Money & sales
Outside the room — share of net sales
The share of a night’s net sales the POS positively identified as takeaway, delivery or shipping. Where any sales are unclassified, this is reported as a floor, not a total — the true share can only be higher.
What it is
Outside the room — share of net sales is the part of a venue's net sales that the POS feed positively identified as takeaway, delivery, drive-through or shipping on its most recent completed night, divided by that night's total net. It is a channel-mix reading: how much of what the room sold went out the door rather than being consumed in the room.
It is reported as a floor, not a total. Any order the feed did not classify sits in the "everything else" half under RollCall's standing bar-tab rule, so the figure is only the share known to be off-premise — the true share can only be higher. Both halves use one accounting basis: net sales, meaning item prices after discounts and before tax, with tips excluded.
How to use it at your venue
Off-premise trade has become a structurally significant, growing share of restaurant demand nationally — the National Restaurant Association tracks it as a headline figure, reporting that roughly three-quarters of restaurant traffic is now off-premise and that a majority of limited-service operators, and a large minority of full-service ones, say it is a bigger share of sales than before 2019.[1] Operators often read this metric less as a single-night verdict and more as a trend line for their own room: is the identified off-premise share rising over recent completed nights, and does that show up as additive volume or as covers moving out of the room?
Peer-reviewed hospitality operations research treats delivery and off-premise as a distinct demand channel that draws on the same kitchen capacity as dine-in, with its own cannibalization and additive dynamics rather than being a subcategory of the same business[2] — and that literature notes the channel keeps growing year over year while remaining comparatively understudied.[3] A grounded use is as channel context for the other money figures on this card: because House yield and money-per-band leave classified off-premise orders out, a rising off-premise share tells you how much room activity those figures are setting aside. A rough external check is possible too — comparing your own share against the national off-premise figures[1] to see whether you index high or low for your service style — but treat a low or flat reading with some skepticism whenever POS channel-tagging is known to be incomplete.
How to read it
Read it as "at least this much of the night went out the door." A higher share is neither good nor bad on its own — format and service style legitimately differ, and a counter-service spot and a sit-down room will sit at different levels for honest reasons. The value carries its own uncertainty: the unclassified share of net is named on every row, so a figure with a large unclassified remainder is a soft floor, while one with almost nothing unclassified is close to a true reading. Watch the trend within one venue, not a single night's number.
What it doesn't mean
⚠ What it can't tell you
It is not a total — only the share the feed positively identified — and it is never compared to another venue. It cannot tell you whether off-premise trade is worth having, what it costs to serve, or which platform it came through. Because unclassified orders (common for quick bar tabs) stay in the "everything else" half, a low reading does not prove low off-premise trade; it may just mean the feed tagged few orders. It is channel context for the other figures here, not a verdict on any of them.
How it's calculated
The net channel split is produced on RollCall's servers from the completed, settled night: orders classified takeaway, delivery, drive-through or shipping form the off-premise net; on-premise plus unclassified plus other form the rest. The two figures come from the completed night already loaded for this card, so nothing extra is read. Before anything is shown, the two channel figures must add up exactly to the night's gross minus its discounts over the same orders; if they do not reconcile, the split is judged untrustworthy and nothing is displayed. No scan data is involved.
The exact method
Both figures are net sales — item prices after discounts, before tax, tips excluded — over the same orders on the latest completed, settled night. OFF_PREMISE_CHANNELS is the set {takeout, delivery, drive_through, shipment}; on-premise, unknown and other channels are summed into the on-site half, with the unknown-channel net carried as an explicit audit line. The channel split is computed by (moneySummary); the share and its floor/spoken forms are computed by (offPremiseShareFromDocs).
Hard reconciliation gate: the figure renders only if totalNet === gross − discount as exact integer minor units (line 9442); otherwise the result is withheld with why:"unreconciled" and nothing is shown. Whenever unclassified money exists, the result is presented as a floor, and the unclassified share of net is named on every row so the reader can see how much of the figure is uncertain. In production only Square is connected; it classifies from an order's fulfilment details, and an order with no fulfilment details is returned unclassified — common for quick bar tabs.
The research behind it
How much of what you sold last night went out the door — bagged, delivered, or driven off — instead of being eaten in the room. Nationally this is no longer a niche slice: for a majority of restaurants it's now a larger share of sales than it was before the pandemic, and it draws on the same kitchen capacity as dine-in, so it's worth tracking as its own line, not folding it silently into total sales.
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2025 Off-Premises Restaurant Trends ✓ verified
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A blended model of restaurant deliveries, dine-in demand and capacity constraints ✓ verified
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Robot vs human: expectations, performances and gaps in off-premise restaurant service modes ✓ verified
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Confidence & caveats
On a night that passes the reconciliation gate the arithmetic is exact — but "exact" describes the classified fraction, not the whole night. The number's honesty rests on the unclassified remainder: where that remainder is small the floor is close to the truth, and where it is large the true off-premise share may be materially higher than shown. If a night is later corrected, its value is withdrawn rather than shown in two versions. No reading is a state, not a zero, and the figure is never rolled into a group total or compared against another venue.