs; the only `group order` hits are the Cuboh Direct spec's multi-brand `order_group_id`, which batches one partner payload across several merchants of the same company and is not a diner-facing feature. A shareable multi-participant cart documented on a ChowNow product page would overturn it. Quotation: "Through a dedicated catering page with serving-size guidance, dietary labels, and clear lead times, so a corporate diner can place an order for a group without a phone call." https://get.chownow.com/blog/how-to-start-catering-at-your-restaurant/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

Offers a distinct catering ordering flow with separate catering menu/minimums, lead-time rules, quotes or proposals, deposits, and invoice/house-account or ACH payment terms. differentiator

digital-catering-portal

5% commission and 'Set lead times, order minimums, and prep windows ... up to 30 days ahead' are confirmed verbatim. However 'inquiry forms for event details' does not appear anywhere on the catering page and should be struck from the note as unsourced. Score stays partial for the right reasons. https://get.chownow.com/products/catering/ · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Vendor offers AI voice phone ordering (native or a named certified partner) that answers inbound calls and injects the completed order into the POS without staff transcription. differentiator

digital-voice-ai-phone

About the ChowNow ordering platform. ChowNow's published answer to the inbound phone order is a set of scripts for human staff and voicemail that deflect the caller to the website or branded app - affirmative prose for a different and exclusive mechanism. `voice AI`, `AI phone`, `answering service`, `call answering`, `AI agent`, `ConverseNow` and `Voicea` each return zero over the whole corpus, including all 278 merchant support articles, the 41 PDFs, all 1,781 source files and both OpenAPI specs, and no certified voice partner appears in the published integrations list. Bounded to the q253 corpus of 2026-09-10 plus Wayback reads of the /products/ catalogue and /pricing/; a named voice-ordering partner on the integrations page would overturn it. Quotation: "Sorry we missed your call! You can still place your order anytime on our website [or app]. It's fast, convenient, and lets you order ahead so your food is ready when you are." https://get.chownow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Direct-Orders-Talk-Tracks.pdf · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports AI voice ordering at the drive-thru lane, integrated with the POS menu/modifiers and with escalation-to-human handoff.

digital-drivethru-ai

Verdict unchanged; two supporting clauses are withdrawn. First, the prior note ended by saying ChowNow ships no hardware but an order-receiving tablet and a receipt printer, which is false - ChowNow Hub ships a kiosk with Stripe Terminal card readers, per dashboard.cuboh.com main.e1fbe2eb.js utils/kiosk.helper.js and config/router.config.js, and ChowNow documents a Fresh KDS integration at get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-integrate-with-fresh-kds/. Second, the prior note's zero was bounded to 723 WordPress documents and DOES NOT HOLD over the 3,319-document q253 corpus: `drive-thru` now returns 24 hits in 7 documents on the stem matcher and 23 in 7 on the word-boundary matcher, all of them generic www.cuboh.com blog posts about Chick-fil-A, QSR definitions and ghost kitchens, none about a ChowNow or ChowNow Hub product. `drivethru` is still 0/0 and `drive through` is 3 hits in 2 documents, again cuboh-www blog. The verdict now rests on the closed positive enumerations instead: the ORDERING SUITE row set on the 2026 pricing sheets, and the complete route tables of all three dashboards, none of which contains a lane, a menu board, a speaker post or any voice-ordering surface. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Supports conversational SMS or chat ordering/reordering (text-to-order or text-a-link) that lands in the POS.

digital-sms-ordering

ChowNow issues every U.S. client a Text-To-Order code: 'Customers can simply text your custom code to the number 33733 and they will be sent directly to place an order on the proper web or mobile device', and ChowNow tells operators to print it 'on your POS receipts, in-store signage, 4x6 cards, takeout menus, business cards, and stickers'. Orders placed through the resulting flow reach the POS via ChowNow's POS integrations. Shortfall: this is text-a-link only - a one-shot keyword autoresponder on a shared 33733 short code that hands off to web or app. Nothing conversational exists: no in-thread item selection, no text reordering of a previous order, and no inbound-reply handling. ChowNow's own SMS product is otherwise one-way marketing ('SMS marketing lets you reach customers directly on their phones with promotions, updates, and announcements'), enabled as a 10DLC registration under Marketing > Campaign Settings. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/text-to-download-code/ · retrieved 2026-08-06 adversarially verified

Supports Order with Google — the restaurant's direct ordering link is provisioned to the Google Business Profile as an ordering option (ideally set as 'Preferred by Business'), rather than leaving marketplace links as the only choice. differentiator

digital-google-order

ChowNow's own blog states Google discontinued end-to-end ordering in July 2024; diners are now 'redirected to either your restaurant's website or a third-party site.' ChowNow also publishes a support article titled 'Disabling End-to-End Google Ordering with ChowNow.' What remains is an 'Order Online' link on the Google Business Profile plus the Preferred-Provider designation — a link placement any ordering vendor can obtain, not a provisioned Google ordering channel. The dossier's parenthetical ('Food Ordering with Google, not legacy Place Actions') describes a mechanism Google has retired. https://get.chownow.com/blog/googles-ordering-changes-what-your-restaurant-needs-to-know/ · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Supports Apple Business Connect ordering placement — an 'Order Food' custom action on the Apple Maps place card pointing at the vendor's first-party ordering flow.

digital-apple-business-connect

Apple Maps is a named Discovery Network channel — 'Connect your menu to Apple Maps ... find, browse, and order' — but Apple Business Connect and the 'Order Food' custom action are not named and the provisioning mechanism is not documented. https://get.chownow.com/integrations/apple-maps/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Loyalty accrual and redemption work inside the first-party digital ordering flow using the same guest identity as in-store, not as a separate post-purchase enrollment.

digital-loyalty-attach

Rewards accrue and redeem automatically at checkout across the ordering page, branded app, Marketplace and Discovery Network under the diner's ChowNow account. There is no in-store POS identity to unify with — in-store diners enter only via CSV upload to marketing. https://get.chownow.com/products/rewards-program/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports guest subscription / membership programs (recurring billing for a delivery-fee waiver, a per-period item entitlement, or a paid loyalty tier) managed in the platform.

digital-subscriptions

'Does my online ordering have a membership program?' answers: 'ChowNow offers a membership program... Customers can prepay a membership fee to join - 100% of which goes directly to you - and in return they get a discount on orders for the coming year when they order from your restaurant's website, branded mobile app, or from the ChowNow website, iOS app, or Android app.' ChowNow's Membership Products Terms of Service define the entitlement formally: 'Members are Registered Users who sign up for ChowNow's annual customer membership program... The Customer Membership Program allows Members to pay an annual fee on a per-Restaurant, per-location basis, to earn discounts at such Restaurant locations for orders placed.' That is a paid membership tier billed on a period, entitling the diner to ongoing discounts, administered by the platform across all of the restaurant's ChowNow channels. Enrolment is set up with ChowNow's support/marketing team rather than self-serve, and the separate Restaurant Rewards Program (sticker-card loyalty, per location) is free rather than paid. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/loyalty-program-alternatives/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Discounts, coupon codes, and loyalty offers are defined once and honored identically across POS, kiosk, and first-party digital channels, with channel eligibility controls.

digital-promo-parity

Rewards and campaign offers apply consistently across all ChowNow first-party channels. There is no POS or kiosk channel to reach parity with, and reviewers report promos display weakly on the ordering page. https://get.chownow.com/products/rewards-program/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor documents that the operator owns and can export first-party guest records (email, phone, consented marketing status, order history) in bulk, without a fee or vendor approval. differentiator

digital-guest-data-ownership

The quote is marketing copy on a product page. No contract clause vests ownership in the merchant, and the dossier itself records that ChowNow's privacy policy reserves rights to use the same diner base for its own Marketplace, mParticle analytics, and third-party advertisers/remarketers — while operating a consumer marketplace competing for that diner. Self-serve CSV export of the Customer Spending report is real and verified; ownership is not. That is partial. (The researcher already scored commercial-data-ownership-clause 'partial' — this cell is inconsistent with it.) https://get.chownow.com/legal/privacy-policy/ · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Digital checkout uses vendor-hosted fields or a hosted payment page so card data never touches the restaurant's page, with the vendor publishing PCI DSS 4.0 compliance (including the client-side script-integrity requirements effective March 2025) and supporting 3DS.

digital-checkout-pci-sca

Checkout is vendor-hosted and processed by Stripe, and ChowNow's terms assert PCI-DSS compliance. No PCI DSS 4.0 statement, no script-integrity (6.4.3/11.6.1) disclosure, and no 3DS documentation. https://get.chownow.com/legal/terms-of-service/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Digital channels support the same service-fee / dual-pricing / card-surcharge configuration as the POS, with the required guest-facing disclosure and correct handling of jurisdictions and card brands where surcharging is prohibited. differentiator

digital-surcharge-transparency

Operators can add a service fee by dollar amount or percentage per location, and can choose how the Flex Delivery fee splits with the diner. No dual pricing, no card-brand surcharge engine, no jurisdiction handling documented. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/order-and-payments-processing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Maintains a single guest profile that automatically merges transactions from in-store POS, first-party web/app ordering, and kiosk under one identity (phone or email match), with documented dedup/merge behavior.

guest-loyalty-unified-profile

One diner identity spans ChowNow's website, branded app, Marketplace and Discovery Network. In-store guests are brought in only by CSV upload; no automatic POS transaction merge, and no documented dedup/merge rules. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Orders arriving from third-party marketplaces (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub) attach to a native guest profile with usable guest identity rather than landing as anonymous tickets. differentiator

guest-loyalty-thirdparty-identity-attach

About the ChowNow diner database, with ChowNow Hub (formerly Cuboh) as the aggregation product. This is a closed enumeration - two ways, the second being a one-time CSV upload - and its first branch is scoped to direct channels only, listed as online ordering, branded mobile app, discovery channels, ChowNow Marketplace and in-store QR Code Ordering. Marketplace orders arriving through the Hub are not among them. Corroborating: the Hub dashboard's whole route table (analytics; manage with fresh-kds, kiosk, orders-display, payments, storefronts; menu with management and mapping; orders-control; profile; reports; settings; stripe) has no customer or CRM route; the Hub's own published article index at /restaurant-support/chownow-hub-overview/ has sections for Order Aggregation, Menu Management, POS Integrations and Menu Mapping and none for guest data; and the Cuboh Direct `Customer` schema is name, phone and address with no identity key. The Hub tablet does display a third-party order's customer name and contact information on the ticket, but that is ticket display, not attachment to a native guest profile. A support article showing marketplace orders creating ChowNow diner contacts would overturn it. Quotation: "Diners are added to your marketing contact list two ways: Automatically, when they place an order through your direct ChowNow channels." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/understanding-marketing-contact-limits/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports at least two of points-per-dollar, visit/punch-count, and spend-tier accrual as configuration, without custom development or a bolt-on loyalty vendor.

guest-loyalty-accrual-models

One model only: a 'sticker' punch/visit count with an operator-set qualifying minimum order value and an operator-set sticker threshold, redeeming a % or $ reward. No points-per-dollar and no spend-tier accrual. https://get.chownow.com/products/rewards-program/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports status tiers with automatic promotion and demotion driven by rolling-window spend or visit counts. differentiator

guest-loyalty-tiers

Marketing auto-segments include a behavior-derived VIP segment that diners move in and out of, but this drives campaigns — it is not a loyalty status tier with earn-rate or benefit differentiation. https://get.chownow.com/products/email-sms-marketing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Documents explicitly what loyalty lookup, accrual, and redemption do when the POS loses connectivity (queue-and-reconcile vs blocked). differentiator

guest-loyalty-offline-behavior

The Rewards Program article is the vendor's complete published description of loyalty - how stickers accrue, how they redeem, plus an eleven-question FAQ - and both accrual and redemption happen server-side inside the ChowNow online checkout, never at a POS terminal; the same FAQ states the program covers takeout orders through ChowNow only and that stickers cannot be added manually. The loyalty path therefore never touches the operator's POS, and ChowNow publishes no degraded-connectivity behaviour for it, so the rubric's queue-and-reconcile-vs-blocked question is documented nowhere. Absence control on the vendor's own word: 'offline' in this help centre means an item 86'd from a menu, not a lost connection; the one connectivity article, i-am-unable-to-log-into-my-cuboh-tablet, says a tablet that cannot reach the servers cannot even authenticate. Bounded to the publisher's own manifest, 278 of 278 restaurant_support articles. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/get-started-with-our-restaurant-rewards-program/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Offer/discount engine exposes explicit stacking and precedence rules (exclusive vs combinable, order of application) as configuration. differentiator

guest-loyalty-offer-stacking-rules

ChowNow resolves discount collisions itself rather than exposing stacking rules: 'When a diner unlocks their reward discount, it will get automatically applied to their next order. If at that time they have another discount for your restaurant associated with their ChowNow account, the system will pick the better of the two.' The configurable surface of the Rewards Settings page is enumerated in this article and in the best-practices guide as three fields only - stickers required per reward, minimum order value to earn a sticker, and reward value (percent-off or dollar-off). There is no exclusive-vs-combinable flag, no precedence/order-of-application setting, and no stacking configuration in the campaign tooling (get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/getting-started-with-custom-on-demand-email-campaigns/, .../getting-started-with-automated-email-sms-campaigns/), where automated campaign content and offers 'cannot be edited at this time'. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/get-started-with-our-restaurant-rewards-program/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Offers can be issued to a dynamically defined audience (rules over recency, frequency, spend, or items purchased) rather than only broadcast to the whole list. differentiator

guest-loyalty-targeted-offers

Help centre campaign builder: 'Select your audience from the library of pre-built, lifecycle-based segments, or target your entire marketing list', then 'make sure the promo code is set up in your dashboard (Marketing > Promotions)' and 'Select the promotion you want to use from the dropdown. The offer details will automatically populate within the email.' The SMS equivalent is the same flow with the promo code pasted into the text. Limit worth recording: the documentation describes choosing from ChowNow's pre-built lifecycle segments or the full list - it does not document an operator-authored rule builder over arbitrary spend or item-purchased criteria. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/getting-started-with-custom-on-demand-email-campaigns/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Automatically computes recency/frequency/monetary or equivalent lifecycle segments (new, regular, at-risk, lapsed, VIP) without the operator building the queries. differentiator

guest-loyalty-rfm-segmentation

Help centre: automated campaigns run against 'lifecycle moments like Welcome, Win Back, and VIP, plus monthly and seasonal promotional sends', and the campaign builder lets the operator 'Select your audience from the library of pre-built, lifecycle-based segments' - i.e. the segments are computed by ChowNow from order activity, with no query-building by the operator. The documentation does not publish the thresholds (what order count makes a VIP, how many days make a diner lapsed); those figures appear only in ChowNow's marketing blog. Also note automated campaign content and promotions 'cannot be edited at this time', and marketing is unusable on Launch (no contacts or send credits). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/getting-started-with-automated-email-sms-campaigns/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Ships triggered lifecycle automations (birthday, first-visit thank-you, lapsed win-back) as configurable always-on campaigns rather than one-off manual sends.

guest-loyalty-lifecycle-automation

Pre-built always-on automations for Welcome, Win Back, VIP and Seasonal moments across email and SMS. Birthday is not among the named triggers. https://get.chownow.com/products/email-sms-marketing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Sends both email and SMS campaigns natively from the platform, not solely by handing the list to a third-party ESP. differentiator

guest-loyalty-native-email-sms

Help centre: SMS is sent from ChowNow itself - the operator submits 10DLC registration (legal name, EIN, business type) via 'Dashboard under Marketing > Campaign Settings' and waits roughly 5 business days for carrier approval; '10DLC registration is required for any business sending SMS marketing messages, regardless of audience size'. Email campaigns are composed in the same Marketing section (Getting Started with Custom On-Demand Email Campaigns), and campaign reporting for both channels lives under Marketing > One-Time Campaigns > Reports. Shortfall to record: 'SMS marketing is included with ChowNow Grow and Elevate plans' - not Launch. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-enable-sms-marketing/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Captures per-channel marketing consent with timestamp and source of consent, and honors revocation received by any reasonable means (not just the STOP keyword) across all channels.

guest-loyalty-consent-management

Revocation is honoured and is not STOP-keyword-only: diners 'are automatically removed from your active count when they: Unsubscribe from your email or SMS marketing' or hard-bounce, and thereafter 'stay in your database for reporting and history... and won't receive future campaigns'. On-demand SMS templates are 'preloaded with your restaurant's name, and opt-out directions'. Named shortfalls: (1) consent is not captured, it is inferred - the same article enumerates exactly two ways a diner joins the marketing list, 'Automatically, when they place an order' and 'Via a one-time list upload during onboarding', with no opt-in checkbox or consent record described at checkout; (2) consent is not per-channel - 'Each unique diner counts as one contact, whether you reach them by email, SMS, or both', and no separate email/SMS consent state is documented; (3) no consent timestamp or source is stored - get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-add-in-store-diners-to-my-chownow-marketing-list/ puts the burden on the operator to 'confirm these contacts opted in to marketing communications' and to drop anyone who has not received marketing email in 12 months or marketing texts in 6 months, which is an attestation rule rather than a recorded consent artefact. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/understanding-marketing-contact-limits/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Handles or explicitly documents A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration required for the operator to send SMS through the platform.

guest-loyalty-10dlc-registration

ChowNow explicitly documents the A2P 10DLC step as part of turning SMS marketing on: '10DLC (10-Digit Long Code) is the carrier-approved framework that allows businesses to legally send SMS marketing messages in the U.S.', and 'Registration is required by mobile carriers to verify your business.' The operator submits legal business name, EIN and business type through ChowNow, which files the registration; approval is stated as roughly five business days, after which SMS campaigns can send. SMS sending itself is metered in credits (get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/understanding-sms-credits/: '1 credit = 1 text message sent to 1 diner', 2 credits over 160 characters or with emoji) and is a Grow/Elevate-tier feature. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-enable-sms-marketing/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Reports redemption and incremental sales attributable to a specific campaign or offer, tying redeemed offers to actual check totals. differentiator

guest-loyalty-campaign-attribution

Verified that the marketing page says 'Track attributed orders and revenue, not just opens and clicks' — but that is the entire evidentiary basis. No product documentation, no attribution model, no attribution window, no report name, and no support article describing where an operator sees it. Under the marketing-is-claim-level rule this is claim-level on a weighted differentiator. https://get.chownow.com/products/email-sms-marketing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Provides self-serve export of the full guest list and transaction history, including contact PII, via CSV or API, without a vendor fee or support ticket. differentiator

guest-loyalty-data-export-portability

Support article 'How can I reach the customers I have collected in my database?' documents exporting the Customer Spending report with contact data for external marketing; report exports are self-serve from the dashboard. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=export · retrieved 2026-08-01

Exposes a documented outbound guest and order event API or webhook stream that a CDP or marketing platform can subscribe to (e.g. Olo, Punchh, Bridg, Klaviyo). differentiator

guest-loyalty-cdp-event-api

Withdrawing 'there is no ChowNow developer portal'. There is one, and it rules this out explicitly. The ChowNow Partner API spec has no `webhooks` and no `callbacks` object anywhere in the document - order state is read by polling GET /v1/orders/{order_id}/status - and there is no guest or customer resource among its ten operations. The portal's own status list confirms it: 'These endpoints are not yet implemented and return 501 Not Implemented: Customer creation, lookup, and detail'. So there is no outbound guest-or-order event stream a CDP could subscribe to. The one webhook stream in the ChowNow group, Cuboh Direct's orders.* and merchant.* events, is a channel-partner integration surface - subscription requires Cuboh QA certification and a piloted live merchant, it carries no loyalty or guest-profile events, and it cannot be pointed at an operator's Klaviyo, Punchh or Bridg instance. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-08-06

Triggers post-transaction feedback requests and routes responses by score, sending low scores to private service recovery and high scores toward public review sites. differentiator

guest-loyalty-review-capture-routing

Assessed and unresolved. A ChowNow-operated diner feedback mechanism demonstrably exists, because ChowNow publishes an unsubscribe-confirmation page for restaurant ratings emails at get.chownow.com/confirmation/restaurant-ratings-unsubscribe-confirmation/ reading 'You will no longer receive restaurant ratings emails from ChowNow' (read via a 2026-01-21 Wayback capture). What no document in the corpus establishes is the trigger, whether the operator ever sees a score, or whether any score-based routing exists - `NPS`, `Net Promoter`, `feedback request` and `service recovery` return zero corpus-wide, `review` across all 1,781 source files means only reviewing a CSV import or a Stripe account in review, and the Marketing Suite's campaign catalogue is enumerated identically in three independent ChowNow documents (the automated-campaigns support article, the Marketing Suite Sell Sheet and the Marketing Suite Ebook) with no feedback or review campaign. A support article or product page describing ChowNow diner ratings, or the body of a restaurant-ratings email, would settle this cell in either direction. ADDENDUM 2026-09-16: CLAIM: post-transaction feedback requests routed by score. VERDICT: still unknown. NEW SURFACES: get.chownow.com diner support (38 URLs in diner_support-sitemap.xml, all fetched 200 with a browser UA) - the only feedback article is diner-initiated: 'How do I relay feedback? You can email [support] or send a text message to ChowNow at 888-707-2469.' `rating(s)`, `survey`, `NPS` = 0. The current automated-campaign catalogue (restaurant-support/what-automated-emails-texts-are-sent-to-my-diners/, modified 2026-08-06) enumerates Welcome Series, Win Back 30/60, VIP Special Offer, Monthly Promos, Seasonal Promos - no feedback/review campaign. support.cuboh.com (ChowNow Hub Intercom, 105/105): `rating`, `feedback` = 0; `review` hits are 'reviewing' menu mappings (poison). The ChowNow 'restaurant ratings emails' unsubscribe page from a prior pass remains the only trace, so a diner-rating email exists but its trigger/routing is undocumented. Retrieved 2026-09-16. || 321st: CLAIM: post-transaction feedback requests routed by score. VERDICT: still unknown. crt.sh (chownow.com 80 names, cuboh.com 19) probed for /swagger, /openapi.json, /api-docs, /docs, /redoc, /sitemap.xml: no new anonymous spec on any production host (preprod.developer.chownow.com 403 on every path = refusal; reporting-production.chownow.com is a bare Cube.js server banner; docs/dashboard/order.cuboh.com are SPA catch-alls returning the same ~1 KB shell for a nonsense path). NEW SURFACE: updates.cuboh.com, the Cuboh/ChowNow Hub product changelog (Headway), 96 of 96 sitemap URLs fetched 200 with a browser UA (robots.txt is a generic User-agent: * Disallow: / that does not name ClaudeBot). The only feedback features are operator-to-vendor: "Customers can now provide feedback directly through the Cuboh mobile app, to let us know what can be improved on the app" (222237), later removed as a menu option because it mostly held feature requests (268375). Controls over 96 pages: rating 0, NPS 0, review 2 (both "review your information" in DoorDash onboarding), feedback 5 (all operator-to-Cuboh). Retrieved 2026-09-17. || 329th: 329th: NEW SURFACES, cell still unknown - and I can now say why it is unresolvable from public text rather than merely unresolved. (1) The automated-campaign catalogue is a CLOSED enumeration and it has no feedback campaign. 'Getting Started with Automated Email & SMS Campaigns' (modified 2026-06-30) states 'All automated campaigns are enabled by default' and points at the catalogue; 'What Automated Emails & Texts Are Sent to My Diners?' (2026-08-06) enumerates it in full - Lifecycle: Welcome Series (10% offer one day after the first order), Win Back Series (30/60 days), VIP Special Offer ($5 after the 4th direct order); Promotional: Monthly Promos, Seasonal Promos (8 named sends, New Years through Small Business Saturday). Every entry is an offer. The operator-authored alternative, Custom On-Demand Campaigns (2026-06-30), is a promo builder - headline, body copy, promo code, CTA, personalization tags - with no rating widget and no response handling. (2) The product line itself is an enumeration: 20 /products/ pages (advanced-reporting, marketplace, restaurant-websites, discovery-network, flex-delivery, branded-mobile-apps, rewards-program, order-aggregation, direct-online-ordering, q2-feature-release, email-sms-marketing, qr-code-ordering, catering, pos-integrations and variants), all page-builder pages whose REST content is empty, now fetched as HTML. There is no reviews, ratings or reputation product. Controls over those 184 page-builder pages: NPS 0, survey 0, alert 0, anomaly 0, feedback 2 (a careers-process step and a 'thanks-survey' confirmation page), rating 21 (ALL poison - the same 'strong rating on Capterra' trust badge repeated across paid-media landing pages), ratings 1 (only the restaurant-ratings unsubscribe page). Controls over the 728-body WP REST census: NPS 0, 'service recovery' 0, 'review request' 1 (blog advice to print one on receipts), survey 12 (all sweepstakes/market-research, none product). (3) WHY IT STAYS UNKNOWN: the WP media library holds exactly 8 assets matching 'notification' and none matching a rating panel, and the 'restaurant ratings emails from ChowNow' unsubscribe page (get.chownow.com/confirmation/restaurant-ratings-unsubscribe-confirmation/, re-read live today, 37.6 KB) proves a ChowNow-operated diner ratings email exists OUTSIDE the enumerated campaign catalogue. That mechanism is therefore not bounded by the enumeration that would otherwise carry a no. Its preference centre is a Marketo shell (info.chownow.com/Email-Preference.html, 1.7 KB, form injected by JS, no categories in the HTML). The diner app's App Store screenshots (id 1210943577, v1.73.0) are Eat with impact / Order delivery or pickup / Save on next meal / Track delivery / Keep chefs cooking - no rate-your-order screen. Settled only by the body of a restaurant-ratings email or an operator-facing article about it. Retrieved 2026-09-18. adversarially verified

Includes a native referral mechanic with per-guest codes or links, attribution of the referred guest's first order, and two-sided rewards.

guest-loyalty-referral-program

About the ChowNow ordering platform. ChowNow's own help centre disambiguates the noun: the article titled 'Is there a referral program to recommend other restaurants to ChowNow?' describes a merchant-acquisition bounty paid to whoever refers a restaurant, and both published referral contracts at /legal/referral-terms/ and /legal/referral-program-agreement/ are affiliate lead-generation agreements in which commission is the sole compensation due to the Referring Party - one-sided, ChowNow-operated, and aimed at ChowNow subscriptions and ChowNow's own consumer app rather than at a restaurant's guests. There is no guest-side referral mechanic: the CN Dashboard's marketing entitlement scopes are a closed list of six (marketing_suite, campaigns_automated_email, campaigns_automated_sms, campaigns_one_time_email, campaigns_one_time_sms, csv_import) with no referral scope, the `rewards_config` object has no referral field, and the contact-list article enumerates exactly two ways a diner enters the database, neither a referral. AUDIT CORRECTION to a published figure: the prior note said `refer a friend` returns zero corpus-wide. That was true of the corpus the analyst held and is now FALSE - the page-builder backfill brought it to 4 documents, every one of them the site's footer navigation ('Partner With Us Refer a Friend Become an Affiliate'), i.e. the same merchant-referral programme this verdict is about. The invariance survives and is in fact corroborated: every occurrence of the phrase on ChowNow's own site points at merchant referral, none at a guest. A per-guest referral code documented anywhere would overturn it. Quotation: "Referrals must be submitted through the Refer-A-Restaurant form in order to receive rewards." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/referral-program/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

Issues an Apple Wallet or Google Wallet loyalty pass with push-updatable balance, as an alternative to requiring a branded app download. differentiator

guest-loyalty-wallet-pass

About the ChowNow Rewards Program, the vendor's loyalty product. This is a closed three-place enumeration of where a diner's balance lives, and a wallet pass is not among them; the same sentence appears twice in the article and the /products/rewards-program/ page I read via Wayback (2026-05-21) says only that diners track progress on the ordering page and in their ChowNow account. `Apple Wallet`, `wallet pass`, `pkpass`, `Add to Wallet` and `digital wallet` each return zero over the whole corpus; the only `Google Wallet` hits are in the Restaurant Agreement's Third-Party Services clause alongside Google Pay and Apple Pay, that is payment wallets rather than loyalty passes, and it is the trap term on this record. A pass-issuing feature documented on the Rewards product page would overturn it. Quotation: "Diners can track their sticker progress on your ChowNow menu, in their ChowNow account settings, and through emails we send on your behalf." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/get-started-with-our-restaurant-rewards-program/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

Provides admin tooling to fulfill guest data access and deletion requests (CCPA/CPRA-style) including deletion propagation to loyalty and marketing records.

guest-loyalty-privacy-rights-tooling

ChowNow operates a vendor-side OneTrust Data Privacy Rights Request webform and a CPRA notice, and diners can access/delete their own contact data in account settings. No operator-facing in-app DSAR tooling and no deletion-propagation documentation. https://get.chownow.com/legal/privacy-policy/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Enforces loyalty fraud controls such as redemption velocity limits, manager approval on manual point adjustments, and flagging of employee self-redemption, with an audit log.

guest-loyalty-redemption-fraud-controls

The Rewards Settings surface is enumerated the same way in both ChowNow rewards articles and consists of three configurable fields: the number of stickers required to unlock a reward, the minimum order dollar amount that earns a sticker, and the reward value (percent-off or dollar-off). The get-started article additionally states that manually adding stickers to a diner is not available, and that changes to a program apply only 'for new diners going forward'. Redemption is automatic - 'When a diner unlocks their reward discount, it will get automatically applied to their next order' - with no operator step to approve. There is consequently no redemption velocity limit, no manager-approval workflow on point adjustments (there are no manual adjustments), no employee self-redemption flag, and no audit log; the only reporting exposed is aggregate program stats (diners enrolled, rewards unlocked) on the Rewards Settings page. A support search for 'audit' at get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=audit returns 0 results. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/get-started-with-our-restaurant-rewards-program/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor documents AI/ML-generated recommendations for offer content, target audience, or send timing (claim-level; verify it is a shipped product feature, not a roadmap statement). differentiator

guest-loyalty-ai-offer-recommendation

About the CN Dashboard v1.68.0 Marketing Suite. `marketingAiRecommendations` is one of exactly five LaunchDarkly flags in the app's FEATURE_FLAGS constant, and the card it gates - RecommendationsCard - has no data source and no API hook: its entire body is a title and a CardEmpty placeholder, so even with the flag on there is nothing to show. The rubric asks the vendor to document AI recommendations AND expressly requires verifying that they are a shipped product feature and not a roadmap statement; a source file cannot settle the documentation half in either direction, but it settles the shipped half decisively and against, which is sufficient for a no on a conjunctive claim. On the documentation half: the token `AI` appears zero times across the 41 PDFs including the Marketing Suite Ebook and Sell Sheet, its single occurrence in 278 merchant support articles is Square's menu generator rather than ChowNow's, and now that the page-builder hole is nearly closed it is also absent from every readable ChowNow product page, including /products/email-sms-marketing/ and /products/automated-email-marketing-2/. AUDIT CAVEAT: /products/automated-email-marketing/ is one of the 17 still-unread bodies and has ZERO Wayback 200-captures, so no instrument reaches it; its sibling slug is readable and carries no AI claim. ChowNow does ship other AI, an auto-generated-menu path and a menuPhotoEnhancementTool flag, neither of which is offer recommendation. A shipped, documented AI recommendation in the campaign builder would overturn it. Quotation: "const recommendationsEnabled = Boolean(flags[FEATURE_FLAGS.marketingAiRecommendations]);" https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/containers/CampaignInsights/CampaignInsights.tsx · retrieved 2026-09-10

Offers native stored-value/gift card balances tied to the same guest profile and redeemable across all locations of the brand.

guest-loyalty-stored-value-gift

About the ChowNow Rewards Program. Both halves of the claim fail affirmatively rather than by silence. The published Rewards terms state the currency is not cash-equivalent and that stickers accrue on a per-Restaurant-Partner-Location basis only, and the CN Dashboard's own Rewards drawer confirms the second: the location selector is hard-disabled against a single-element list under a comment saying to uncomment it when multi-location support exists in One Dashboard. The `rewards_config` object the dashboard PUTs is six fields - enabled, order_threshold, order_minimum, reward_amount, reward_type, max_dollar_cap - with reward_type restricted to percent or dollar_amount, so it is a discount rule with no balance to store. `stored-value` returns zero corpus-wide and `stored value` appears twice, both describing Givex, a third-party POS ChowNow integrates. A brand-wide diner balance documented on the Rewards product page would overturn it. Quotation: "Neither stickers nor Rewards may be auctioned, traded, copied, transferred, bartered, modified, sold, or redeemed for cash or a cash equivalent." https://get.chownow.com/legal/restaurant-rewards/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

Employees clock in and out at the POS terminal using a PIN, badge, or card, with no separate time-clock hardware required.

labor-clock-in-at-pos

No labor module of any kind; 7shifts is ChowNow's named team-management partner. https://get.chownow.com/partners/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Captures a photo at punch (or performs facial verification) attached to the timecard entry, with a photo-only mode available that stores no biometric template. differentiator

labor-photo-punch-verification

A photo cannot be attached to a timecard entry that does not exist, and ChowNow has no employee records to attach one to. Its complete published answer to "Can I add more users to my dashboard?" is two administrative roles — Company admin and Regional admin — with no staff-level identity of any kind, so there is nobody to punch. "clock in", "clock-in" and "time clock" together return one hit across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278), and it is an article about correcting the tablet’s time-zone display. The biometric vocabulary the rubric implies ("biometric", "BIPA", "fingerprint", "facial recognition") returns hits only inside the CCPA/CPRA statutory category lists in ChowNow’s own privacy notices, which concern diners and ChowNow job applicants, not operator staff punch data. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/adding-users-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Supports mobile clock-in restricted by geofence or location validation for staff who do not punch at a fixed terminal.

labor-geofenced-mobile-punch

This cell turns on the staff-facing mobile app, so I scored it against that app's own documentation rather than a corpus-wide zero. The ChowNow Business Manager app is the only operator mobile client ChowNow ships, and its published feature article enumerates order acceptance, 86ing, receipt printing, notifications and printer/sound settings — an order-management surface with no clock-in of any kind, geofenced or otherwise. Consistent with that, "geofenc" occurs zero times across all 723 corpus documents, and "clock" appears in the 278-of-278 operator help centre only in an article about correcting the tablet's time-zone display. Bounded to the publisher's own manifest: the Yoast sitemap and the WordPress REST API independently both answer 278 restaurant_support articles. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/what-s-new-with-the-refreshed-chownow-tablet-app/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Records time punches while the POS is offline and reconciles them on reconnect without loss or duplicate entries, with the behavior documented. differentiator

labor-offline-time-punch

There is no time punch to buffer offline. ChowNow’s entire user model is administrative: the help centre’s complete answer on adding users offers a Company admin and a Regional admin and nothing else, so no employee exists in the system to be clocked in or out. "time clock", "clock in" and "clock-in" return a single hit across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278) and it concerns the tablet’s time-zone setting; "payroll", "labor" and "labour" are 0 occurrences in the 66,425-char Restaurant Agreement. Because the punch itself does not exist, its offline behaviour cannot be partially met. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/adding-users-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Permissions are grantable per discrete action (void, comp, discount, refund, drawer open, price change, report access) per role and per location, not limited to fixed cashier/manager/admin tiers.

labor-granular-rbac

Two apps, two different models, and neither is per-action. ChowNow Hub (the aggregation product, dashboard.cuboh.com) checks `user.permissions.includes(permission)` against exactly the nine-entry vocabulary quoted above — none of void, comp, discount, refund, drawer open, price change or report access is in it, and no route in config__router.config.js edits it. CN Dashboard v1.68.0 (portal.chownow.com) instead uses fixed boolean tiers on the user record — `is_chownow_admin`, `is_super_admin`, `is_region_admin`, `is_company_admin` (src-cn/src__helpers__constants.ts states the same closed set as `USER_GROUP_ID = { chownow_admin: '1', company_admin: '2', region_admin: '3' }`) — plus location-level ENTITLEMENT scopes (`feature:restaurant.*`), which gate what the account bought rather than what a user may do; its Users page is an `EmbeddedAdmin` iframe with no permission editor in the bundle. get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/who-should-have-admin-access/ confirms the only operator choice is location breadth: 'If you own multiple locations, you can decide if you’d like your admin users to have access to just one or to all locations.' ChowNow is not a POS, so drawer open, void and comp have no object to bind to. RE-CHECKED against the APIAuditrecord cube, which does not change the verdict, because an audit trail records actions rather than granting them: `APIAdjustment` carries staffName, type, reason and amount and `APIOrderCancellationData` carries cancelled_by, so a who-adjusted-what trail does exist at order level — but helpers/reporting.js exposes both only as fixed report dimensions, and constants/reporting.js declares exactly two audit event names, `STORE_STATUS_UPDATED` and `POS_EXCEPTION`. RESIDUAL, now that a gated tier is known to exist: get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/general-refund-guidelines/ is one of exactly two WordPress documents behind a post password and I could not read it; refund is one of the seven actions this rubric names, so it is unread rather than absent — though a refund-policy article states when refunds are given, not who may issue them. Quotation: "export const PERMISSIONS = { FETCH_INTEGRATIONS: 'Fetch Integrations', FETCH_MENU_ITEM: 'Fetch Menu Item', FETCH_ORDER: 'Fetch Order', CREATE_CREDENTIALS: 'Integration Credentials', TOGGLE_MENU_ITEM: 'Toggle Menu Item', UPDATE_COMPANY_SETTINGS: 'Update Company Settings', UPDATE_INTEGRATIONS: 'Update Integrations', UPDATE_ORDER: 'Update Order', VIEW_MERCHANTS: 'View Merchants', };" https://dashboard.cuboh.com/static/js/main.e1fbe2eb.js#constants/auth.constants.js · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Manager overrides and approvals are attributed to the individual approver and written to an immutable audit trail queryable after the fact.

labor-manager-override-audit

Something override-shaped does exist here, so the reason matters more than the verdict. ChowNow's only approval construct is the refund flow on the Dashboard and the Business Manager app, and it captures the approver as a free-text name the acting user types into an "Approved By" box plus a reason — self-asserted, not attributed to the authenticated identity, which is the precise thing the rubric requires. The identity model behind it is thin by design: the help centre's user-administration article offers exactly two roles, Company admin and Regional admin, with no staff-level accounts to attribute an action to. A queryable order-level log does exist — the report catalog lists "Order Edit Data – See a list of any previous adjustments made to orders" — but it is an order-adjustment history on the online-ordering side, not an immutable manager-override trail, and no labor override exists to record. Bounded to the publisher's own manifest for restaurant_support: sitemap and WordPress REST API both answer 278. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/order-refunds/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Builds and publishes employee shift schedules inside the same platform that holds the timekeeping data, rather than requiring a third-party scheduling app. differentiator

labor-native-scheduling

No labor module; 7shifts partner. https://get.chownow.com/partners/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Generates recommended staffing levels or labor hours by daypart from the operator's own POS sales history, not just a static template. differentiator

labor-demand-labor-forecast

The rubric asks for recommended staffing levels derived from the operator’s own sales history, so the deciding surface is ChowNow’s reporting. Its published report catalogue — five ChowNow Pro reports (Analytics, Accounting Data, Customer Data, Promo Data, Order Source) and seven Hub/Premier reports (Order History, Order Edit Data, Cancellation Data, Order Control Data, POS Errors, Item Report, Modifier Report) — is order-, money-, customer- or menu-dimensioned throughout, and no report named anywhere else in the corpus (the disbursement report included) carries an hours, wage or staffing dimension either. ChowNow does hold the sales history the rubric starts from, so this is a genuine absence of the output rather than of the input; and it holds no labor input at all, since "time clock" / "clock in" return a single time-zone article across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-run-reports/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Displays labor cost as a percentage of sales in real time during service on a manager view or POS, not only in end-of-day or next-morning reports. differentiator

labor-realtime-labor-percent

Labor cost as a percentage of sales requires a labor cost, and ChowNow holds no labor data to divide by its sales data. Every report it publishes — the twelve in the Dashboard catalogue plus the disbursement report documented separately — is dimensioned by order, money, customer, promo, menu item or modifier; the richest financial export, Accounting Data, breaks an order down into taxes, delivery fees and tips with no wage or hour field. The real-time manager surface is the Dashboard sales-trends view, described in terms of gross sales, taxes, tips, fees and discounts, again with no labor term. The cell fails on the absence of the numerator, not merely on the absence of a live view: "time clock" and "clock in" return one hit across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278) and it is a tablet time-zone article. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-run-reports/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Warns or blocks at clock-in when an employee is approaching or would cross a configured overtime threshold, before the overtime is incurred. differentiator

labor-overtime-prevention

An overtime warning has to fire at clock-in, and ChowNow has no clock-in because it has no employees. The help centre’s complete answer on adding users offers two administrative roles, Company admin and Regional admin, with no staff-level accounts; there is nobody to accrue hours against and no threshold to configure. "overtime" returns 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278) and 0 in the 66,425-char Restaurant Agreement, and the only "clock in" hit in the help centre is an article about the tablet’s time-zone setting. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/adding-users-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Configures meal and rest break rules per state or jurisdiction, prompts required break attestation, and flags missed breaks for premium pay. differentiator

labor-break-compliance-by-state

Meal and rest break rules are configured against a schedule and attested at a terminal, and ChowNow publishes neither. The pricing page's Included Features block enumerates the entire product as twenty features in three named suites — ORDERING SUITE (7), MARKETING SUITE (6) and OPERATIONS SUITE (7, quoted) — and a complete list whose stated purpose is to say what the operator gets contains no scheduling, no timekeeping and no compliance rules engine. Graded C as a marketing page; the same absence holds in the current Restaurant Agreement, where "labor" occurs zero times. "break compliance", "premium pay" and "attestation" return zero across all 723 corpus documents. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Supports predictive-scheduling ordinances by tracking advance-notice deadlines for published schedules and calculating predictability pay owed for employer-initiated changes.

labor-fair-workweek-support

Predictive-scheduling ordinances are tracked against a published employee schedule, and ChowNow publishes no schedule to track advance notice against. The pricing page enumerates the whole product as twenty Included Features across three suites, of which the ordering suite quoted here is the first; nothing in any suite is a schedule. "fair workweek", "predictive scheduling" and "predictability pay" return zero across all 723 corpus documents, and the only "scheduling" hit in the 278-of-278 operator help centre is about scheduling an SMS campaign. Graded C because the deciding document is a marketing page; I did not upgrade it on the strength of a zero-hit, since an absence of ordinance vocabulary inside an online-ordering help centre is evidence about the help centre, and the positive feature enumeration is what carries the verdict. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Enforces minor-labor restrictions (age-based maximum hours, prohibited time windows, school-day limits) at both scheduling and clock-in.

labor-minor-labor-rules

Minor-labor limits are enforced at scheduling and at clock-in, and ChowNow has neither, because it holds no employee record to carry an age. The complete published user model is two administrative roles, Company admin and Regional admin. "schedule staff", "schedule employees" and "time clock" return no operator-facing hit across the 278-of-278 help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278). The word "minor" does appear there, but only as "minor classes" in the Silverware POS menu-mapping guide — the vocabulary trap this cell invites, and not about employees. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/adding-users-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Computes tip pooling and tip-outs automatically per shift from configurable rules (percentage of sales, hours worked, points, or role), rather than requiring a manual spreadsheet.

labor-tip-pooling-rules

Tips are passed through in disbursements; no pooling engine. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/order-and-payments-processing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Retains a per-shift, per-employee record of tips received, amounts contributed to the pool, and amounts distributed from the pool, exportable for audit.

labor-tip-distribution-audit-trail

ChowNow really does collect, report and disburse tips, so this needed deciding on the rubric's own terms — and the vendor answers it explicitly: it reports tips and expressly disclaims distributing them. The rubric asks for a per-shift, per-employee record of tips received, contributed to a pool and distributed from it; what ChowNow ships is an order-level daily total. Its dedicated article on the question, "How do I keep track of tips for Dine-In orders?", answers with an order-type filter on the Accounting Data Report that makes it "easier to distribute tips" — order-dimensioned reporting handed to a manual process, with no employee dimension anywhere in the twelve-report catalog. Flex Delivery tips are disbursed straight to the courier service and surface only as a Flex Delivery Tip column on the disbursement report. Tip reporting: yes. Per-employee tip ledger: no. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/tips/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Payroll export separates cash from charged qualified tips and carries a Treasury tipped-occupation code, supporting the W-2 Box 12 code TP and Box 14b reporting required for tax year 2026. differentiator

labor-qualified-tips-w2-reporting

ChowNow issues 1099s to restaurants earning $20,000+; it has no employee-level payroll or W-2 reporting. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/billing-my-account/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor processes payroll itself as a first-party product (tax filing and direct deposit), as opposed to exporting to a third-party payroll provider only. differentiator

labor-native-payroll

The pricing page enumerates the whole product as twenty Included Features in three named suites — ORDERING (7), MARKETING (6) and OPERATIONS (7, quoted) — and no suite contains payroll, tax filing or direct deposit. The money ChowNow moves is order disbursement to the restaurant’s own bank account through Stripe, which is settlement, not payroll; "payroll" is 0 occurrences in the 66,425-char Restaurant Agreement and 0 across the 278-of-278 operator help centre. I also checked the weaker form of the claim, since a payroll INTEGRATION would change the note even though it would not satisfy the rubric: the WordPress REST registry lists 41 /integrations/* URLs, of which 38 are named partners (the others being the index, the "all" directory and a contact page), and every one is a POS, printer, marketplace, discovery, listing or gift-card partner — no payroll or workforce provider. Bound: the REST registry, not the stale page sitemap. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Exports timecards, wages, and tips in documented formats or via direct integration for at least two major payroll providers (e.g. Gusto, ADP, Paychex, QuickBooks).

labor-payroll-export-formats

No labor hours to export; no named payroll integrations on the integrations page. https://get.chownow.com/integrations/all/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Employees can request shift swaps or claim open shifts in a self-service app, subject to a manager approval workflow that enforces overtime and role eligibility. differentiator

labor-shift-swap-workflow

A shift swap needs an employee to offer the shift, an employee to claim it and a manager to approve it. ChowNow has none of the three: its complete published user model is two administrative roles, Company admin and Regional admin, and it ships no employee-facing app at all — the only operator mobile client is the ChowNow Business Manager app, whose published feature article covers order acceptance, 86ing, receipt printing, notifications and settings. "shift swap" returns 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278); its single corpus hit is a blog post recommending third-party apps. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/adding-users-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Provides digital new-hire onboarding that collects W-4 and I-9 documentation and supports E-Verify submission.

labor-digital-onboarding-i9

The only construct in ChowNow's contract that touches a restaurant's employees at all is the definition of "User" quoted here — a person the restaurant authorises to log into the Platform. That is an access grant, not a hire: nothing in the agreement collects, stores or files new-hire documentation, and "payroll" and "labor" occur zero times in its 66,425 characters. Correspondingly "W-4", "I-9" and "E-Verify" return zero across all 723 corpus documents, and the only onboarding in the 278-of-278 operator help centre is a ChowNow Onboarding Specialist who launches the restaurant's ordering integrations. Graded B as the vendor legal document that defines the Services. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Reports per-employee sales performance metrics (average check, items or category attachment rate, void and comp rate) by server or cashier. differentiator

labor-server-performance-metrics

No employee dimension in reporting. https://get.chownow.com/products/advanced-reporting/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports multi-level recipe/BOM costing where a recipe can contain sub-recipes (prep items) and plate cost recalculates automatically when any component ingredient's cost changes.

inventory-recipe-bom-costing

No inventory module; MarketMan is the named inventory partner. https://get.chownow.com/partners/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Stores purchase unit, recipe unit, and count unit per item with explicit conversion factors, plus a yield/waste percentage applied to raw-to-usable conversion.

inventory-unit-conversion-yields

Purchase, recipe and count units with conversion factors need an item master holding quantities, and ChowNow’s only stock-facing surface is a binary switch: the article titled "How do I 86 items when I run out of ingredients?" sends the operator to Menu > Item Availability and a toggle per item and per modifier, with no numeric field anywhere. "recipe", "yield" and "unit conversion" each return 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278), a manifest the publisher itself supplies twice. ChowNow holds no stock quantity of any kind: where counts exist they are the POS’s, and ChowNow’s published role is to consume a sold-out signal from them — "Square tracks your inventory levels for each item. When an item’s stock reaches 0, it is automatically marked as sold out across all connected platforms." Its own stock-facing control is a binary Item Availability toggle with no numeric field. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-delete-menu-items/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Produces a theoretical-vs-actual usage variance report per item for a defined count period, showing theoretical usage from POS sales times recipe, actual usage from counts plus receipts, and the variance in both units and currency. differentiator

inventory-theoretical-vs-actual

A theoretical-vs-actual variance report needs theoretical usage (sales times recipe) and actual usage (counts plus receipts), and ChowNow holds neither term. Its own integration article locates the stock ledger in the POS — Square tracks the levels, and when an item reaches zero ChowNow is told it is sold out — so what crosses the wire is a boolean, never a quantity. "theoretical", "variance", "on-hand" and "recipe" each return 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278), and ChowNow never sees line-level POS usage in the first place. TRAP CHECKED: 35 of the 193 blog posts contain "inventory" and every one is industry advice, not a product claim; none is cited here. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/automatically-sync-square-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Depletes ingredient on-hand quantities in near real time as orders are fired at the POS, including depletion driven by modifier selections, not only in an end-of-day batch. differentiator

inventory-realtime-depletion

RUBRIC READING, STATED EXPLICITLY: I took the strict reading — the rubric asks the system to deplete INGREDIENT on-hand quantities, modifier-driven, in near real time. Under that reading this is a clean no, and the cited article is the reason: the stock counts live in Square, not ChowNow ("In your Square Dashboard, enable the Tracking toggle"), they are per menu ITEM rather than per ingredient, and what crosses to ChowNow is a boolean sold-out signal, not a quantity. The other reading — that consuming a POS depletion signal and reflecting it satisfies the claim — still fails on "ingredient", because no recipe layer exists anywhere in the corpus ("recipe" is 0 hits across 278 of 278 support articles); only if one further relaxed "ingredient" to "menu item" would this become a partial at grade B, on this article plus its Clover, Heartland, Omnivore and Revel siblings. I did not take that third reading, because the rubric contrasts ingredient depletion with an end-of-day batch, which presupposes quantities the vendor never holds. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/automatically-sync-square-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Automatically 86s (marks unavailable) menu items on the POS, online ordering, and connected third-party delivery menus when a component ingredient hits zero or a configured threshold. differentiator

inventory-86-auto-sync

Item and modifier 86 syncs automatically from the connected POS's own stock status out to ChowNow and the marketplaces — but it is POS-driven availability, not ingredient-level depletion or threshold logic owned by ChowNow. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=inventory · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports full physical inventory, ad-hoc spot counts of a subset, and scheduled recurring cycle counts, with each count's variance recorded as separate history rather than overwriting prior counts.

inventory-count-modes

The question is whether ChowNow has any count-entry surface at all, and this article — titled "How do I 86 items when I run out of ingredients?" — answers it: the operator’s only stock-facing control is a binary toggle under Menu > Item Availability. There is no numeric field, so there is no full count, no spot count, no cycle count and no variance history to record. Across 278 of 278 restaurant_support articles (Yoast sitemap and WP REST X-WP-Total both 278), "physical inventory", "cycle count", "stocktake" and "variance" each return 0 hits; the only 6 hits for /counting/ are all the substring inside "accounting". Where counts do exist they are held in the POS (see automatically-sync-square-inventory-updates/: "Square tracks your inventory levels for each item"), which is the vendor’s stated position. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-delete-menu-items/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Provides a mobile/tablet counting app supporting barcode or QR scanning that continues to accept counts with no network connectivity and syncs on reconnect.

inventory-mobile-count-offline

Two independent failure modes, and only one is needed; both hold. (1) NO COUNTING: ChowNow does ship a mobile surface — the ChowNow Business Manager app, and the Cuboh/Hub tablet — but the quoted article shows its entire stock-facing function is a per-item and per-modifier toggle with no quantity entry, and "barcode" returns 0 hits across 278 of 278 restaurant_support articles (REST == sitemap == 278). (2) NO OFFLINE: the vendor’s own "offline" vocabulary in this corpus means either an item taken offline (deactivated) or POS_OFFLINE, a connectivity FAULT the operator resolves by manually re-entering the order into the POS — not a local-capture-and-sync mode. Since the availability state is server-side and propagated outward to DoorDash, UberEats and Grubhub, there is nothing to queue offline. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-use-the-tablet-to-update-a-menu-item-s-availability/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Ships pre-built electronic vendor catalog and order-transmission integrations with named broadline distributors (e.g. Sysco, US Foods, Performance Food Group) that send purchase orders and receive invoices electronically rather than by emailed PDF. differentiator

inventory-vendor-catalogs-edi

US Foods appears on the partners page as a distributor discount relationship, not an EDI catalog/PO integration. https://get.chownow.com/partners/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Ingests supplier invoices from photo, PDF, or email and extracts line-item detail (item, quantity, unit, price) into the inventory ledger without manual line entry. differentiator

inventory-invoice-ocr

Ottimate is listed as an AP-automation partner, not a ChowNow feature. https://get.chownow.com/partners/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Tracks per-item purchase price history across invoices and alerts when a received price exceeds the prior or contracted price by a configurable threshold. differentiator

inventory-price-change-alerts

RUBRIC READING: this is a PURCHASING claim about supplier invoice prices, not menu prices, so the controls must run on purchasing nouns. "purchase order", "supplier", "par level" and "price change" each return 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278); the 3 "invoice" hits are ChowNow’s own subscription billing, not goods received. Positively, the pricing page enumerates the entire product as twenty Included Features in three suites and its seven-row OPERATIONS SUITE, quoted here, carries no purchasing, receiving or vendor-price row — there is no invoice surface for a price history to accumulate in. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Maintains par levels per item per location and generates suggested purchase order quantities from on-hand versus par, with at least one mode driven by a sales forecast rather than a static par. differentiator

inventory-par-auto-suggest

Par levels and suggested order quantities need an on-hand quantity and a purchasing surface. ChowNow holds no on-hand quantity — its own integration article puts the stock ledger in the POS and describes ChowNow as the recipient of a sold-out signal — and it publishes no purchasing surface: "par level" and "purchase order" are each 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278). ChowNow does hold demand data and could in principle forecast, but nothing in the corpus claims it turns that into order quantities; its forecasting-adjacent language is confined to blog advice addressed to the industry. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/automatically-sync-square-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Provides a structured waste/spoilage logging workflow with reason codes that debits inventory and reports waste cost separately from usage variance.

inventory-waste-logging

The Included Features table enumerates the entire product as twenty features in three named suites; the OPERATIONS SUITE quoted here is the whole of that suite, seven rows, and contains no waste, spoilage or inventory row. A complete published feature list is a positive scope statement rather than a null result — but it is a marketing page, hence grade C. It is corroborated at grade B by the current Restaurant Agreement (0 occurrences of "inventory" in 66,425 chars; no waste service in any tier definition) and by 0 hits for "waste" and "spoilage" across 278 of 278 restaurant_support articles. TRAP CHECKED: waste and food-cost advice is abundant in the 193 blog posts but is addressed to restaurants generally, never to a ChowNow feature. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Supports inter-location inventory transfers as a two-sided transaction crediting the sending location and debiting the receiving location, with an in-transit or approval state.

inventory-transfers

An inter-location transfer is a two-sided stock movement, so it needs a per-location stock ledger on both sides. ChowNow keeps none: its own integration article puts the levels in the POS and describes ChowNow receiving a sold-out signal when a count reaches zero. Its multi-location model in the help centre is a Headquarters view over locations for reporting and menus only, and "transfer between" returns 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278). With no quantities held anywhere there is nothing to credit, debit or hold in transit. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/automatically-sync-square-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Supports a commissary/central kitchen model where one location produces prep items and issues or sells them to other locations at a computed transfer cost.

inventory-commissary

A commissary model needs everything transfers need plus production of prep items and issue-at-transfer-cost accounting. ChowNow holds no stock quantity at all — the levels are the POS’s and ChowNow consumes a sold-out signal from them — and it publishes no production or costing surface: "commissary" and "central kitchen" each return 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278), 0 across all 28 /legal/ documents, 0 across the 4 pages-html and 0 across the 37 diner_support articles. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/automatically-sync-square-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Captures lot/batch numbers at receiving and links them through production to sales or transfers, enabling a backward and forward recall trace.

inventory-lot-traceability

Lot and batch numbers are captured at receiving, and ChowNow has no receiving surface and no stock ledger to link a lot through: the quantities are the POS’s and what reaches ChowNow is a sold-out boolean. "lot number", "batch number" and "purchase order" each return 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278), and the 4 "receiving" hits are the ordinary verb. PUBLISHER TEST: ChowNow is an online-ordering layer and is arguably not the publisher who would document recall tracing at all — but the citable content here is positive (it states where the inventory ledger is, and it is not in ChowNow), which is what makes this a no rather than an unknown. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/automatically-sync-square-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Tracks expiration or use-by dates on received and prepped items and surfaces an expiring-soon report or alert before spoilage.

inventory-shelf-life-expiry

Expiry tracking presupposes received and prepped items carrying dates, and ChowNow holds no item quantities or receipts at all — the stock ledger is the POS’s and ChowNow consumes a sold-out signal from it. "shelf life", "expiration" and "use-by" each return 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278). The only date-bounded availability behaviour anywhere in the product is the opposite of an expiring-soon report: an 86 toggle on the Cuboh/Hub tablet is a same-day deactivation that resets to active at 4am the next morning. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/automatically-sync-square-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Supports partial-bottle liquid inventory by weight (scale integration) or by bottle fraction for bar and beverage counting.

inventory-bar-partial-bottle

Partial-bottle counting needs either scale integration or a fractional count field, and ChowNow has no count field of any kind — its only stock-facing control is the binary Item Availability toggle reached from Menu in the Dashboard, mirrored as a toggle on the tablet. "bottle", "partial bottle", "scale" and "barcode" each return 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278); the single "liquor" hit is an article about adding alcohol to an online menu, concerning compliance and menu setup rather than counting. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-delete-menu-items/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Exports period COGS and accounts-payable invoice detail in a named accounting system's import format (e.g. QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, NetSuite) with GL account mapping configurable per item category.

inventory-cogs-gl-export

No COGS data and no accounting connectors in the integrations directory. https://get.chownow.com/integrations/all/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Inventory and recipe costing are delivered natively by the POS vendor rather than requiring a separately-contracted third-party product (e.g. MarginEdge, MarketMan, Restaurant365) to function. differentiator

inventory-native-not-partner

Explicitly partner-delivered: MarketMan is listed as ChowNow's inventory partner. https://get.chownow.com/partners/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Joins recipe cost to actual item sales mix to report contribution margin per menu item, and flags items whose margin fell below a configured threshold after ingredient cost changes. differentiator

inventory-menu-margin-linkage

Item & Modifier reports are marketed as identifying 'top sellers and margin drivers', but there is no recipe cost input, so no true contribution margin per item. https://get.chownow.com/products/advanced-reporting/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides a live sales dashboard reflecting transactions within minutes of the sale, accessible from both a browser and a mobile app off-premise.

reporting-realtime-dashboard

Centralized performance dashboard with on-demand, real-time data across first- and third-party channels and multi-location visibility. Browser-based; no operator mobile app documented. https://get.chownow.com/products/advanced-reporting/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Generates a daily close-out/EOD report reconciling gross sales, net sales, tax, tips, discounts, refunds, tender types, and expected cash deposit in one document.

reporting-eod-closeout

Disbursement Reports reconcile payouts line-by-line, available ~1 hour after closing each business day. No tender-type/cash/tax EOD reconciliation — there is no POS drawer. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/order-and-payments-processing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides a product mix (PMIX) report at individual menu item AND modifier level with quantity, gross and net sales, filterable by daypart and revenue center.

reporting-pmix-modifier-level

Item & Modifier Reports are one of the four named report families, covering top sellers and margin drivers. https://get.chownow.com/products/advanced-reporting/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Produces an audit report of comps, voids, discounts, and price overrides attributed to the employee who applied them and the manager who approved them, with reason codes and timestamps.

reporting-comps-voids-audit

The prior note - 'No comp/void/override constructs exist in a digital-ordering-only platform, and no such report is listed' - was grade E and is falsified by the current CN Dashboard's own reporting layer. Its Cube query builder defines an ADJUSTMENT report over the dimensions APIAdjustment.amount, .orderId, .type, .reason, .staffName and .createdAt, ordered by createdAt descending: that is an adjustment audit with a reason code, staff attribution and a timestamp. A CANCELLATIONS report carries APIOrderCancellationData.cancelled_by and .created_at, and a CONTROL report reads APIAuditrecord.eventName, .userId and .createdAt. Named shortfall keeping this at partial: the adjustment types are refund and upcharge, not comps, voids or price overrides; there is no separate approver field, since the refund UI's Approved By is free text per get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/order-refunds/; and no discount or override application is captured anywhere. Scoped to the CN Dashboard (portal.chownow.com v1.68.0); the legacy and Hub dashboards use different report models. Quotation: "'APIAdjustment.type', 'APIAdjustment.reason', 'APIAdjustment.staffName'," https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/helpers/reporting.js · retrieved 2026-09-10

Reports cash over/short per drawer, per shift, and per employee, comparing counted cash to expected cash from tendered transactions and paid-outs.

reporting-cash-over-short

A cash over/short report requires tendered cash and a drawer, and ChowNow takes neither: its published policy is that all orders are prepaid by credit card, and payments run card-not-present through Stripe. The published report catalogue confirms the shape - restaurant-support/how-to-run-reports/ enumerates the twelve Dashboard reports (Analytics, Accounting Data, Customer Data, Promo Data, Order Source, Order History, Order Edit Data, Cancellation Data, Order Control Data, POS Errors, Item Report, Modifier Report) and none is a drawer, shift or paid-out report. A vendor that holds no cash cannot report over/short on it, and the operator's POS remains the system of record for the drawer. Bounded to the publisher's own manifest: 278 of 278 restaurant_support articles. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/accepting-cash/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Reports sales per labor hour and labor cost as a percentage of sales by hour, by department, and by employee, using actual clocked hours from the POS time clock.

reporting-labor-productivity

The rubric asks for sales per labor hour and labor cost percentage by hour, department and employee, computed from clocked hours. ChowNow holds no clocked hours — "time clock", "clock in" and "overtime" return a single hit across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278) and it is an article about the tablet’s time-zone setting — and no report it publishes anywhere carries an hours, wage, department or employee dimension: the Dashboard catalogue quoted here is order, money, menu and diner reporting throughout, and the separately documented disbursement report is order money as well. Sales per labor hour cannot be computed without the denominator. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-run-reports/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Reports per-server metrics including average check, items per check, attachment rate for named categories, and tips as a percentage of sales. differentiator

reporting-server-scorecards

ChowNow's own POS integration prerequisite collapses the employee dimension by design: every ChowNow order is booked into the POS against one pseudo-employee named 'ChowNow' (the identical instruction appears in the Brink, Clover, Micros, Positouch and Squirrel guides, and as 'Cuboh' in the Revel guide). There is consequently no server to score on ChowNow's side, and the twelve-report Dashboard catalogue at restaurant-support/how-to-run-reports/ contains no per-employee report - average check and item mix exist only in aggregate (Analytics, Item Report, Modifier Report). ChowNow is an off-premise ordering channel that employs no servers, so per-server attribution is the POS's job. Bounded to the publisher's own manifest, 278 of 278 restaurant_support articles. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/integrating-with-your-brink-pos/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Reports revenue and margin by fulfillment channel — dine-in, direct online, first-party delivery, and each third-party marketplace separately — net of marketplace commission fees. differentiator

reporting-channel-profitability

Comparative Analytics benchmarks performance across channels, locations and time periods, with claimed 'margin reporting across every platform' and commission tracking. Explicit net-of-commission P&L by marketplace is not documented. https://get.chownow.com/products/advanced-reporting/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides a consolidated multi-location report with side-by-side location comparison and drill-down from group total to a single location and then to an individual transaction. differentiator

reporting-multiloc-drilldown

Multi-location visibility plus a dashboard location switcher and comparative analytics across locations; a formal group-to-location-to-transaction drilldown path is not documented. https://get.chownow.com/products/advanced-reporting/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Includes a self-service report builder letting a non-developer choose dimensions, measures, and filters and save the result, rather than only fixed canned reports. differentiator

reporting-custom-report-builder

RE-SCORED against the CubeJS layer instead of the help centre's report list, and the cube makes the verdict stronger rather than weaker. ChowNow reporting is a CubeJS deployment over nine cubes (`APIOrder`, `APIOrderDetail`, `APIAdjustment`, `APIOrderCancellationData`, `APIMerchant`, `APICompany`, `APIStatus`, `APIOrdergroup`, `APIAuditrecord`) — but the operator selects nothing from it. `getQueryDimensions(reportType)` is a hard-coded map from report type to a fixed dimension array (ADJUSTMENT 17 dimensions, ORDER 19, ANALYTICS 21, POS_ERROR 4); `getQueryTimeDimension(reportType)` fixes the time axis per report; and the measure vocabulary of the entire report layer is the single entry quoted above. `buildQueries` assembles the Cube query wholly from `reportType`, and the only operator inputs reaching it are `selectedDateRange`, `selectedCompanies`, `selectedMerchants`, `selectedTimezone` and an `orderID`. A dimension list the APP picks by route is a canned report, which is what the rubric excludes. The remaining operator controls are a search box, a sort toggle and a `canBeDisabled` column-visibility flag held in ephemeral hook state (`useCubohTable`: `disabledColumns: []`); `saved view`, `savedReport` and `saveReport` are zero across all three source trees, matcher proved live in the same run by `Reports` = 78/55/29. POISON, publish it: the `queryCube` comment reads 'The custom dimension added to each query' — and that custom dimension is a redis cache-buster appended as cubeQuery.database, not an operator-defined dimension. Bounded to bundle index-CuKaZvK5.js. Overturned by any dimension or measure picker reaching `buildQueries` from the UI. Quotation: "export function getQueryByMeasures(reportType) { const measures = { item: ['APIOrderDetail.count'], }; return measures[reportType]; }" https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/helpers/reporting.js · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Supports scheduling any report for automatic recurring delivery by email or to a shared destination on a defined cadence and recipient list.

reporting-scheduled-delivery

Recurring emailed reporting exists: from the Dashboard, select the location under 'Headquarters', then Settings > Email Notifications, enter email addresses and choose 'daily, weekly, and/or monthly order reports'; the article states you can 'sign up as many people as you'd like to receive' them, so cadence and recipient list are both configurable. Named shortfall: this is a notification setting for order summaries, not a scheduler for reports - the claim's 'any report' is not met. The Reports section itself (get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-run-reports/) offers Analytics, Accounting Data, Customer Data, Promo Data, Order Source, Order History, Order Edit Data, Cancellation Data, Order Control Data, POS Errors, Item Report and Modifier Report only as manual runs finished by clicking Export to Excel, with no scheduling option and no shared destination (SFTP, drive, webhook). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/daily-order-summaries-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Offers automated recurring bulk export of transaction-level raw data to a customer-controlled destination (S3, SFTP, Snowflake, BigQuery, or equivalent), not just manual CSV download. differentiator

reporting-raw-warehouse-export

Withdrawing the 'no API' leg. The ChowNow Partner API spec declares exactly ten operations - GET /v1/restaurants, GET /v1/restaurants/{id}, GET /v1/restaurants/{id}/menu, GET /v1/restaurants/{id}/availability, POST /v1/quotes, POST /v1/orders, GET /v1/orders/{id}, POST /v1/orders/{id}/cancel, GET /v1/orders/{id}/status, POST /v1/orders/{id}/refunds - and that enumeration is exhaustive for the product. None is a bulk or recurring export; there is no destination configuration of any kind (the strings S3, SFTP, warehouse, Snowflake, BigQuery and export do not occur in the document), and orders are addressable only one at a time by order_id, with no list-orders endpoint, so transaction-level data cannot even be swept programmatically. Operator-side, the dashboard offers manual CSV download only. Automated recurring bulk export to a customer-controlled destination does not exist. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-08-06

Publishes a documented public REST or GraphQL API covering orders, payments, menu, and labor data, with self-service developer credentials obtainable without a signed partner agreement. differentiator

reporting-public-api

A public API exists and is documented: 'ChowNow Developer API', OpenAPI 3.1, version 0.1.0-draft, server https://openapi.chownow.com/v1, security scheme workos_m2m (OAuth2 client-credentials via WorkOS), with exactly ten operations - GET /v1/restaurants, GET /v1/restaurants/{id}, GET /v1/restaurants/{id}/menu, GET /v1/restaurants/{id}/availability, POST /v1/quotes, POST /v1/orders, GET /v1/orders/{id}, POST /v1/orders/{id}/cancel, GET /v1/orders/{id}/status, POST /v1/orders/{id}/refunds. Coverage against the claim: orders yes (place, read, status, cancel, refund), payments partly (a Totals breakdown of item_total, discount, subtotal, sales_tax, delivery_fee, service_fee, tip, total, total_due on quotes and orders - no settlement, payout or tender reporting), menu read-only. Shortfalls: no labor data of any kind; there is no list-orders or reporting endpoint, so this is a transactional partner-ordering API rather than a reporting API; and credentials are not self-service - 'Ask ChowNow for Partner API access. Your request is reviewed by our team; it can be approved for sandbox, or declined', with production access granted only after sandbox approval and governed by an integration agreement. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-09-17

Emits outbound webhooks for order and payment lifecycle events to a customer-supplied endpoint, with documented retry behavior and payload signature verification. differentiator

reporting-webhooks

Outbound webhooks exist on one of ChowNow's two published APIs. The Cuboh Direct spec (Cuboh is ChowNow's subsidiary, the engine behind the Hub product) carries an OpenAPI 3.1 'webhooks:' block with orders.new, orders.update, orders.accept, orders.adjust, orders.cancel, orders.complete, merchant.new, merchant.update, merchant.open, merchant.close, delivered to a subscriber-defined HTTPS URL, signed with an 'X-Cuboh-Signature' HMAC-SHA256 of the body, and retried on 500/502/503/504/429 'based on an exponential backoff algorithm. Ex. 1 second after the initial attempt, then 2 seconds, then 4 seconds until 5 total events were sent'. Shortfalls: ChowNow's own Partner API (developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json, verified 2026-08-06) declares no webhooks and no callbacks at all - order state is polled via GET /v1/orders/{id}/status; there are no payment lifecycle events (no paid, voided or refunded webhook - Cuboh exposes refund only as an inbound POST); and the endpoint owner must be a QA-certified Cuboh channel partner, not an operator supplying their own URL. https://docs.cuboh.com/static/media/direct.cc50b46f10923bea774a.yml · retrieved 2026-08-06

API and raw-data access are included in the standard subscription rather than gated behind an additional per-location fee, revenue share, or enterprise-only contract. differentiator

reporting-api-not-upcharged

Withdrawing 'no API to include' - an API exists. It is nonetheless not a subscription entitlement. The Getting Access page enumerates the complete lifecycle in four stages: 'Partner API access is granted in two stages: sandbox first, then production. Production access is only reachable after sandbox approval - the ordering is enforced by the platform, not by convention'; 'Ask ChowNow for Partner API access. Your request is reviewed by our team; it can be approved for sandbox, or declined'; and 'Approved access can later be revoked under the terms of your integration agreement.' No path from a ChowNow restaurant subscription to API or raw-data access appears anywhere on the portal, and the API's own description scopes it to 'ChowNow marketplace partners' rather than to subscribing restaurants. Access is therefore gated behind a separately negotiated partner agreement, which is exactly what this claim asks about; the commercial terms of that agreement are not published. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/getting-access · retrieved 2026-09-17

Core reporting beyond basic sales summaries — labor vs sales, PMIX, comps/voids audit, multi-location comparison — is available on the entry-level paid plan rather than requiring a higher tier or an add-on analytics SKU. differentiator

reporting-tier-paywall

DOWNGRADED FROM GRADE A, because the evidence that actually carries this verdict is a pricing sheet and an inference, not source. The source half is solid and unchanged: CN Dashboard v1.68.0 gates navigation on per-location entitlement scopes, and ITEM_REPORT and MODIFIER_REPORT - ChowNow's product-mix reports - plus ORDER_HISTORY, ORDER_EDIT_DATA, ORDER_CONTROL_DATA, ORDER_CANCELLATIONS, ORDERS_CONTROL and OVERVIEW all require canSeeAggregationPage, which in scopes/helpers.ts resolves to the location scope feature:restaurant.orders_aggregation, while [ANALYTICS] carries an empty condition array and is therefore ungated. But the source establishes only that those reports are entitlement-gated; it does not say which tier grants the entitlement. That step comes from this pricing sheet, where the Third-Party Order Aggregation row's Launch cell carries the not-included glyph, and it rests on equating the scope name feature:restaurant.orders_aggregation with the sheet's 'Third-Party Order Aggregation' row - a plausible but undocumented identification. So: product mix is tier-gated above the entry plan, basic sales and multi-location comparison are on the entry plan, and labor-versus-sales and comps/voids reports do not exist at any tier, so no higher tier unlocks them. That last point is why this stays partial rather than no. https://get.chownow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Pricing-Sheet-2026-Affiliates.pdf · retrieved 2026-09-10

Documents a historical retention window of at least 24 months of transaction-level detail queryable in the reporting UI, with no silent truncation or archive retrieval fee. differentiator

reporting-history-retention

The Analytics view carries no history limit: 'You are able to view sales data starting from your first day on ChowNow', over an operator-selected date range, exportable to CSV. Named shortfall: that is aggregate sales analytics (gross vs net sales, order source, average order amount, hourly peaks), not the transaction-level detail the claim requires. On the transaction-level reports, get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-run-reports/ documents the Accounting Data report as showing individual orders 'up to 90 days' and Order Source as covering 'a time range no greater than 30 days'. ChowNow publishes no retention window for order-level data, states nothing about truncation, and names no archive-retrieval fee, so a 24-month transaction-level look-back is neither documented as available nor priced. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-view-sales-analytics-on-the-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Sends proactive push or email alerts when an operator-configured metric breaches a threshold or deviates from its historical pattern (e.g. void spike, sales below forecast, discount rate anomaly). differentiator

reporting-anomaly-alerts

329th: CLAIM: proactive push/email alerts when an operator-configured metric breaches a threshold or deviates from history. VERDICT: no. THE DECISIVE SURFACE THE PRIOR NOTE ASKED FOR IS PUBLISHED AS AN IMAGE, NOT TEXT, WHICH IS WHY THREE PASSES MISSED IT. The article 'How do I update my reporting notifications?' (modified 2024-08-25, still live and still serving the image today) illustrates step 6 with a full-resolution capture of the Email Notifications panel itself: https://get.chownow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/notifications-2.png (552 KB, read as an image). The panel enumerates EVERY checkbox: 'Order Cancellations', 'Orders / Delivery', 'Orders / Pickup', 'Orders Report - Daily', 'Orders Report - Weekly', 'Orders Report - Monthly', 'Schedule Change', with a legend defining four of them ('Orders/Delivery - Notification when a delivery order is placed'; 'Orders Report (Daily/Weekly/Monthly) - Report of orders coming from your website, mobile apps, and Facebook page'; 'Order Cancellations - Notification when an order is not acknowledged in time and cancelled by the system'). Every option is either a per-order EVENT or a fixed-calendar report digest; there is no metric, no operator-set value, no comparison to history, and no threshold field anywhere in the panel. The one option added since (how-to-enable-catering, 2026-02: a 'Catering Inquiry Request' checkbox 'under any email addresses') is also an event. Corroboration on a second surface: /products/advanced-reporting/ (2026-07-24, a page-builder page whose REST content is empty, fetched as HTML) enumerates the whole reporting module - 'Order Reports', 'Item & Modifier Reports', 'Comparative Analytics benchmark performance across channels, locations, and time periods', 'Disbursement Reports' - and no alerting of any kind. BOUND/CONTROLS: get.chownow.com censused via WP REST to 100% of every public type - posts 198/198, pages 216/216, restaurant_support 277/277, diner_support 37/37 (each == its X-WP-Total header), 728 bodies / 3.28 MB stripped text - PLUS the 184 pages whose REST content is empty because they are page-builder pages, re-fetched as HTML (1.22 MB stripped text): that hole is what hid /products/advanced-reporting/ from earlier passes. Tokenised, word-boundary, case-insensitive controls over both corpora: anomaly 0/0, deviation 0/0, 'below forecast' 0, unusual 1 (blog prose), alert 11/0 (all poison: third-party inventory/scheduling software in blog prose, a Stripe 'Information Required Alerts' heading, a tablet app-update banner), threshold 11/1 (all Rewards order minimums and blog prose). POISON NAMED: 'rate' matches 'flat-rate' and 'open-rate' 50 times; 'spike' is blog prose 11 times. Retrieved 2026-09-18. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-update-my-reporting-notifications/ · retrieved 2026-09-18 adversarially verified

Offers a natural-language query or AI assistant that answers ad-hoc questions against the operator's own sales and labor data and returns a figure or chart, not a generic help-article response.

reporting-nl-query

RE-HOMED, because the prior citation was not the closed enumeration it was described as. CN Dashboard v1.68.0's reporting layer is queried only through buildQueries, which composes the whole Cube query from `reportType` plus a date range, a timezone and company/merchant filters; there is no free-text-to-query path and no operator-supplied member anywhere in it. The app's route table (src/Router.jsx) is the closed surface enumeration and contains no assistant, chat, ask or query route, and src-cuboh config/router.config.js - ChowNow Hub's whole route table - has none either. Tokenised over all three shipped source trees with a file-based matcher (never an inline shell regex), `openai`, `anthropic`, `llm`, `copilot`, `chatgpt` and `gpt-` each return zero hits; the same run returned `Reports` 78/55/29 and `assistant` 12, every one of the twelve inside vendored Pusher transport code (assistant_to_the_transport_manager.ts), so the matcher fired and carried its own poison. AUDIT CORRECTION to a published figure: `llm` was published as zero corpus-wide and the page-builder backfill has falsified the number - it is now 3 documents, all of them diner-facing SEO copy on /products/advanced-reporting/ and /products/marketplace/ about 'structured data that helps LLMs like ChatGPT surface and recommend you'. That is about a restaurant's discoverability to consumer chatbots, not a query interface over operator data, so the invariance holds and the verdict does not move. Overturned by a later bundle shipping a query assistant. Quotation: "export function buildQueries(queryData) { const { reportType, order, selectedDateRange, selectedTimezone } = queryData;" https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/helpers/reporting.js · retrieved 2026-09-10

Reports guest-level analytics including new versus returning guest counts, visit frequency, and lifetime spend cohorts tied to identifiable guest records from loyalty or online ordering. differentiator

reporting-guest-cohorts

Guest-level raw data yes, cohort reporting no. The Customer Data report 'will show you your customer's email addresses, when they ordered last, the total number of orders they've placed at your restaurant and much more', and the dashboard article adds 'each diner's total spend, amount of orders, their average purchase' - so lifetime spend and order frequency are available per identifiable diner and exportable. Named shortfall: no documented report of new-versus-returning guest counts, retention or frequency cohorts; Order Source gives only 'the amount of customers you had, their average order amount, your largest order' for a window of at most 30 days, and the New/Repeat/VIP/Lapsed lifecycle segments are selectable as campaign audiences, not reported as cohort sizes. Campaign reports are aggregate only (sent, opens, clicks, sales within 14 days, unsubscribes). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-run-reports/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Produces a forward sales forecast at daypart or hourly granularity from the location's own history, exposed in the reporting UI and consumable by scheduling or ordering workflows. differentiator

reporting-sales-forecast

This is exclusive affirmative prose about the ChowNow Dashboard Analytics page, the only forward-looking candidate on the record: the page cannot render the current day, let alone a future one, and CN Dashboard v1.68.0 corroborates it in code — containers/Reporting/CNAnalytics.jsx sets the date picker's `maxDate` to `dayjs().subtract(1, 'day')`. Every measure on the record is retrospective: the nine in `CN_REPORTS_TYPE` that feed the Analytics charts, and the single entry in `getQueryByMeasures` that is the whole measure vocabulary of the CubeJS report layer, whose nine cubes carry no forward-looking dimension at all. `forecast` returns zero hits across all three source trees and zero in wp:restaurant_support, cuboh-support and the two OpenAPI specs; the 34 stem-mode corpus documents are entirely blog and Webflow marketing prose giving generic advice about forecasting (A = 22 docs/32 hits, B = 34/78, so the stem mode is proved firing in the same run). Bounded to this corpus. Overturned by the live body of get.chownow.com/products/advanced-reporting/, which is in the 186-page hole; its 2026-07-03 Wayback snapshot contains `forecast` 0 and `predict` 0 while `Advanced Reporting` = 6. Quotation: "Can I view my Analytics data for the current day? You must select a day in the past for the data to be shown." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-view-sales-trends-on-the-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

Generates payroll- and tax-ready tip reporting: declared versus charged tips per employee, tip pool distribution detail, and a tax liability summary by jurisdiction.

reporting-tip-tax-compliance

ChowNow issues restaurant-level 1099s only; there is no employee-level declared-vs-charged tip reporting or pool distribution detail. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/billing-my-account/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports a named organizational hierarchy of at least three levels (e.g. enterprise > region/group > location) as a first-class object that reporting and permissions can be scoped to, not just a flat list of locations.

multi-location-org-hierarchy

An above-store tier exists and is a real object rather than a flat list: the dashboard shows a 'Headquarters' label in the left sidebar and the operator switches context by clicking it and then searching for or selecting a location. Reporting can span it - the Analytics view lets the operator 'select either a single location or multiple locations to view their sales data' (get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-view-sales-trends-on-the-dashboard/) - and permissions are scoped to it: Settings > Users > Create offers Company admin, who 'can change settings for all locations', or Regional admin, who is 'only associated with a specific location'. Named shortfall: the hierarchy is two levels (Headquarters > location), not the three the claim requires. Despite its name the Regional admin role is scoped to named locations, not to a region; no region, group, market or brand object is documented anywhere as something reporting or permissions can target, and multi-location reporting is done by multi-selecting individual locations. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-can-i-switch-which-location-i-am-viewing-in-the-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

A corporate-level menu can be authored once and published to a chosen set of locations in a single action, with a publish/version history showing what was pushed, when, and by whom.

multi-location-central-menu-publish

Centralized menu management publishes one edit across channels from a single dashboard. Publishing to a selected set of LOCATIONS with version history showing what/when/who is not documented. https://get.chownow.com/products/order-aggregation/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Corporate menu items expose per-field override rules so a location can change some attributes (e.g. price, availability) while corporate locks others (e.g. name, image, recipe), and locked fields are not editable at store level. differentiator

multi-location-local-override-policy

CN Dashboard v1.68.0 (portal.chownow.com, the current ChowNow operator dashboard) does have a corporate master menu: linking merchants to a menu makes it a master and each linked merchant receives a cloned menu, and the clone's per-record Enabled/Disabled switch is explicitly NOT inherited from the master, so item availability is genuinely location-owned. That is a real per-field split, but it is one field wide and it is not configurable: src/helpers/masterMenuPermissions.js emits a per-record tooltip reading 'You cannot edit master menu ... in cloned menus. Use master menu to edit.' and the row flag that drives it (noEdit) is per record, not per field, so price and name are locked at store level with no rule to configure. AUDIT ADDITION: ChowNow's own blog claims more than the code delivers - get.chownow.com/blog/online-ordering-multi-location-restaurants/ says ChowNow is built on an architecture of 'one master menu with per-location overrides' with 'controlled overrides for local pricing, item availability, and hours'. That is a grade-D marketing claim contradicted by the grade-A shipped source, and the source governs. Overturned by a corporate field-lock configuration surface, which does not exist in these 1,036 files. Quotation: "Enabled/Disabled changes on the master menu do not apply to the clones. Please access cloned menus to update them." https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/components/MenuManagement/Fields/RecordEnabledSwitch.jsx · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports price tiers/zones so one menu item carries different prices per location group, per order channel, and per daypart without duplicating the item record.

multi-location-price-zones

One of the claim's three dimensions is real and now primary-sourced. The ChowNow Partner API spec (OpenAPI 3.1, developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json) documents the menu fetch as issued 'with a neutral User-Agent (partner-gateway/1.0) and NO cn_channel query param -> base, no-markup pricing (CN-48933)' - so ChowNow's menu service carries a channel-keyed markup over a single base price, the same mechanism the vendor markets as 'a baked-in tool that automatically adjusts menu prices to offset standard fees'. One item record, different prices by channel, no duplication. Shortfalls: the markup is ChowNow's automatic fee-offset keyed to a channel identifier, not an operator-defined price tier or zone object - no zone/tier entity appears in the spec or in the Menu Editor articles; there is no location-group price dimension (menus resolve per restaurant_id, and bulk edit is documented only as one uniform dollar or percentage change across 'All Items' or 'All Modifiers'); and per-daypart pricing is positively excluded - 'ChowNow will always display the base price at all times of the day'. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-08-06

Menu, price, and promo changes can be scheduled to activate at a future date/time interpreted in each target location's own timezone, and can be rolled back after activation. differentiator

multi-location-scheduled-publish

Future-dated activation exists in CN Dashboard v1.68.0 but only for Special/Holiday hours: setting hours for a future date queues an automatic whole-menu publish a fixed number of days ahead. It fails the claim's timezone requirement affirmatively rather than by silence - src/components/Modals/MenuInfoModal/MenuInfoModal.jsx carries the comment 'No matter where the restaurant is, we always publish' followed by 'at 1am Pacific Time (where the server is located)', and renders the operator-facing string as scheduled to be published on a date 'at 1am PT'. No effective-date field exists for a price or a promo change: bulk price edits apply immediately, and the only reversal is src/components/MenuManagement/MenuEdit/EditByBulk/BulkHistory.tsx, which offers Undo on the single most recent entry, warning 'This will reset the price to what it was before all bulk price updates.' The term `version history` returns 0 documents in both boundary modes over the whole 3,319-document corpus. Overturned by a scheduled-change object carrying a per-location effective time. Quotation: "This menu will be automatically published on ${scheduledPublishDate} at 1am, with ${dayName} set to these hours." https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/helpers/menuManagementHours.js · retrieved 2026-09-10

A new location can be provisioned by cloning a documented configuration template (menu, taxes, roles, printers, modifiers, tenders) rather than being configured from scratch, and the vendor publishes the expected time-to-open. differentiator

multi-location-new-store-template

A new location is NOT configured from scratch for menus: adding the new merchant to an existing master menu in CN Dashboard v1.68.0 provisions it a cloned menu carrying the master's categories, items and modifiers. That is the whole of the template. No tax, role, printer or tender configuration is cloned by any surface in the 1,036-file portal source, and ChowNow is not a POS so it holds no tender configuration of its own. AUDIT CORRECTION to the prior note's second half: the analyst's control for 'undocumented' was `clone`, which is the auditor's word and not the vendor's, and it fails the brief's vendor-vocabulary rule. ChowNow's own help centre DOES name the mechanism - get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/what-is-the-menu-editor/ lists 'Integrations, Linked Merchants, and Recently Published' as tabs of Menu Info. So the mechanism is named to operators, but nothing published explains master/clone inheritance or what a linked merchant receives, and no expected time-to-open is published anywhere: the vendor's own article on adding a location (get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-add-another-restaurant-chownow/) is a hand-off to a Restaurant Success Manager with no timeline. Bounded to this corpus, now 3,701 documents with 17 page-builder bodies still unread, all of them forms and confirmation pages. A published launch timeline would move the second conjunct. Quotation: "Adding merchants here will make this menu a master. Linked merchants will receive a cloned menu with limited functionality. Removing a merchant also removes their cloned menu. Contact support for assistance." https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/components/MenuManagement/MenuEdit/LinkedMerchants/LinkedMerchants.jsx · retrieved 2026-09-10

The permission model distinguishes a franchisor/corporate tenant from an independently-owned franchisee tenant, so corporate can see franchisee sales and enforce config while the franchisee owns its own employees, banking, and labor data. differentiator

multi-location-corp-vs-franchisee-roles

RE-HOMED from the legacy dashboard to the current one, because a three-tier constant in a superseded app is a weak ceiling for the current product. The current CN Dashboard v1.68.0 carries the same closed set on the live user record: helpers/heap.ts identifies a user by exactly is_chownow_admin, is_region_admin and is_super_admin, and hooks/useProvideAuth.jsx derives isInternalUser = is_chownow_admin || is_super_admin, so of the three booleans only is_region_admin is a customer-side distinction and the rest is ChowNow staff. Everything else in the current app is an ENTITLEMENT scope on a location (feature:restaurant.*) or a per-field company write scope in scopes/headquarter.js - what the account bought, not who owns it. There is no second tenancy anywhere: every role is a scope inside one company, so no franchisor tenant can hold a separately-owned franchisee tenant. The two other role enumerations agree - ChowNow Hub's nine-entry PERMISSIONS list has no ownership role, and the master-menu tier model is binary FULL_ACCESS / LIMITED_ACCESS. The claim's second half has no counterpart at all, since ChowNow operates no labor or employee module. Overturned by a franchisee account object with its own billing relationship. Quotation: "is_chownow_admin: user.is_chownow_admin, is_region_admin: user.is_region_admin, is_super_admin: user.is_super_admin," https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/helpers/heap.ts · retrieved 2026-09-10

Calculates franchise royalty, ad-fund, and marketing-fee amounts automatically from POS net sales on a defined schedule, with a configurable royalty basis (gross vs net of discounts/comps/third-party). differentiator

multi-location-royalty-calculation

The current Restaurant Agreement (66,133 characters, 'Current Version as of August 6, 2026') governs the whole relationship, and its single use of the word franchise is this warranty that the restaurant's OWN franchise agreement is a third-party contract ChowNow is not party to - no franchisor is a party, so there is nothing for which to compute a royalty. The behavioural side is a closed set that agrees: CN Dashboard v1.68.0's fee-configuration container (src/containers/TransactionFees/TransactionFees.tsx) renders exactly four fee cards - CreditCardFeesCard, ObnFeesCard, SupportLocalFeesCard, CateringFeesCard - all of them ChowNow's own charges, none carrying a gross-versus-net basis selector, and the page throws unauthorized for anyone who is not an internal user. The terms `ad fund` and `advertising fund` each return 0 documents in both boundary modes across the 3,319-document corpus, and the stem `royalt` matches 27 times in 13 documents (17 in 12 for the exact token `royalty`), zero of them in the 278 merchant help articles and zero in any of the 1,679 source files: 10 stem matches are IP-licence boilerplate in the get.chownow.com legal set ('royalty-free', 'rights to payment of royalties') and the other 17 are SEO blog copy on cuboh.com about franchising in general. Consistent with this record's sibling multi-location-royalty-collection, already `no` at grade B on the same document. Quotation: "the execution and delivery of the Agreement by it and the performance of its obligations hereunder are not in violation or breach of, and will not conflict with or constitute a default under, any contract, agreement, or commitment binding upon it, including, with respect to Restaurant, any franchise agreement." https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Supports automated ACH/debit collection of calculated royalties and fees from franchisee accounts, with a franchisee-visible statement of what was charged.

multi-location-royalty-collection

The current Restaurant Agreement ('Current Version as of August 6, 2026') defines the entire commercial relationship - Subscription Types, Fees, Credit Card Processing Charges, disbursements, PCI compliance at 4.7, auto-renewal at 5.1 - and its single mention of a franchise agreement is a warranty that the restaurant's OWN franchise agreement is a separate contract ChowNow is not party to and must not conflict with. Money moves one way: ChowNow collects its subscription and processing fees and disburses order proceeds to the restaurant (restaurant-support/how-do-i-access-my-disbursement-reports/). No franchisor party, royalty calculation, franchisee debit or franchisee-visible royalty statement appears anywhere in the 28-document legal set or in 278 of 278 help articles; 'royalty' occurs only inside IP licence boilerplate ('royalty-free'). https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Provides above-store reporting that aggregates sales, labor, discounts, voids, and item mix across any selected set of locations in one view, with store-vs-store ranking and variance flags.

multi-location-consolidated-reporting

Dashboard tracks sales and ordering trends 'across first- and third-party channels with multi-location visibility' and benchmarks across locations. Store-vs-store ranking and variance flags are not documented. https://get.chownow.com/products/advanced-reporting/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Item-level sales roll up across locations under a shared corporate item ID even when stores have renamed or locally priced the item. differentiator

multi-location-normalized-item-rollup

OVERTURNED from partial. The rubric's discriminating clause is 'under a shared corporate item ID even when stores have renamed ... the item', and the current CN Dashboard fails it positively rather than by silence. The Item Report's grouping key IS the item's display-name string - the quoted line, under the file's own comment 'Group by Item Name (returns Object)' - so a store that renames an item splits into a second row, which is exactly the condition the rubric exists to test. There is no corporate item identifier in the reporting model at any point: helpers/reporting.js hard-codes the ITEM report's dimensions as APIOrderDetail.item, .price, .quantity, APIOrder.merchantId, .created, APIOrder.app and APIOrder.statusOrder, with no item id, and the single measure of the whole report layer is APIOrderDetail.count. Cross-location aggregation does exist and local pricing does not break it, but rollup by display name is the trivial case; the shared-identifier mechanism the claim asks for is absent. Scoped to CN Dashboard v1.68.0 (portal.chownow.com); ChowNow Hub's only SKU concept is the POS's own per-merchant id used for menu mapping. Overturned by an item-level report keyed on a shared identifier. Quotation: "const groupedItemObject = groupBy(result, order => [order['APIOrderDetail.item']]);" https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/hooks/useProvideCubohReporting.jsx · retrieved 2026-09-10

Gift cards issued at one location are redeemable at any other location in the brand, with a reported outstanding-liability balance and inter-store settlement/redemption reconciliation between owners.

multi-location-cross-location-giftcard

CLAIM: gift cards issued at one location redeem at any other, with liability balance and inter-store settlement. VERDICT: no/B - ChowNow publishes a CLOSED enumeration of the tenders it accepts, and a gift card is not among them, so there is no ChowNow gift-card instrument to redeem cross-location. EVIDENCE: get.chownow.com/diner-support/payment-options/ (Yoast lastmod 2024-08-26): 'All major credit/debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, AMEX) are accepted. Apple Pay is also accepted if you are using the restaurant's iOS application. All other payment options (Cash, PayPal, Android Pay, etc) are not accepted at this time.' Corroborated by get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/accepting-cash/: 'We do not accept cash so that all ChowNow orders are prepaid by credit card.' and /restaurant-support/using-separate-payment-processor/: 'ChowNow requires all of our clients to use our current payment processor.' BOUND/CONTROLS: the verdict rests on the enumeration's exclusivity clause ('All other payment options ... are not accepted'), not on a zero-hit. Supporting controls: `gift card(s)` (tokenised, word-boundary, case-insensitive) = 0 of 42 diner-support + recent restaurant-support pages fetched this pass (diner_support-sitemap.xml lists 38) and 0 of 105 support.cuboh.com (ChowNow Hub) Intercom pages (sitemap 105 = fetched 105); the one `gift` hit is the VIP campaign's '$5 thank-you gift' (POISON: a marketing credit, not stored value). Prior pass: 0 in 1,679 dashboard source files. CAVEAT: the enumeration is dated 2024-08 and some restaurant-support articles are password-protected ('Protected: General Refund Guidelines'), so the help centre is not a full census; the no rests on the dated closed enumeration. Fetched with a browser UA (get.chownow.com 403s a bare UA via Cloudflare; robots.txt is a generic User-agent: * with no bar). Retrieved 2026-09-16. https://get.chownow.com/diner-support/payment-options/ · retrieved 2026-09-16 adversarially verified

A single customer loyalty profile, balance, and stored order history is shared across all locations in the brand rather than being per-location.

multi-location-cross-location-loyalty

ChowNow states the limitation directly: 'Today the Rewards Program works on a per-location basis only.' A diner's sticker accrual and unlocked reward therefore belong to the individual location that ran the program, and are not shared across the other locations of the brand; each location configures its own sticker goal, minimum order value and reward value, and changes 'go into effect for new diners going forward' at that location. The claim's requirement of a single loyalty profile and balance shared brand-wide is not met by design. (The diner does hold one ChowNow account with order history, but the loyalty balance the claim turns on is explicitly per location.) https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/get-started-with-our-restaurant-rewards-program/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

A single location/terminal can operate two or more distinct brands or virtual brands with separate menus, receipts/branding, and separately reportable revenue, on the same hardware and drawer. differentiator

multi-location-multi-brand

ChowNow Hub (formerly Cuboh), the order-aggregation product, treats a brand as a merchant object: its own KB writes 'merchants/brands' as one term, its storefront article says the parent page 'will apply across all brands', and its tablet article describes toggling app integrations by concept, broken down by merchant. Each merchant carries its own menu and its own app integrations, and revenue is separately reportable, every Hub report filtering on the selected merchant set and carrying an APIMerchant.name dimension. Two named shortfalls. First, the hardware half is only half met: multiple merchants can be hooked up to one Hub tablet and filtered there, but ChowNow sells no POS terminal and no cash drawer, so the claim's 'same hardware and drawer' has no counterpart, and per-brand receipt branding is documented in neither the 126-article Hub KB nor the 278-article ChowNow help centre. Second, the ChowNow ordering platform's own multi-brand switch, write:company.is_multi_concept in src/scopes/headquarter.js, is rendered only behind user.is_super_admin in src/containers/HqDetails/HqDetails.jsx - a ChowNow-internal flag on the headquarters record, not an operator-configurable one. Quotation: "If you have multiple merchants/brands, you may see that the Create or Import button is greyed out." https://support.cuboh.com/en/articles/5795607-adding-a-new-menu-to-cuboh · retrieved 2026-09-10

Tax configuration is per-location with support for multiple simultaneous tax rates, jurisdiction-specific rules (e.g. prepared-food vs grocery, inclusive vs exclusive tax), and per-location tax exemptions.

multi-location-multi-tax-jurisdiction

Tax is handled per location and ChowNow publishes a Marketplace Facilitator Laws FAQ covering marketplace-collected tax; subscription sales tax is applied by state/local rules. Multiple simultaneous rates and prepared-food vs grocery rules are not documented. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/order-and-payments-processing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports locations operating in different currencies and languages within one enterprise account, with consolidated reporting converted to a reporting currency.

multi-location-multi-currency-locale

ChowNow operates in the US and Canada — the support portal has a Canada-specific section — but consolidated multi-currency reporting is not documented. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Produces an immutable audit log of who changed which configuration object (price, tax, permission, discount) at which location and when, exportable or queryable by corporate. differentiator

multi-location-config-audit-log

An audit-record store exists and corporate can query it: CN Dashboard v1.68.0 queries an APIAuditrecord cube carrying payload, createdAt, eventName, userId, companyId and merchantId; the Order Control report renders it as Date, Time, Event, Source, User, Status, Location and Merchant Name (src/components/Reporting/TableView/tableView.columns.js), filtered on the selected companies; and it exports to CSV through the default branch of ReportingExportDataButton.jsx. The bound is the event vocabulary, a closed two-value set in this app: src/constants/reporting.js declares exactly STORE_STATUS_UPDATED and POS_EXCEPTION, and reporting.js filters the two audit reports on precisely those. So the log answers who paused ordering at which location and when, and nothing about a price, tax, permission or discount change - the one change history that does cover prices, src/api/useFetchBulkHistory.ts, returns detail, logUuid, timestamp and type with no user field at all. The term `audit log` returns 0 documents in both boundary modes over the corpus, so none of this is documented to operators, and immutability is unmeasured. Overturned by a further eventName reaching that cube. Quotation: "[CONTROL]: [ 'APIAuditrecord.payload', 'APIAuditrecord.createdAt', 'APIAuditrecord.eventName', 'APIAuditrecord.userId', 'APIAuditrecord.companyId', ]," https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/helpers/reporting.js · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports SSO via SAML or OIDC against the customer's identity provider for back-office/above-store users, with SCIM or equivalent for automated deprovisioning. differentiator

multi-location-enterprise-sso

CN Dashboard v1.68.0's only sign-in surface takes an email and a password: no identity-provider button, no discovery step, no redirect. Its sole login function (src/hooks/useProvideAuth.jsx) calls consolidatedLogin with email and password or a password-reset key, resolves a ChowNow and/or a Hub session, and throws 'invalid consolidated auth state' on anything else, so the path is exhaustive. The terms `SAML`, `OIDC`, `SCIM` and `single sign-on` each return 0 documents in BOTH boundary modes across the whole corpus, source bundles included, and `workos`, `authkit`, `auth0` and `okta` appear in none of the recovered source files. AUDIT CORRECTION to a figure: the source-file counts in the prior note do not reproduce - the corpus holds 1,781 JS/TS files, not 1,679, and the per-app split is portal 1,036 / legacy 612 / Hub 133, not 1,034 / 512 / 133. The invariance is unaffected: all four terms are zero across every one of them. The one countervailing token is a telemetry type union in src/helpers/dashboardAnalytics.ts declaring LoginMethod as email_password, sso or google - but it has no producer: all three call sites of trackUserLoggedIn pass email_password. Overturned by an operator-facing IdP configuration screen or a published enterprise tier; ChowNow publishes three per-location tiers and no enterprise tier. Quotation: "export type LoginFormValues = { emailUsername: string; password: string };" https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/containers/UserAuth/Login/LoginForm.tsx · retrieved 2026-09-10

Publishes a documented multi-location API (or data warehouse/BI export) that returns transaction-level data across all locations in one authenticated call, without per-location credentials. differentiator

multi-location-enterprise-api

Withdrawing 'no public API of any kind'. A public API exists and one credential does span locations - a single organization-level OAuth2 client-credentials token authorizes GET /v1/restaurants across the whole ChowNow network, so per-location credentials are not required. But the claim's substance, transaction-level data across all locations in one authenticated call, is absent: of the ten declared operations the only order reads are GET /v1/orders/{order_id} and GET /v1/orders/{order_id}/status, both single-order and both requiring an order_id the caller already holds. There is no list-orders, no date-range query, no per-location transaction feed and no BI or warehouse export operation in the document, and the spec's operation list is exhaustive. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-08-06

Labor rules (overtime, break enforcement, predictive-scheduling compliance) are configurable per location or location group and enforced at the terminal, not just reported after the fact.

multi-location-central-labor-policy

The post-Cuboh Dashboard splits into a Headquarters view (Dashboard Home and reports) and a Location view (Orders, Menu Editor, Orders Control, Integrations) — a reporting rollup plus centralized menu management, with no labor object anywhere in it. There is therefore no overtime, break or predictive-scheduling rule to configure per location or location group, and no ChowNow terminal on which to enforce one: the platform holds no employee identities (its user model is two admin roles) and ChowNow orders are booked against a single pseudo-employee on the operator’s POS. "overtime", "break enforcement" and "predictive scheduling" return 0 hits across the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/introduction-to-the-chownow-dashboard/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Public, self-serve API reference documentation is readable without a signed partner agreement, NDA, or sales call.

extensibility-public-api-docs

Withdrawing the earlier shortfall that ChowNow publishes no API reference of its own. developer.chownow.com serves /docs/openapi.json (OpenAPI 3.1, 55KB, HTTP 200, no credentials) plus /docs/getting-started, /docs/getting-access and /docs/authentication as full prose - all four retrieved anonymously on 2026-08-06. The reference is complete on its face: base URL, the ten operations, request and response schemas, error shapes, the workos_m2m OAuth2 client-credentials scheme with its five scopes, the token endpoints, a worked curl token exchange, the rate limit, a troubleshooting table and the live-vs-501 endpoint status list. Nothing is behind a sign-in, an NDA or a sales call - the 'Sign in' and 'Request access' links govern credential issuance, not readability. Cuboh's Direct and Connect specs (docs.cuboh.com) are separately readable in full and corroborate the same posture for the Hub product. The API is versioned 0.1.0-draft, which bears on maturity but not on whether the documentation is public. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-08-06

API access is included in the base subscription at no additional per-location fee, surcharge, or upgraded plan requirement. differentiator

extensibility-api-access-cost

Withdrawing 'no ChowNow operator API exists to be priced'. The Partner API exists, and the portal enumerates its access path completely, with no subscription route among the stages: 'Partner API access is granted in two stages: sandbox first, then production. Production access is only reachable after sandbox approval - the ordering is enforced by the platform, not by convention'; 'Ask ChowNow for Partner API access. Your request is reviewed by our team; it can be approved for sandbox, or declined'; 'Approved access can later be revoked under the terms of your integration agreement'; and 'your integration agreement determines which scopes and endpoints are available to you'. The API is scoped to 'ChowNow marketplace partners' - buying a ChowNow restaurant subscription (Launch, Grow or Elevate on get.chownow.com/pricing/) grants no API access at all, and the public Restaurant Agreement's fee definitions (Subscription Fee, Marketing Fee, Add-On Fees, Set up Fee, Direct Service Charge, Credit Card Processing Charges) contain no API entitlement. So access is conditioned on a separate negotiated agreement rather than included; what that agreement costs is not published. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/getting-access · retrieved 2026-09-17

The vendor publishes its partner/marketplace commercial terms (referral fee, revenue share percentage, or per-location partner fee) in public documentation.

extensibility-partner-revshare

'If a restaurant uses your link to purchase a ChowNow Subscription, you'll earn a $500 reward after they've been live with ChowNow for 30 days. You'll get an email from PartnerStack to create an account and get paid via PayPal or Stripe.' The page is public and ungated, states no referral cap ('There's no limit to how many restaurants you can refer'), does not require the referrer to be a customer, and enumerates qualifying and excluded business types plus the conditions under which a referral is marked unqualified. A specific referral fee is therefore published; a percentage rev-share for integration partners is not, but the claim is satisfied by any one of the three named forms. https://get.chownow.com/refer-a-restaurant/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

A free sandbox or test environment with seeded data is available to developers without owning a paid production account. differentiator

extensibility-free-sandbox

Re-scored against ChowNow's own portal rather than the Cuboh spec. A first-party sandbox exists and precedes any paid relationship: base URLs are 'Production https://openapi.chownow.com/v1' and 'Sandbox https://partner.openapi.chownow.com/v1 (being provisioned)', with a separate sandbox token issuer, and the access lifecycle grants sandbox first - 'Production access is only reachable after sandbox approval'. No fee is attached to it and no production account is required to reach it. Shortfalls, all stated by ChowNow: it is not open self-serve - 'Ask ChowNow for Partner API access. Your request is reviewed by our team; it can be approved for sandbox, or declined'; it is still 'being provisioned'; and there is no seeded test data because it is not an isolated environment at all - 'Sandbox and production credentials call the same API with the same data - the only difference is which set of credentials you were issued. There is no order or data isolation between the two today.' Cuboh's core-staging.cuboh.net development server exists on the Hub side under the same manual-credential model. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/getting-started · retrieved 2026-08-06

Third-party apps authenticate via OAuth 2.0 with scoped, operator-granted, individually revocable permissions (not shared static API keys or credential sharing).

extensibility-oauth-partner-apps

The ChowNow Developer API (OpenAPI title 'ChowNow Developer API', version 0.1.0-draft, server https://openapi.chownow.com/v1) declares exactly one security scheme, 'workos_m2m: type: oauth2', with a clientCredentials flow (production token endpoint https://auth.developer.chownow.com/oauth2/token, sandbox https://diverse-touch-59-partner.authkit.app/oauth2/token) and five scopes - restaurants:read, catalog:read, orders:read, orders:write, orders:refund - applied per operation (GET /v1/restaurants requires restaurants:read; POST /v1/orders/{order_id}/refunds requires orders:refund). The Authentication guide adds that the token is an RS256 JWT whose 'scope' claim the gateway enforces, rejecting a request that lacks the scope with 403 Forbidden; that the client secret is shown once and is rotatable, and 'the old one keeps working until you revoke it'; and the portal's own API exposes POST /api/v1/apps/{public_id}/secrets/revoke. Shortfalls against the claim: the permissions are ChowNow-granted at partnership level, not operator-granted - 'Your application is granted the API scopes for the current endpoint surface... You do not choose scopes per application yet', 'per-application scope selection is planned', and orders:refund is 'granted selectively' - so there is no restaurant-operator consent step and no per-app scope grant; access is also gated behind a manual request/approval lifecycle (sandbox approval, then production approval). The separate Cuboh/Hub specs at docs.cuboh.com remain static bearer tokens 'valid for 10 years', unique per partner and unscoped. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-09-17 adversarially verified

The platform pushes real-time webhooks for order lifecycle events (created, modified, paid, voided, refunded) rather than requiring polling.

extensibility-webhooks-push

Split verdict across ChowNow's two published APIs. ChowNow's own Partner API spec (developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json, OpenAPI 3.1) contains no `webhooks` and no `callbacks` object anywhere; order lifecycle is read by polling GET /v1/orders/{order_id}/status, which is precisely what this claim asks a platform not to require. Real push does exist on the Cuboh Direct API behind the Hub product: an OpenAPI 3.1 'webhooks:' block covering orders.new, orders.update, orders.accept, orders.adjust, orders.cancel, orders.complete, merchant.new, merchant.update, merchant.open, merchant.close, delivered over HTTPS to one subscriber URL per event family with a <300ms response-time standard - 'You must define only one Webhook URL for each of the Order(s), Merchant(s) and Menu(s) events'. Shortfalls: no paid, voided or refunded event in the enumerated set (Cuboh exposes refund only as an inbound POST /cuboh-connect-order/<order_id>/refund/), and the subscriber must be a QA-certified channel partner rather than an operator registering their own endpoint. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-08-06

Webhooks are cryptographically signed (e.g. HMAC) AND documented to retry with backoff, with a replayable event log for missed deliveries. differentiator

extensibility-webhook-reliability

Signing: 'Each webhook event includes an X-Cuboh-Signature request header... a hexadecimal HMAC signature of the HTTP request body, using a secret as a key and SHA256 as the hash function' (for GETs the signature covers external_integration_merchant_uuid). Retry: 'If Cuboh receives any of the following server errors: 500, 502, 503, 504, or 429 - the webhook event will be resent based on an exponential backoff algorithm. Ex. 1 second after the initial attempt, then 2 seconds, then 4 seconds until 5 total events were sent without a response', with a handling table (500/503 retry with backoff; 400 do not retry; 401 update token; 403 contact Cuboh). Shortfalls: no replayable event log or redelivery endpoint is documented anywhere in either spec, so after five failed attempts the event is lost; and the signing 'secret can be found in the QA documentation provided', which is not public. https://docs.cuboh.com/static/media/direct.cc50b46f10923bea774a.yml · retrieved 2026-08-06

A public write API accepts externally originated orders into the POS as first-class tickets that fire to KDS/printers and land in reporting.

extensibility-order-injection-api

Re-scored onto ChowNow's own spec. POST /v1/orders ('Place an order', scope orders:write) accepts a fully formed externally originated order with restaurant_id in the body and returns an Order carrying the restaurant_id for later lookups; POST /v1/quotes prices the cart first and the returned total is re-sent as validated_total 'so the price can't drift between quote and order'; the lifecycle afterwards is GET /v1/orders/{id}, GET /v1/orders/{id}/status and POST /v1/orders/{id}/cancel. The portal states the purpose plainly: 'The ChowNow Partner API lets your platform place food orders at thousands of restaurants on behalf of your users.' Cuboh's POST /api/v2/external-integration/order does the same for the Hub product. Shortfalls: ChowNow is an ordering layer, not a POS, so the destination is ChowNow's order flow (and, for Hub, the Cuboh tablet) rather than a POS ticket; neither spec documents KDS or printer firing for an injected order or states that injected orders land in the operator's reporting; and cancellation and refund are listed among the endpoints that 'are not yet implemented and return 501 Not Implemented'. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-09-17

Menu items, modifiers, and prices can be written and updated via API, not just read. differentiator

extensibility-menu-write-api

Neither of ChowNow's published APIs can write a menu. The ChowNow Partner API declares exactly ten operations and the only catalog access among them is read-only - GET /v1/restaurants/{id}/menu, described as 'a single, schedule-resolved menu ... already stripped of unavailable (86'd) items and base-priced' - with no POST, PUT or PATCH on any menu, item, modifier or price path; that enumeration is exhaustive for the API. On the Cuboh side, POST 'New Menu' and PATCH 'Update Menu' under /api/v2/external-integration/merchant/<uuid>/menus both carry the tag 'Menu Ingestion (coming soon)' and descriptions beginning '[coming soon, open a get GET to ingest menu]', so they are specified but not live. The only unqualified menu write anywhere is POST item/status-update, which toggles item availability (86ing) and writes no item, modifier or price. Menu authoring remains a Menu Editor / POS-sync operation. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-08-06

Every core object the API can read (orders, menu, customers, employees, inventory) can also be written or updated via the same API. differentiator

extensibility-data-symmetry

Complete path inventory of both specs. Direct: POST/GET /api/v2/external-integration/order, GET order/{id}, POST order/{id}/cancel, POST order-group/{id}/cancel, POST merchant/<uuid>/status. Connect: POST cancel/refund/upcharge/complete/accept on /cuboh-connect-order/<order_id>/, GET /cuboh-connect-order/<order_id>/details/, POST+GET+PATCH menus, GET menus/<external_menu_id>, POST+GET validate/<id>, POST item/status-update, POST merchant status, GET merchant orders. Menus are readable now while both write verbs (POST New Menu, PATCH Update Menu) are tagged 'Menu Ingestion (coming soon)', so a core readable object is not writable. Customers, employees and inventory have no path and no schema in either document. Read/write symmetry across core objects is positively absent from the schema, not merely unfound. https://docs.cuboh.com/static/media/connect.7bc86b76a95006107da4.yml · retrieved 2026-08-06

API rate limits are published as specific numeric quotas with documented throttling behavior and headers.

extensibility-published-rate-limits

All three elements the claim asks for are published. Numeric quota: 'Every client organization is limited to 600 requests per 60 seconds. This limit is the same for sandbox and production credentials - there is no per-tier rate differentiation today.' Throttling behaviour: the OpenAPI document defines a shared RateLimited response, referenced from every one of the ten operations, described as 'Per-partner rate limit exceeded' with the body '{ "code": "RATE_LIMITED", "title": "Rate limit exceeded." }' when enforced at the Cloudflare API Shield edge, and the security scheme states the gateway 'derives the partner identity from the JWT org_id claim and uses it for ... partner-scoped rate limits'. Headers: Retry-After ('Seconds to wait before retrying'), X-RateLimit-Limit ('Request budget for the surfaced window') and X-RateLimit-Window ('Length in seconds of the surfaced budget window'), all typed in the response definition. Caveat, not a shortfall against this claim: the API is versioned 0.1.0-draft, and the edge-enforced 429 body omits request_id, so callers correlate via the cf-ray header instead. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/getting-started · retrieved 2026-08-06

The vendor is a named DoorDash Preferred Integration Partner (DPIP) under the 2026 program requirements. differentiator

extensibility-doordash-preferred

DoorDash publishes its own complete provider registry at https://merchants.doordash.com/api/partner-integrations — 64 providers, each carrying a `qualityStatus` of PREFERRED (12), CERTIFIED (47) or AT_RISK_OF_SUSPENSION (5), plus a features-completed count against the eight high-quality features the program requires. It is served anonymously and merchants.doordash.com/robots.txt permits it (Allow: / with only /cdn-cgi/ and /monitoring barred). This is the instrument the program page points to when it says the roster is tracked in real time, and it supersedes the 2026 announcement post most of this corpus cited — that post introduces its ten names with the word `include`, which makes it a floor, not a ceiling. In that registry this vendor is the entry `cuboh_production`, rendered as 'ChowNow', with qualityStatus CERTIFIED and 5 of the 8 high-quality features built. CERTIFIED and AT_RISK are the program's other two tiers, so this is positive evidence of non-membership rather than a failure to find the vendor: it is present in the registry and carries a status that is not PREFERRED. GRADE HARMONISED TO B, 2026-09-11: this URL was first written at grade A. The adversarial pass ruled E on the principle that the rubric grades by the publisher's relationship to the SCORED vendor, and DoorDash is not that vendor. B is the settlement, for two reasons that are not preference: 39 rows already graded a DoorDash-published document B on this claim before today, and one URL on one claim cannot carry two grades; and E is unworkable, because nine of the 47 rows are `yes` on a differentiator-weight claim, which the grade floor refuses below B. B reads as the product documentation of the programme's own publisher, which is what this registry is. The dissent is recorded in verification.jsonl. https://merchants.doordash.com/api/partner-integrations · retrieved 2026-09-11

Direct, first-party certified integrations exist with DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub without requiring a paid middleware layer (Otter/Chowly/Deliverect/Checkmate). differentiator

extensibility-first-party-delivery-integrations

DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub integrations are ChowNow-owned (via the 2024 Cuboh acquisition) and included in the base subscription — no separate middleware contract required. https://get.chownow.com/integrations/all/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

The POS is a supported endpoint for at least two major aggregation middleware platforms (Deliverect, Chowly, Otter, Checkmate, ItsaCheckmate).

extensibility-middleware-compatibility

Direction checked deliberately, because ChowNow Hub is itself an aggregator and that is the easy wrong `yes`. Both legs run the right way - someone else's middleware treats the ChowNow ordering platform as a connected endpoint - and both are now platforms the rubric NAMES. (1) Otter: this help-centre article documents ChowNow as a selectable destination inside the Otter Business Manager Portal ('Select ChowNow and Press “Continue”') and both Otter paths, Direct POS Integration and Otter Order Manager, connect using the operator's ChowNow Dashboard credentials. That is documentation of a shipped procedure, grade B. (2) ItsaCheckmate: ChowNow publishes a co-branded partner page at get.chownow.com/demo/itsacheckmate/ saying in its own voice 'Send orders straight to your point of sale system with our ItsACheckmate partnership.' - read from the 2026-06-07 Wayback capture, since the live page is in the 215-page manifest with an empty page-builder body. That page is a demo/lead-gen surface, so it is a first-party CLAIM of order routing at grade D rather than documentation of one, and it is admitted as the second leg on that footing. Stream is NOT used as a leg: get.chownow.com/integrations/stream/ does say 'Connect ChowNow to your POS through Stream to reduce errors and save time.', but Stream is not among the five platforms the rubric names and this record is where its peer status would have come from, which is circular. SHORTFALL WORTH RECORDING: ChowNow's own 11,036-character integrations catalogue at get.chownow.com/integrations/all/ - now fully backfilled - lists 30-odd POS, discovery and delivery-app integrations and NOT ONE of Deliverect, Chowly, Otter, Checkmate, ItsaCheckmate or Stream, so neither leg is catalogue-grade; the settling documents are those vendors' own integration catalogues, a different publisher outside this corpus. Quotation: "If you are integrating ChowNow into your POS system via Otter, you will need to work with Otter to provide access to your POS system." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/what-to-expect-when-integrating-with-otter/ · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Native, vendor-maintained connectors exist for QuickBooks Online and at least one other GL/accounting system, with mapped journal entries rather than CSV-only export.

extensibility-accounting-connectors

Confirmed by full enumeration of the integrations directory: 24 POS systems, 4 delivery apps (DoorDash, Grubhub, Skip, Uber Eats), 5 discovery channels (Apple Maps, Google, Snap, Tripadvisor, Yelp), 2 printer vendors. Zero accounting, zero payroll, zero reservations, zero third-party loyalty. Same enumeration independently supports labor-payroll-export-formats and extensibility-payroll-export. https://get.chownow.com/integrations/all/ · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Labor hours export natively to at least two named payroll providers (e.g. Gusto, ADP, Paychex, Paylocity) without manual re-keying.

extensibility-payroll-export

No payroll integrations listed; ChowNow holds no labor hours to export. https://get.chownow.com/integrations/all/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Raw transaction-level data can be exported on a schedule to a customer-controlled destination (S3/SFTP/warehouse/Snowflake share), not only viewed in the vendor's reporting UI. differentiator

extensibility-bi-data-warehouse

Manual dashboard CSV export only. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=export · retrieved 2026-08-01

The vendor operates a public integrations marketplace listing named third-party apps that operators can browse and self-install.

extensibility-app-marketplace

A public integrations directory lists named POS, delivery and discovery integrations, and a partners page lists named service partners with discounts. Self-install by the operator is not documented — POS connections are set up by an Onboarding Specialist. https://get.chownow.com/integrations/all/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Operators can define custom fields or run vendor-hosted custom logic/scripts against POS objects without a vendor engineering engagement.

extensibility-custom-fields-scripting

This is the exclusive affirmative prose the rubric turns on: the single operator-visible webhook configuration anywhere on the record is a form submitted with a ChowNow Onboarding Specialist, a vendor engagement by construction, and the endpoint it points at is ChowNow's own (core.cuboh.net/api/v2/pos-inventory/revel), not one the operator chooses. The closed enumerations agree: CN Dashboard v1.68.0's route table (src/Router.jsx) has no developer, scripting or custom-field route, and src-cuboh config/router.config.js is ChowNow Hub's whole route table (Analytics, Reports, Menu Management, Menu Mapping, Orders Control, Integrations, Payments Setup, Storefronts, Kiosk, Orders Display, Fresh KDS, Stripe, Settings, Profile) and has none either. AUDIT CORRECTION: the prior note leaned on scopes/nav.js as a list of 'all 65 gateable destinations'. That figure does not reproduce - NAV_CONDITIONS holds 53 entries and nav.js exports 56 nav-key constants - and more importantly canAccessNavItem returns true for any key absent from the map, so NAV_CONDITIONS is a list of the CONDITIONAL destinations, not a census of destinations. The route table replaces it and reaches the same answer. `scripting`, `Zapier` and `no-code` are zero corpus-wide in both modes; the single `custom field` hit is a poisoned control - a code comment about a table filter key in src/helpers/table.js - and the CubeJS layer's own 'custom dimension' comment is a redis cache-buster, not an operator-defined field. Partner API access to either Cuboh spec is gated on approval and an email to integrations@cuboh.com. I did NOT use spec silence here: `additionalProperties: false` occurs zero times across all 67 schemas, so neither spec is a ceiling. Overturned by a custom-attributes or automation surface in a later bundle. Quotation: "Your Onboarding Specialist will help you submit a Webook Request Form via Revel for enablement." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-automatically-sync-revel-pos-inventory-updates/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

The vendor supports a headless/embedded mode where a third-party UI (kiosk, web ordering, drive-thru) drives the POS transaction engine via API.

extensibility-headless-embedded

The capability exists and I can name the bound. Cuboh Direct API v2.0 (ChowNow Hub, published anonymously as OpenAPI 3.1 at docs.cuboh.com/direct) lets a third-party ordering application drive the order lifecycle end to end via API: Order Creation, Order List, Order, Cancel Order, Cancel Group Order, plus Get Menu, Push Menu and item/modifier status, with four webhook channels returning accept, complete, cancel and adjust. THE BOUND: it is order INJECTION, not a transaction engine — the quoted sentence shows the partner has already taken the order, and the payload carries `charges` (subtotal, tax, discount, tip, delivery_fee, total) computed by the partner, so ChowNow prices nothing and tenders nothing on the third party's behalf; auth is `ApiKeyAuth` and the spec states approved integrations only. The genuinely priced headless path is the ChowNow Partner API (GET menu, GET availability, POST /v1/quotes, POST /v1/orders, cancel, refunds), already recorded in this record's api_posture.notes from a pre-bar pass — developer.chownow.com is in data/robots-bars.json and I did not refetch it; it is partner-gated behind an application that can be declined. And the kiosk on this record is ChowNow's own first-party surface (Hub route /manage/kiosk, with Stripe readers), not a third-party UI. Overturned by a published embedded-checkout or kiosk SDK, or by a Cuboh Direct pricing/quote operation. Quotation: "When an order is placed by the customer, the partner will POST the order to the Order Creation" https://docs.cuboh.com/direct · retrieved 2026-09-10

The vendor publishes an API changelog and a stated deprecation/notice policy for breaking changes.

extensibility-api-versioning-deprecation

Scored against ChowNow's own Partner API, not Cuboh's. The OpenAPI 3.1 document (info.version '0.1.0-draft', server https://openapi.chownow.com/v1, ten operations) contains no changelog, no x-changelog, no sunset or deprecation policy, no notice period for breaking changes, and not one deprecated flag on any path, operation or property - the strings 'changelog', 'deprecat', 'sunset' and 'breaking' occur zero times in the 55KB spec. Versioning is stated only as a URL convention: 'Versioning - Endpoints are versioned in the URL path (e.g. /v1/...)'. The only stability language anywhere is on the RFC 9457 error schema, and it runs the other way - 'title/detail are human-facing and may be reworded without notice'. The developer portal's own sidebar enumerates the complete published documentation set - Introduction, Getting Access, Authentication, Place an order, API Reference - with no changelog or release-notes entry, and /docs/changelog returns 404. Getting Started instead labels endpoints 'not yet implemented' returning 501 and says per-application scope selection is 'planned', which is a roadmap note, not a deprecation policy. https://developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json · retrieved 2026-08-06 adversarially verified

A complete historical data export (orders, customers, menu, payments metadata) is available to the operator on demand, in a documented machine-readable format, at contract end. differentiator

extensibility-data-portability-exit

While active, orders, items/modifiers, analytics, disbursements and the diner contact database are self-serve exportable to CSV. No documented complete historical export at contract end and no machine-readable format specification. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=export · retrieved 2026-08-01

Order entry, ticket routing, and check printing continue on-terminal when the internet connection is lost.

reliability-offline-order-entry

The brief was right that a documented offline fallback exists — and it is a human one, which is why the cell stays no. ChowNow's published answer to "what happens when the tablet is off" is that ChowNow support telephones the restaurant and relays the order verbally, accepting it on the operator's behalf; the companion article tells the operator to call 888-707-2469 to learn whether an order was even placed. Both paths require ChowNow's cloud to be up and make the tablet irrelevant. The rubric requires order entry, ticket routing and check printing to CONTINUE ON-TERMINAL when the connection is lost; nothing continues on-terminal — tablet-off-fix states the app simply reads "Tablet Offline" when it is not connected to the internet. Bounded to the 278-article operator help centre (sitemap 278 == REST 278). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/paid-orders/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Card payments can be accepted while offline via store-and-forward, not just cash-only fallback. differentiator

reliability-offline-card-auth

ChowNow's model inverts the premise of the rubric: the diner is charged before the order ever reaches the restaurant, so the restaurant never authorises a card and has no authorisation to defer. Declining an order produces a refund to the diner, not an unsettled auth. There is therefore no store-and-forward path — and no cash-only fallback either, since cash is not an accepted tender at all (diner-support/payment-options). This is a positive published statement of when and by whom payment is captured, not an empty search. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/paid-orders/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

The vendor publicly documents who bears the loss when a store-and-forward transaction declines after connectivity returns, and states any per-transaction or cumulative offline cap. differentiator

reliability-offline-decline-liability

ChowNow does publish a loss-allocation position, and it is the opposite shape from the one the rubric asks about: unlimited fraud and chargeback protection on prepaid card-not-present orders, with ChowNow absorbing the loss. Because no transaction is ever held offline, no per-transaction or cumulative offline cap is stated anywhere — and the document that would state one, the current Restaurant Agreement, allocates chargebacks in detail ("ChowNow shall assume any consumer chargebacks") with no offline provision at all. Grade C on the marketing citation; the grade-B corroboration is legal/registermyresto/. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Multiple terminals continue to share a single check/table state over the local network while the internet is down (LAN-only degraded operation, not per-terminal islands). differentiator

reliability-lan-degraded-multi-terminal

The only local-network function ChowNow documents anywhere is the Cuboh tablet discovering a Star Micronics or Epson printer on the same wi-fi — one tablet, one printer, no peer terminals and no shared state. There is no check or table object to share in the first place: every ChowNow order is a prepaid single-diner cart and the operator device is an order-receiving screen. I bounded this to the publisher's manifest for the operator help centre (Yoast sitemap 278 == WP REST X-WP-Total 278): no article describes two or more terminals sharing a check, a LAN-only degraded mode, or any house-network role beyond tablet-to-printer discovery. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/setting-up-your-printer/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

The vendor documents a local/on-premise transaction engine or edge server (not purely cloud-hosted request/response) for the ordering path. differentiator

reliability-local-transaction-engine

ChowNow’s operative hardware terms define the tablet as a pure client: it is leased "for use solely in connection with the Services" and the Restaurant "shall not … use the Tablet or leased Wireless Printers for any purpose other than to connect to the Services", with the prohibitions naming "(i) to process in-house orders not processed through the Services" first. A device contractually forbidden to process orders that do not go through the cloud is not a local transaction engine. No article in the 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278) names a local server, edge cache or on-premise engine, and the vendor’s published remedy for a break in the ticket path is manual re-entry into the POS. The Agreement also disclaims warranties of "AVAILABILITY, ERROR-FREE OR UNINTERRUPTED OPERATION". https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto-outdated/tablet-and-wireless-printer-terms/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Kitchen display and/or kitchen printer routing continues to function while offline.

reliability-offline-kds-printing

ChowNow publishes exactly one remedy for a connectivity break in the ticket path and it is manual re-entry by a human: on a POS_OFFLINE error the operator is told to key the order into the POS by hand, then restart the POS once the internet is confirmed up. Routing is cloud-first by construction — the Cuboh settings article states that sending an order to the kitchen accepts it on the app and only then sends it to the connected POS or printer, so an order that never arrives from the cloud is never routed or printed. ChowNow ships no KDS; its kitchen output is a wireless receipt printer (the pricing page's only hardware fee is "$250-$420 for printer"). The fax path (fax-machine-printing, $0.15 per send) is an alternative cloud delivery channel, not an offline one. Bounded to the 278-article help-centre manifest. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/pos-offline-error/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

The system automatically fails over to a backup printer or KDS station when a configured kitchen printer is unreachable, and alerts staff.

reliability-printer-fallback

The Hub/Cuboh tablet's printer configuration is exhaustively described by two articles. Global Printer Settings ('These settings affect all printers connected directly to the Cuboh tablet') lists every toggle: Ticket Font Size (Medium/Large/Extra Large), Show Menu Item Prices, Show Menu Modifier Prices, Show Discounts, Print Cancelled Orders, Print Delivery Fee. The per-printer screen (Printer Connections) lets you toggle a discovered Star Micronics TSP100/SP700 or Epson TM printer on, Save, then 'tap Configure to configure which merchants and also the number of copies to use for the connected printer'. There is no backup or failover printer assignment, no reroute-on-unreachable behaviour and no staff alert setting in either screen; a support search for printer returns no failover article. The entire configurable printer surface is enumerated and automatic failover is not in it. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/global-printer-settings/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

The vendor documents its conflict-resolution behavior for edits made on two devices during a network partition (e.g. last-write-wins, merge, or operator prompt).

reliability-sync-conflict-handling

329th: CLAIM: the VENDOR DOCUMENTS its conflict-resolution behaviour for edits made on two devices during a network partition. VERDICT: no - this is a publication-shaped claim and it now rests on a completed publication census. POSITIVE EVIDENCE: where ChowNow does document what happens when the link drops, the published behaviour is manual re-entry, not reconciliation. 'Why am I getting a POS_OFFLINE error' (modified 2026-07-02): 'Your POS may go offline if it is unable to connect to your restaurant internet... First, manually enter the order into your POS. Then, restart your POS System.' 'Tablet Offline' is likewise documented only as a connectivity fault to fix ('the tablet will read offline if the table is not connected to internet'), never as a mode in which edits are accepted and later merged. And where ChowNow DOES publish write semantics - the partner API, whose portal is now open (developer.chownow.com/robots.txt is 404) - what it publishes is duplicate-write handling, not partition handling: the live OpenAPI 3.1 at developer.chownow.com/docs/openapi.json (12.7 KB, 8 paths, 45 schemas, found via /static/scalar_embed.js) requires an 'Idempotency-Key' header on POST /v1/orders and documents '200 OK - idempotent replay: re-sending the same Idempotency-Key returns the original order; no new order is created and no second charge is made', plus 'A read is safe to retry. A write may still have been applied upstream, so re-send it only with the Idempotency-Key the original used.' An idempotent retry rule is an ADJACENT mechanism, not conflict resolution, so it is cited as a shortfall rather than a partial. BOUND: the census is now the vendor's entire publication - get.chownow.com WP REST to 100% of all four public types (posts 198/198, pages 216/216, restaurant_support 277/277, diner_support 37/37, each == X-WP-Total; 728 bodies / 3.28 MB) PLUS the 184 page-builder pages whose REST content is empty, re-fetched as HTML (1.22 MB); developer.chownow.com in full (5 doc pages + the OpenAPI); and from prior passes support.cuboh.com 105/105 and updates.cuboh.com 96/96. CONTROLS (tokenised, word-boundary, case-insensitive, run over all of it): 'last-write' 0, concurrent 0, concurrency 0, partition 0, 'two devices' 0, simultaneous 1 (blog prose about too many promotions), merge 1 (a blog line about consolidating multi-location reports), overwrite 1 (the Cuboh menu-mapping 'REPLACES MAIN' option, a mapping choice not a device rule). POISON NAMED: conflict returns 8 hits and ALL 8 are legal boilerplate - 'conflict of laws principles' and 'In the event of any inconsistency or conflict between the Incorporated Terms and the terms of the Agreement' across terms-of-service, registermyresto, refund, the CCPA/CPRA notices and google-incentive-terms - a word a naive count would have read as a hit. Retrieved 2026-09-18. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/pos-offline-error/ · retrieved 2026-09-18 adversarially verified

The vendor publishes an explicit list of which features are unavailable offline (gift cards, loyalty lookup, refunds, manual card entry, text-to-pay).

reliability-offline-feature-matrix

No offline feature matrix exists; a support search for offline returns only 'POS Offline Error'. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=tablet · retrieved 2026-08-01

A public, per-component status page exists showing current and historical incident state without a login.

reliability-public-status-page

A public, per-component, login-free status page for a ChowNow product does exist, and this record already relies on it elsewhere: reliability-incident-postmortems is scored against https://status.cuboh.com/history.rss. The prior verdict enumerated only get.chownow.com's sitemap and the NXDOMAIN of status.chownow.com, so it bounded the absence to the wrong publisher. The live page (retrieved 2026-09-10) lists per-component state for Cuboh Dashboard, Cuboh Cloud Infrastructure, Official Delivery Platforms, Uber Eats Orders, Skip The Dishes Orders, DoorDash Orders, DoorDash Menu Updates, DoorDash Drive API, DoorDash Drive Portal, GrubHub Orders, ChowNow Orders and Cuboh Reporting Service, plus 'Uptime over the past 90 days. View historical uptime.' and a dated Past Incidents list. Named shortfall: the components are the ChowNow Hub aggregation stack plus a single 'ChowNow Orders' channel component - the ChowNow direct-ordering platform, portal.chownow.com and the branded mobile apps have no component of their own, and status.chownow.com does not resolve. Overturned to yes by a ChowNow-branded status page covering the ordering platform. Quotation: "Cuboh Dashboard Operational Cuboh Cloud Infrastructure Operational Official Delivery Platforms Operational" https://status.cuboh.com/ · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

A contractual uptime SLA with a stated percentage AND a service credit remedy is published or available in the standard agreement. differentiator

reliability-contractual-uptime-sla

The restaurant-side Restaurant Agreement (General Terms, public, effective 2026-04-08) is the operative contract and states the opposite of an SLA. Section 7.3 Disclaimer: 'CHOWNOW CANNOT GUARANTEE THAT THE PLATFORM, ORDER BETTER NETWORK, OR ANY OF THE SERVICES WILL BE AVAILABLE AT ALL TIMES, OR THAT EVERY ERROR IN THE PLATFORM OR PROBLEM RAISED BY RESTAURANT WILL BE RESOLVED', the services are 'provided AS IS and AS AVAILABLE', and ChowNow 'hereby disclaims any and all express, implied, or statutory warranties, including, without limitation, any warranties of... AVAILABILITY, ERROR-FREE OR UNINTERRUPTED OPERATION'. No uptime percentage and no service credit appears in the Agreement; the only remedy provisions are Section 8's liability caps (12 months of fees, or $100 for Core-only subscribers). Section 5.4 lists the surviving sections and no service-level exhibit is among the incorporated terms. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

The vendor publishes written post-incident reports or root-cause summaries for major outages.

reliability-incident-postmortems

The Cuboh status page (Atlassian Statuspage, components include Cuboh Dashboard, Cuboh Cloud Infrastructure, Cuboh Reporting Service and 'ChowNow Orders') publishes an incident history whose RSS feed returns 19 entries with written cause statements. Examples: 'On January 22nd a database value was unintentionally modified during a release, causing a service outage that lasted approximately 8 minutes. Everything was quickly rolled back' (3 Feb 2025); 'There was a package upgrade in our latest release which has caused a system outage. This outage lasted for 32 min (From 10:56AM PST to 11:28AM PST)' (22 Oct 2024); 'DoorDash excess of menu serve requests overwhelmed our systems and brought down our servers from ~8:30PM to 8:45PM PST' (20 Nov 2024). Shortfalls: these are one-to-three-sentence cause-and-duration notes, not post-incident reports with remediation or prevention actions; the most recent entry is Feb 2025; status.chownow.com does not resolve (DNS NXDOMAIN), so ChowNow's own ordering platform, Dashboard and branded apps have no equivalent surface. https://status.cuboh.com/history.rss · retrieved 2026-08-06

24/7/365 live human support by phone is included in the base subscription, not sold as a premium support tier.

reliability-247-live-support

'24/7 Support (Phone & Chat)' is checked on all three tiers including Launch; support line 888-707-2469 accepts call or text. Reviewers note peak-time wait times. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

The vendor offers in-person on-site installation and go-live support (first-party or certified dealer network), not remote-only self-install. differentiator

reliability-onsite-install

ChowNow onboards remotely and ships hardware that the operator installs. The ChowNow Hub (formerly Cuboh) tablet arrives in a shipment and the operator powers it up and joins it to WiFi (quoted); the ChowNow tablet update guide likewise walks the operator through erasing and re-setting up the iPad themselves; and the published leased-hardware terms have ChowNow deliver a tablet already configured for the Services. The go-live path is a named but REMOTE Onboarding Specialist, and the current CN Dashboard's own Go Live Checklist (portal.chownow.com v1.68.0, src/containers/LocationGoLiveChecklist/helpers.ts) is a closed sixteen-entry list of self-serve dashboard data-entry requirements -- address, sales tax, menu, disbursement info, bank account -- with no install, site visit or dealer step in it. Bounded to this corpus: `installer`, `field service`, `site survey` and `cabling` are each 0 docs in both modes, and onsite / on-site occur only in cuboh.com blog prose about restaurants, never about a ChowNow service. Overturned by a ChowNow document offering in-person installation or naming a certified dealer network. Quotation: "Before you get started, please ensure you have the following items in your tablet shipment." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/cubohs-tablet/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

The vendor performs the initial menu build as part of onboarding rather than leaving it entirely to the operator. differentiator

reliability-menu-build-service

A $119-$499 setup fee and Onboarding Specialists who coordinate POS menu retrieval/mapping are documented; menu mapping articles also describe operator-performed mapping for some POS systems, so responsibility is split. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=modifier · retrieved 2026-08-01

A hardware replacement/advance-exchange program with a stated turnaround time is included or purchasable.

reliability-hardware-replacement-sla

ChowNow's public Refund Policy documents a hardware return and replacement program: call 1-888-707-CHOW for a Return Material Authorization; a product is DOA 'if it shows symptoms of a hardware failure, preventing basic operability, when you first use it after opening the box', reportable 'within 30 calendar days of the invoice date', after which Technical Support offers Replacement ('ChowNow, at its expense, will ship another of the same product') or Service (repair, after which replacement may not be requested). Returns must reach the warehouse within 14 calendar days of RMA issuance, and a $150 handling fee applies if a returned product is found not to be DOA. Shortfalls against the claim: no turnaround time is stated for either replacement or repair; there is no advance-exchange (the replacement is arranged after the DOA determination); the program is scoped to out-of-box failures inside 30 days, with later failures referred to 'ChowNow's standard product warranty', which is not published - the incorporated Tablet and Wireless Printer Terms at get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/tablet-and-wireless-printer-terms/ returns 404. https://get.chownow.com/legal/refund/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Operators can trigger and retrieve their own data backup/restore, or the vendor publishes RPO/RTO figures for data recovery.

reliability-backup-restore

Neither half of the rubric is met, for the ChowNow ordering platform or for ChowNow Hub. There is no operator-triggerable backup or restore: the only self-service data retrieval ChowNow documents is running a Dashboard report and exporting it to an Excel file, and those reports are windowed (Order Source capped at 30 days as quoted, Accounting Data at 90) - a bounded report download, not a backup, and with no restore path at all. And no recovery objective is published: `RPO`, `RTO` and `disaster recovery` are each 0 documents in BOTH boundary and stem modes across the whole corpus. The stem-matcher proof the prior note published as a number has moved with the corpus and is restated as an invariance: `SLA` is 0 documents in boundary mode while its stem mode returns dozens (55 when the analyst ran it, 65 after the page-builder backfill), every one of them a slash-or-Slack-type stem rather than a service-level agreement - the contrast, not the count, is what proves the matcher fires. The zero is bounded to a corpus that includes the /legal/ set in full, the Restaurant Agreement and DPA included, which is where a service-level or recovery commitment would live. status.cuboh.com publishes 90-day component uptime history for ChowNow Hub but states no objective. Overturned by a published SLA, trust page, or DPA exhibit carrying recovery objectives. Quotation: "This report will show you the total number of orders placed during a time range no greater than 30 days." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-to-run-reports/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

The vendor publishes a current PCI DSS v4.0/4.0.1 Attestation of Compliance or equivalent (e.g. validated P2PE listing) covering the post-March-2025 future-dated requirements.

reliability-pci-dss-4-attestation

ChowNow publishes no attestation of any kind. Its own sitemap index is a FLOOR, not a census, and the bound below was re-measured on 2026-09-06: page-sitemap.xml lists 172 page URLs while the WordPress REST registry (wp-json/wp/v2/pages) answers X-WP-Total 215, so the sitemap omits 43 live pages and the earlier figure of 166 read as exhaustive was neither. The conclusion survives the correction - none of the 43 sitemap-omitted pages is a security, trust, compliance or attestation document either, and wp-json/wp/v2/types names exactly four public content types (post, page, restaurant_support, diner_support), so there is no fifth doc project to look in. The support-article bound is the strong one and is unchanged: sitemap 278 and X-WP-Total 278 agree exactly, two instruments that could have disagreed. Within that manifest (a 21-page /legal/ subtree: registermyresto, eight registermyresto-outdated term sets, referral-program-agreement, referral-terms, refund, survey-sweepstakes-rules, membership-products-terms-of-service, restaurant-rewards, cookie-notice, california-privacy-rights-act, california-consumer-privacy-act, commissions, rewards-beta-survey, terms-of-service, privacy-policy) and restaurant_support-sitemap.xml lists all 278 support articles; no page in either is a security, trust, compliance or attestation document, and /security/ and /trust/ both 404 while trust.chownow.com and security.chownow.com do not resolve. The developer portal's docs nav likewise enumerates five documents with no security or compliance page. What ChowNow does publish is two generic statements: Restaurant Agreement s4.7, 'To the extent that ChowNow stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data, ChowNow complies with the most current version of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS)', and a support FAQ, 'ChowNow is a PCI compliant company with proper certification to acquire, maintain, and protect credit card information.' Neither names a DSS version, a QSA, an assessment date, an AoC, an SAQ or a P2PE listing - the strings 'Attestation', 'P2PE' and 'SAQ' occur nowhere in the agreement. Whether an AoC is furnished to merchants privately on request is a separate question this claim does not ask. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Multi-factor authentication is enforceable on back-office and POS administrative logins, with role-based permissions.

reliability-mfa-role-based-access

Value unchanged, but the shortfall 'two roles, both admin ... no per-permission grants' is false for the current app. The CN Dashboard carries a real per-permission model: this file declares feature scopes with read: and write: variants for restaurant.catering and restaurant.link_bank_account, plus write:restaurant.platform_fees, feature:restaurant.integration_pos, .orders_aggregation, .website_access, .marketing_suite, .csv_import and four campaign scopes; scopes/headquarter.js declares per-FIELD company write scopes down to write:company.is_multi_concept and write:company.address.zip; and scopes/nav.js gates every nav item on those scopes plus an isRegionalAdminUser and isInternalUser distinction. The MFA half is what keeps this partial, and it is now a much stronger absence: no MFA, 2FA, TOTP, SSO/SAML or step-up authentication artefact exists anywhere in the 1,781 recovered source files of all three dashboards. Control caveat, recorded because it nearly produced a false hit: bare substring searches for `sso`, `mfa` and `2fa` match minified identifiers, SCSS class hashes and SVG path data, and every hit was one of those. Quotation: "export const RESTAURANT_CATERING_WRITE = 'write:restaurant.catering';" https://portal.chownow.com/assets/index-CuKaZvK5.js#../../src/scopes/scopes.ts · retrieved 2026-09-10

A public, free training library (video/LMS) and a practice/training mode on the terminal exist for staff onboarding.

reliability-self-serve-training

A free, public, login-free restaurant support article library covers getting started, tablet use, menu management, POS integration, delivery, marketing and billing. No video LMS or terminal training mode documented. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Any terminal can assume the master/server role automatically if the designated primary terminal or local server fails. differentiator

reliability-failover-terminal-role

A failover terminal role presupposes a fleet with a master. ChowNow leases one order-receiving tablet plus an optional wireless receipt printer, and its hardware terms permit that tablet "no purpose other than to connect to the Services" — there is no station, no local server and no peer to assume a role from. The 278-of-278 operator help centre (Yoast sitemap == WordPress REST X-WP-Total == 278) documents exactly one local-network function anywhere, a tablet discovering a Star Micronics or Epson printer on the same wi-fi, and no multi-device or master/standby arrangement. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto-outdated/tablet-and-wireless-printer-terms/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Terminals support an automatic cellular/LTE failover for connectivity, first-party or documented.

reliability-cellular-backup

First-party cellular hardware exists and is documented, but as a SUBSTITUTE connection rather than an automatic failover - that is the named bound. ChowNow leases an LTE-equipped order tablet for $20/month (Verizon or T-Mobile by request, per its government-accounts overview), and its own troubleshooting article requires the tablet to be on a working WiFi or LTE network, so LTE is a supported bearer for the ChowNow order terminal. What is missing is the automatic part: `failover` and `cellular` are each 0 documents in BOTH modes across the whole corpus, and no article describes the tablet switching to LTE on loss of WiFi. AUDIT UPDATE, which discharges the prior note's own caveat: the published leased-hardware terms cap the LTE tablet at 0.5 GB per month with $15 per additional 0.5 GB and forbid hotspot use or tethering, and the prior note flagged that this rests on the /legal/registermyresto-outdated/ copy because the current Restaurant Agreement's own link to the live Tablet and Wireless Printer Terms 404s. I recovered the current-version exhibit from the Wayback CDX index (capture 2026-01-14, 10,744 characters) and compared it clause by clause with the -outdated copy: the operative lease, title-retention, must-be-leased-or-purchased-from-ChowNow and data-cap language is identical, so the caveat is discharged and the citation may stay on the readable copy. Overturned by a ChowNow document describing automatic WiFi-to-LTE failover. Quotation: "If improving your WiFi signal is not an option with your Internet Service Provider, you can lease a Verizon LTE tablet from ChowNow for an additional $20/month." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/wifi-alternative-data-plan/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

Vendor publicly offers a month-to-month subscription with no minimum multi-year term commitment for its core POS software tier. differentiator

commercial-month-to-month-contract

Help centre cancellation policy: ChowNow offers month-to-month as well as prepaid (annual or two-year) plans; for month-to-month, 'ChowNow has a 30 day cancellation policy, meaning you will be responsible for paying for the last 30 days of your service', and service can be switched off immediately within that window. Prepaid plans can be cancelled any time but carry no prorated refund. Friction to note: cancelling requires a form plus a consultation call with a Restaurant Success Manager, the Restaurant Agreement auto-renews 'for the same plan term agreed upon', and leased hardware must be returned within 30 days. Published monthly pricing ($249/$349/$449) sits above the annual prepaid rate ($229/$319/$409). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/cancellation-policy/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor's published terms of service or MSA state no early termination fee / no liquidated damages for cancelling the software subscription before term end. differentiator

commercial-no-early-termination-fee

The public Restaurant Agreement contains an early-termination charge rather than a disclaimer of one. Section 5.3 Effect of Termination: 'For Restaurants who are on annual plans but have monthly billing terms, any unpaid balance of the annual plan payment at the time of termination shall be immediately due to ChowNow', and ChowNow 'shall charge Restaurant's credit card, bank account, or other approved facility for any outstanding Fees and Taxes'. Section 4.2 Refunds; Cancellation Fee: 'Restaurant may be subject to a cancellation fee (Cancellation Fee) with respect to certain Services as may be specified in the applicable Service Terms' - and those Service Terms are not retrievable (the Premier, Pro, Core, Additional and Tablet and Wireless Printer Terms pages under get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ all return 404). The Refund Policy's 'you may cancel your ChowNow service at any time. You will be billed for the remaining amount in your monthly cycle' describes monthly plans only and is expressly incorporated subject to Section 4.2. Section 5.2 additionally requires Elevate/Grow/Launch/Premier/Pro/Hub subscribers to file a cancellation request or take a consultation call, after which termination takes a further 30 days. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

The auto-renewal term and the required cancellation notice window (e.g. 30/60/90 days) are stated in publicly accessible contract terms rather than only in a signed quote.

commercial-autorenew-terms-published

The public help center documents a 30-day cancellation policy and the cancellation procedure, and billing timing (charged within 1-3 business days of signup). The auto-renewal term itself is not stated, and the public ToS is the diner agreement, not the restaurant agreement. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/billing-my-account/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

The POS software can be purchased and operated with a third-party payment processor of the operator's choice (no mandatory in-house processing lock). differentiator

commercial-processing-not-bundled

Support article 'Can I use my own payment processor?' — ChowNow requires all clients to use its processor. Payments are hard-bundled at 2.95% + $0.29. https://get.chownow.com/support-category/order-and-payments-processing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor publishes an interchange-plus (cost-plus) processing rate option with the markup stated as a specific bps + per-transaction figure, rather than only blended/flat card-present rates. differentiator

commercial-interchange-plus-published

Only a blended flat rate is published (2.95% + $0.29); no interchange-plus option appears anywhere. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

The processing agreement caps or prohibits unilateral vendor-initiated rate increases outside of pass-through interchange/network changes, or grants penalty-free exit on any increase. differentiator

commercial-rate-increase-clause

The restaurant-side Restaurant Agreement (General Terms, effective 2026-04-08) is public after all. S4.1: 'ChowNow may modify any of the foregoing fees at any time on written notice to Restaurant (including via Restaurant's individual account in its admin.chownow.com dashboard), and any such modification shall go into effect thirty (30) days after such notice.' 'Fees' as defined includes Subscription Fees, Marketing Fee, Add-On Fees and Credit Card Processing Charges (defined at $0.29 + 2.95% US, $0.30 + 2.9% via Third Party POS Integration), so the processing rate itself is unilaterally modifiable. No cap, no index, no carve-out limiting increases to pass-through interchange/network changes, and no clause granting the Restaurant a termination right triggered by an increase. S5.1 auto-renews for the same plan term; S5.2 gives ChowNow termination for convenience on 30 days' notice 'without penalty or liability' but gives that right to the Restaurant only for Core-only subscribers - Elevate/Grow/Launch/Premier/Pro/Hub must file a cancellation request or take a cancellation consultation call, after which termination takes a further 30 days, and S4.2 preserves a possible Cancellation Fee. Positive evidence of absence, not merely silence. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-08-02

Per-location and per-additional-terminal software pricing is published as specific dollar figures on the vendor's public site (not 'contact sales' only).

commercial-pricing-published

Three tiers with specific monthly and annual dollar figures, plus setup fee range, processing rate, printer cost, Apple developer fee, and Flex Delivery per-order fee — all on a public page with no sales gate. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Individual modules (online ordering, KDS, loyalty, inventory, payroll, marketing) can be purchased à la carte and cancelled independently without repricing the base POS subscription. differentiator

commercial-module-unbundling

Value unchanged - nothing is sold a la carte - but two factual clauses in the prior note were wrong and one provenance claim does not reproduce. First, 'tiering is by marketing contact/SMS volume' is false: the 2026 LAUNCH/GROW/ELEVATE table on this sheet marks six FEATURE rows as not-included on Launch - QR Code Ordering, Automated SMS Marketing, On-Demand Email and SMS Campaigns, CSV Upload For In-Store Diners, Third-Party Order Aggregation, and Centralized Menu Management Across Direct plus Third-Party Channels - so tiering is feature gating, not only volume. Second, Flex Delivery is priced at the quoted $7.98 per order on the 2026 sheets, not the $3.99 the note carried over from the 2024 sheet; I confirmed $7.98 on four separate 2026 sheets (Affiliates, Sell Sheet, Dining Alliance, USF). AUDIT CORRECTION to provenance: the not-included mark is described elsewhere in this batch as an en dash at U+2013 'confirmed by byte inspection'; byte inspection actually shows a single 0xAD glyph byte, and what fixes its column is the Automated SMS Marketing row extracting as glyph / '2,000 credits' / '5,000 credits'. Also published here and absent from the record: a 15.5% per-order Discovery Network charge, offset by Profit Protector. The bundle finding survives: the three suites ship together within a tier and no module has its own SKU. Quotation: "$7.98/order for Flex Delivery" https://get.chownow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Pricing-Sheet-2026-Affiliates.pdf · retrieved 2026-09-10

All required terminals, KDS screens, and printers can be purchased outright at a published price, with no mandatory multi-year hardware lease or rental.

commercial-hardware-purchase-outright

The prior note said tablet acquisition terms are not published and that no mandatory lease is disclosed either way. Both halves are false. The Tablet and Wireless Printer Terms state that the Tablet is leased, that title remains at all times with ChowNow or one of its financial vendors, and that Tablets and Wireless Printers for use with the Services 'must be leased or purchased (as applicable) from ChowNow, and cannot be leased or purchased from third parties'. Only the Wireless Printer may be purchased, and it is the sole item with a published price, listed as a $250 to $420 printer charge on the 2026 pricing sheets. The rubric asks whether ALL required devices can be bought outright at a published price with no mandatory lease; for the ChowNow order-receiving tablet the answer is positively no, on the vendor's own contract. AUDIT PROVENANCE, which the prior row did not state: the current Restaurant Agreement hyperlinks these Terms at /legal/registermyresto/tablet-and-wireless-printer-terms/, which 404s live, so the readable copy is the /legal/registermyresto-outdated/ one cited here. I recovered the current-version document from the Wayback CDX index (capture 2026-01-14, 10,744 characters against the outdated copy's 8,900) and compared the operative clauses: the lease sentence quoted here, the title-retention clause and the third-party purchase prohibition are word-for-word identical in both, so the verdict does not depend on the superseded revision. Scoped to the ChowNow ordering platform; ChowNow Hub kiosk hardware terms are not published anywhere in this corpus. Quotation: "Restaurant acknowledges and agrees that the Tablet and Wireless Printers are leased to Restaurant (unless Restaurant opts to purchase a Wireless Printer), and are leased at the prices provided to Restaurant by ChowNow, for use solely in connection with the Services pursuant to the Agreement." https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto-outdated/tablet-and-wireless-printer-terms/ · retrieved 2026-09-10

Vendor documents support for at least one non-proprietary/third-party hardware option (e.g. standard iPad, Epson/Star ESC/POS printers, generic cash drawer) rather than requiring vendor-only devices. differentiator

commercial-hardware-not-locked

Third-party ESC/POS printers from two manufacturers are explicitly supported — Star Micronics TSP100/SP700 and Epson TM (all models) over LAN, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth — and the Hub app runs on standard Android tablets (Lenovo M8, Vankyo MatrixPad S20). https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=tablet · retrieved 2026-08-01

One-time implementation, menu-build, onboarding, and training fees are published as specific amounts or explicitly stated as $0.

commercial-implementation-fee-published

Published as a range — '$119 - $499 setup fee' — not a specific amount, with no explanation of what determines the position in the range. https://get.chownow.com/pricing/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Operators can self-serve export their full transactional history (orders, line items, payments, labor) to CSV or a documented API without contacting support or paying a fee.

commercial-data-export-self-serve

Order reports, item & modifier reports, sales analytics, disbursement reports and the Customer Spending diner database are all exportable from the ChowNow Dashboard without contacting support. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/?s=export · retrieved 2026-08-01

Guest/customer records, loyalty balances or point ledgers, and gift-card liability balances are exportable in machine-readable form by the operator. differentiator

commercial-export-customer-and-loyalty

Diner contact and spending data is exportable and ChowNow markets 'your diners, your data.' Loyalty sticker balances and gift-card liability exports are not documented (and no gift card product was found). https://get.chownow.com/products/direct-online-ordering/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Contract or documentation specifies a post-termination data retrieval window (a defined number of days during which the operator can still export their data) rather than immediate cutoff. differentiator

commercial-post-termination-export-window

Section 5.3 of the public Restaurant Agreement: on termination 'all rights and licenses granted hereunder will immediately cease, and Restaurant will immediately cease all access to, and use of, the Platform and must return any leased hardware as set forth in the Tablet and Wireless Printer Terms'. No grace period, export window or data-delivery obligation is attached. Section 6.2 grants the Restaurant a licence to use Third-Party Order Data only 'during the Term' (while Order Data is jointly owned and usable by either party 'during the Term and indefinitely thereafter', which is a use right, not an access or export right once the Dashboard is closed). Section 5.4 lists the surviving provisions and none of them preserves access. The only post-termination obligation running to the Restaurant is payment of amounts due under Section 4.5 and removal of the ordering widget from its website within 30 days. Immediate cutoff is the published contractual position. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Published terms explicitly state the merchant owns its transaction and customer data, and constrain the vendor's right to use or resell that data (beyond aggregated/de-identified use) for its own products or marketing. differentiator

commercial-data-ownership-clause

Marketing states operators get 'full access to diner ordering data and contact information' and can export at will, but no published contract clause vests ownership in the merchant or constrains ChowNow's use. The privacy policy affirmatively reserves broad rights: aggregate analysis, sharing authenticated users' email and phone with mParticle, and sharing with 'third-party advertisers and remarketers' — while ChowNow simultaneously runs a competing consumer Marketplace on that same diner base. https://get.chownow.com/legal/privacy-policy/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

The POS is source-available or open source with a documented self-hosting option (source published under an OSI or source-available license, not merely an open API).

commercial-source-available-selfhost

The current Restaurant Agreement ('Current Version as of August 6, 2026') settles this positively rather than by absence. Section 2.3(a) forbids the customer to reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discern the source code of the Platform, and further forbids modifying, adapting or reproducing it, reselling or sublicensing it, running it on a 'service bureau' basis, and removing proprietary markings - the standard proprietary-SaaS restriction set and the exact inverse of a source-available grant. The Agreement grants the restaurant no licence to any software at all: the only licence running toward the restaurant (2.1(c)) covers marketing Materials, and 'Platform' is defined at 1.31 as ChowNow's hosted service platforms (Elevate, Grow, Launch, Legacy) reached through ChowNow's app and website. No OSI or source-available licence and no self-hosting option exists to be published. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-09-06 adversarially verified

Vendor documents validated P2PE or hardware-encrypted card entry plus tokenization such that the merchant's PCI scope is reduced to SAQ A / SAQ P2PE-HW, and names the applicable SAQ.

commercial-pci-p2pe-tokenization

ChowNow documents a general PCI-DSS posture and never a scope reduction. Section 4.7 of the current Restaurant Agreement is the agreement's entire PCI treatment and is quoted above in full; the merchant help centre adds only that ChowNow is a PCI compliant company with proper certification. Neither names an SAQ, and `P2PE` and `SAQ` are each 0 docs in BOTH boundary and stem modes across all 3,319 documents, while tokenization occurs exactly once, in a Clover Connect partner quotation on cuboh.com describing CLOVER's payments engine rather than ChowNow's. Affirmatively, ChowNow's own credit-card processing sell sheet frames every ChowNow transaction as card-not-present, covering all online and app-based orders, so hardware-encrypted card entry is not the ChowNow ordering platform's model at all. Subject caveat: ChowNow Hub's kiosk DOES drive Stripe Terminal readers (src/utils/kiosk.helper.js calls api/v2/storefront/{id}/kiosk/terminal/reader), so card-present hardware exists in the Hub -- but whatever P2PE posture it has is STRIPE's, and ChowNow publishes nothing about it. Overturned by a ChowNow attestation, trust page or Hub kiosk security document naming SAQ A or SAQ P2PE-HW. Quotation: "To the extent that ChowNow stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data, ChowNow complies with the most current version of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard ( PCI-DSS ) and other applicable laws, rules, and regulations." https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Vendor documents PCI DSS v4.0.1 future-dated controls in effect since 31 Mar 2025 — notably MFA for all access to the cardholder data environment including POS and back-office logins, and (for hosted ordering pages) payment-page script integrity monitoring per Req 6.4.3/11.6.1.

commercial-pci-dss-4-controls

Neither future-dated control is documented anywhere ChowNow publishes, and the published surface is now enumerable rather than merely unsearched: page-sitemap.xml (166 pages), restaurant_support-sitemap.xml (278 support articles), the developer portal's five-document docs nav, and the Restaurant Agreement. MFA - the agreement's security clause is s6.3, 'commercially reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to prevent a Security Incident', and 'MFA', 'multi-factor' and 'two-factor' occur zero times in its 69KB; no support article in the 278 covers MFA or 2FA; the documented dashboard identity flows are a password reset by emailed verification code and a Settings > Users > Create form whose fields are contact info plus Company-admin or Regional-admin scope, with no second-factor step described; the developer portal documents OAuth2 client-credentials machine-to-machine auth for partners, which is not user MFA and does not cover the merchant dashboard. Script integrity - no ChowNow page documents Req 6.4.3 authorised-script management or 11.6.1 payment-page change detection; the nearest published statement is the FAQ 'ChowNow ordering is SSL secure - which means our widgets have the proper certifcation [sic]', which is a TLS assertion about an embedded ordering widget, not script-integrity monitoring. The dashboard itself is behind a login and cannot be inspected, so this records the documentation, not the implementation. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-08-06 adversarially verified

Vendor states it holds a current SOC 2 Type II (or ISO 27001) attestation and will provide the report under NDA via a trust center or on request.

commercial-soc2-attestation

ChowNow makes no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 statement anywhere it publishes. I re-read the whole Restaurant Agreement (69KB): 'ISO 27' occurs zero times and 'SOC' only inside other words (associated, social, announce); the security undertaking is s6.3, which binds each party to 'commercially reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to prevent a Security Incident', with the 72-hour breach-notification duty running from Restaurant to ChowNow. Beyond the contract, the published surface is enumerable and empty on this point: page-sitemap.xml lists all 166 pages of get.chownow.com and restaurant_support-sitemap.xml all 278 support articles, and none is a trust centre, security page or attestation summary; /security/ and /trust/ 404, trust.chownow.com and security.chownow.com do not resolve, www.chownow.com publishes only brand and location sitemaps, and the developer portal's docs nav lists five documents with no security section. The claim requires the vendor to state it holds the attestation and will provide it under NDA - no such statement is published. Whether an unpublished report exists and is furnished under NDA to enterprise prospects is not something this claim asks or that any crawl could establish. https://get.chownow.com/legal/registermyresto/ · retrieved 2026-08-06 adversarially verified

Product provides in-app tooling for CCPA/CPRA and GDPR data-subject requests — locating, exporting, and deleting an individual guest's records — plus a published DPA the operator can execute.

commercial-privacy-dsar-tooling

ChowNow operates a vendor-side OneTrust Data Privacy Rights Request webform plus a CPRA notice and a Do Not Sell request flow, and diners can edit/delete contact data in account settings. No operator-facing in-app DSAR tooling and no publicly available DPA for restaurants. https://get.chownow.com/legal/privacy-policy/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor publishes an accessibility conformance report (VPAT/ACR) claiming WCAG 2.1 AA (or later) for its self-order kiosk and consumer web-ordering surfaces, including a documented tactile/audio non-visual access mode on kiosks. differentiator

commercial-wcag-kiosk-accessibility

ChowNow publishes no accessibility document of any kind, so it cannot be publishing a conformance report. `VPAT`, `WCAG`, `conformance` and `Section 508` are each 0 documents in BOTH modes across the whole corpus, and the phrase screen reader is 0 in boundary mode with its one stem hit inside legacy dashboard source. This does not rest on the zero alone: get.chownow.com's own CMS registry enumerates the page type to its X-WP-Total at 215 pages, and that manifest contains no accessibility, VPAT, security, trust or compliance page. AUDIT UPDATE to the corpus bound: the prior note said the hole was 185 page-builder-empty bodies; the backfill has since closed 169 of 186 and the remaining 17 are demo forms, confirmation pages, download landing pages and /products/automated-email-marketing/, so the manifest argument is now checkable against read bodies rather than titles alone and still holds. www.cuboh.com's sitemap has no such page either. The only accessibility content ChowNow publishes is the quoted iOS font-size slider on the OPERATOR tablet, which is neither a non-visual access mode nor a diner surface. A self-order kiosk does exist - ChowNow Hub ships a /manage/kiosk route, constants/kiosk.constants.js, and KIOSK_DINE_IN / KIOSK_TAKE_OUT fulfillment types - but it has no product page and no published tactile or audio access mode. Overturned by a ChowNow or Cuboh ACR/VPAT. Quotation: "Step 6: Adjust slider to make system font larger or smaller." https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/how-do-i-change-the-text-size-via-accessibility-settings/ · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

POS supports card-network-compliant dual pricing / cash discount or surcharging with automatic exclusion of debit and prepaid cards from any surcharge, and required receipt and menu-board disclosure of the fee. differentiator

commercial-dual-pricing-compliant

The operator's entire customer-fee surface is one control: 'You can add a service fee either by amount or percentage of the order, through the ChowNow Dashboard under the Location Info section.' There is no card-type dimension to it - no debit or prepaid exclusion, no BIN-based logic, no separate cash and card price, and no receipt or menu-board disclosure handling. The eleven-article Order and Payments Processing help category contains no surcharging, cash-discount or dual-pricing article, and a support search for 'surcharge' returns zero results. Two structural facts close it: 'Do you accept cash? We do not accept cash so that we can ensure your restaurant gets paid' - there is no cash tender for a cash discount to be priced against - and Section 7.2(i) of the Restaurant Agreement requires that 'the prices it charges Customers through the Platform or Order Better Network shall be the same prices (or lower)' as offline prices, with ChowNow automatically deducting the difference if the restaurant prices higher, which forecloses a card-price/cash-price split. https://get.chownow.com/restaurant-support/charging-customers-service-fees/ · retrieved 2026-08-06