Crowd & occupancy
Venues being read
How many of your rooms RollCall can currently see, counted by state. Venues are counted, never averaged. "Not being read" means we can’t see that room right now — not that it’s empty.
What it is
Venues being read is how many of your rooms RollCall can currently see, counted by state rather than blended into one number. It sorts your portfolio into three buckets: venues being read right now, venues not being read right now, and venues not live yet — and reports each as its own count.
A venue counts as being read while it has a live door scan that hasn't expired. It is never a sum of headcounts and never an average of fullness. It is a coverage fact — how much of your fleet is currently instrumented — sitting at the top of the dashboard so every other number below it can be read in context.
How to use it at your venue
Operators often treat this as the trust-gate for every other figure on the page, the same discipline a public restaurant chain applies when its filings disclose how many units count as "comparable" before reporting any same-store-sales number.[3] Before acting on a portfolio-level crowd or performance read, a grounded habit is to glance at how many venues are actually being read right now versus not-read versus not-yet-live — so a quiet total across, say, three of twelve live venues is understood as partial rather than mistaken for the whole picture.[1]
The underlying principle is old and well established: an aggregate is only trustworthy once you know what share of the population it actually covers, and the observation status of the rest has to be reported as its own count rather than dropped or silently folded in.[2] This is a suggestion for how to read the number honestly, not a claim that any particular coverage threshold is validated — it simply keeps a thin reading from being read as a low one.
How to read it
Read it as three separate counts, not one score. "Being read" tells you how much of the fleet is live-instrumented this moment; "not being read" and "not live yet" tell you where the picture has gaps. A higher read-count means more of your portfolio is currently visible — it says nothing about whether those rooms are busy, and the buckets are never combined into a single health figure.
What it doesn't mean
⚠ What it can't tell you
"Not being read" means RollCall cannot see that room right now — it does not mean the room is empty. A venue with no current reading is a state, not a zero, and it is never counted as one. This is coverage, not occupancy: it reports how much of the fleet is visible, never how full any room is, and it is never turned into a total headcount, an average, or a comparison between venues.
How it's calculated
Computed entirely on your device from readings already loaded for the portfolio — it triggers no extra data fetch. Each venue is placed in one bucket by its current live-read state: a venue is "being read" while its live scan hasn't expired, "not being read" once that reading has gone dark, and "not live yet" if it isn't approved. The three buckets are counted and shown side by side. No headcount or capacity is ever summed into the result.
The exact method
Derived client-side in gdRenderScope over data already in memory. A venue is counted as live when vpState(v.id).label is neither "Dark" nor "—" — that is, it carries a current, non-expired reading from its door scans (vpLive/vpState); the "dark" count is the not-being-read bucket; pending is every venue whose approved !== true. The code path explicitly sums no headcount and no capacity. Inputs are per-venue live/state docs derived from door scans plus venue approval flags — no POS data is involved. Because the counts read only cached state, the classification costs no additional read time.
The research behind it
Don't trust a total until you know how much of it you're actually looking at. If you add up occupancy across 12 venues but only 4 of them have a live sensor feed right now, the sum isn't wrong exactly — it's silently incomplete, and treating it as the full picture is the mistake. So instead of one blended number, you report three honest counts: venues currently being measured, venues not currently being measured, and venues that haven't gone live yet. That's the whole idea — coverage before aggregation, always.
-
Survey Errors and Survey Costs ✓ verified
Read the source ↗ -
Inference and Missing Data ✓ verified
Read the source ↗ -
Form 10-K, FY2024 — Comparable Restaurant Sales methodology and definitions ✓ verified
Read the source ↗
Confidence & caveats
The counts are directly observed and exact — each venue is in exactly one bucket by its current state, with no estimate or band involved. What "read" certifies is narrow: that a room has a live, unexpired scan, not that the room is full or empty. Coverage is not adequacy — a venue can be open and busy yet show as not-being-read simply because no current scan reaches RollCall. And the figure is only ever a count of present states: it is never compared against another venue, never averaged, and never rolled into a portfolio total.