Do I still need a POS if I use restaurant middleware?

Yes — middleware does not replace the POS. It works alongside it, pushing online orders into the POS and reading sales data out of it. The POS still owns the tickets, the kitchen routing, and the in-restaurant payments.

Can a single venue benefit from middleware or is it only for chains?

Even one venue with two delivery marketplaces plus a direct ordering site already spends meaningful time on duplicate data entry and menu syncing. Middleware pays off from the second active channel onward. Chains scale that benefit but it is not exclusive to them.

What is restaurant middleware?

Restaurant middleware is the software layer that sits between the channels a restaurant sells through and the systems that actually run the operation. It translates orders, menus, prices, modifiers, and sales data between Glovo, Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo, the direct ordering site, the POS, accounting, stock, and BI — so the team doesn't have to manage each pair by hand.

The problem middleware solves

Without a middleware layer, every channel-to-system pair becomes its own project. The team types Glovo orders into the POS by hand, copies menu changes one panel at a time, exports CSVs to send to accounting, and reconciles marketplace payouts in spreadsheets. Each integration is fragile, and adding one more channel multiplies the work. Restaurant middleware collapses that mesh into one connection per channel and one connection per system.

What good middleware actually does

Good restaurant middleware does five operational jobs at once: (1) order intake — accepts orders from every channel with their full payload (product, modifiers, special requests, type, customer); (2) menu publishing — keeps the menu, prices, and availability consistent across channels; (3) POS handoff — pushes accepted orders to the POS as if a member of the team had typed them; (4) status return — sends accepted/preparing/ready/delivered statuses back to each channel; (5) data movement — pushes POS sales and marketplace data into accounting, stock, and BI. Sinqro implements those jobs as Order Hub (1-4) and Data Sync (5).

Middleware is not an aggregator

A delivery aggregator (Glovo, Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo) operates a marketplace — it owns the customer relationship, runs its own courier fleet (or a partner one), and charges the restaurant a commission per order. Middleware operates the restaurant's stack — it does not list the restaurant publicly, does not own customers, and does not take a per-order commission. Restaurants typically run middleware AND aggregators together: middleware orchestrates every channel including the aggregators.

Where Sinqro fits

Sinqro is the operating layer that ties the channels (marketplaces, direct ordering, kiosk, table QR), the in-restaurant tools (Dashboard, Work App, Rider App), and the back-office systems (POS, ERP, accounting, stock, BI) together. Order Hub handles the channel side. Data Sync handles the data movement. Dashboard, Work App, and Rider App are the daily-operations surface. The full operating layer is what most teams call 'restaurant middleware' in shorthand.