Glossary
Every word a software vendor will use. Explained.
You cannot evaluate a quote written in words you do not know, and no vendor should expect you to. These are the terms that come up when a venue buys software, defined the way we would explain them to a friend, not the way a datasheet defines them. Nothing here is about our product.
The words on every booking screen.
Session
One sellable block of an activity: a 15-minute race, a 30-minute sim sprint, a 90-minute jump. It is the smallest thing a guest can buy, and almost every other number in your business is derived from it.
Bookable unit
Anything the schedule assigns to one guest or group: a bay, a lane, a court, a party room, an escape room. Why it matters: some vendors price per unit, so count yours before you compare quotes.
Availability (or inventory)
What is genuinely free to sell right now. Real availability accounts for capacity, staff, cleaning gaps and overlapping attractions. A calendar that just shows opening hours is not availability.
Capacity
How many guests one session can take. Not the same as unit count, one track might run twelve karts in a heat, which is one bookable thing with twelve seats.
General admission
Selling entry rather than a specific seat, open jump, open play, arcade wristbands. Headcount rather than an assigned unit. Why it matters: some vendors bill per guest registration, which means a great Saturday raises your software bill.
Hold
A short reservation while a guest is on the payment screen, so two people cannot buy the same seat in the same ninety seconds. Without it you get double bookings on busy evenings.
Deposit
Part payment to secure a booking, with the balance due later or on arrival. Standard for parties and corporate events, and the main defense against no-shows on big bookings.
No-show
A booking nobody turns up for. Your no-show policy, keep the deposit, charge the card, release the slot, is worth deciding before you open rather than at the counter on a Saturday.
Walk-up (or walk-in)
A guest who arrives without a booking. Good venues sell to them without letting them jam the queue for people who booked, usually with a virtual line and a text when it is their turn.
Utilization
What percentage of your sellable capacity actually sold. The single most useful operational number you have: it tells you whether to change your prices, your hours or your marketing.
Attach rate
How often a guest buys something extra alongside the main activity, food, a photo, merchandise, a second race. Small changes here move profit more than raising your headline price.
Dynamic pricing
Charging different amounts at different times, peak, off-peak, school holidays. Not a trick: it is how you fill a Tuesday afternoon without discounting your Saturday.
Package
A bundle sold as one product, two races, a pizza and a party room for ten. Usually includes a number of guests and then a per-head price beyond that.
Run sheet
The minute-by-minute plan for a group event: arrive, waivers, briefing, race one, food, race two, awards. The difference between a party that feels organized and one that feels like herding.
The vocabulary of getting paid.
This group is where confusing language costs real money, because the fees are usually described in words the buyer has not been given a reason to learn.
POS, point of sale
The till. The screen and card reader where staff ring up a sale. In a venue it should be the same system that holds the booking, or you will be reconciling two records of the same Saturday.
Card present vs card not present
Whether the physical card was tapped or dipped in front of you, or typed in online. Card-present transactions are cheaper and safer; card-not-present ones carry more fraud risk and a higher rate.
Payment processor
The company that moves card money from your guest’s bank to yours. Stripe, Square, Toast and similar. Your software vendor may include one, integrate one, or force one, ask which.
Merchant account
The bank account that receives card money. New businesses go through underwriting to get one, which takes time. Why it matters: apply months before opening, not weeks.
Interchange
The fee the card networks charge on every transaction, which makes up most of your processing cost. Why it matters: software vendors often earn a share of it. That is legal and normal, but you should be told, and many buyers never are.
PCI (PCI DSS)
The card industry’s security rules. The practical question to ask a vendor is whether card numbers ever touch their system: if they do not, your compliance burden is much smaller.
Chargeback
A guest disputes a charge with their bank and the money is pulled back from you. Clear receipts, signed waivers and a written cancellation policy are what you defend one with.
Settlement (or payout)
When the processor actually deposits your money, usually a day or two after the sale. Your daily sales figure and your bank balance will never match on the same date. That is normal, and good software reconciles the two.
Reconciliation
Proving that what you sold, what you took and what hit the bank all agree. If it takes you more than a few minutes a day, that is a software problem rather than a discipline problem.
Daily close
Ending the trading day: count cash, reconcile card takings, lock the numbers so they cannot be edited afterwards. The locking part is what makes the figures trustworthy a month later.
Split tender
One sale paid with more than one method, part gift card, part card, part cash. Common in venues and surprisingly often unsupported by cheap systems.
Gift card vs store credit vs comp
A gift card was bought, so it is money you already took and owe. Store credit was issued, usually from a refund. A comp is given away. Three different things for your accountant, and worth keeping apart from day one.
Deferred revenue
Money you have taken for something that has not happened yet: a gift card, a prepaid pass, next month’s party. It is cash in the bank but not yet earned income, and your accountant will care about the difference.
Landed cost
What an item really cost you once shipping, duty and handling are included. The number to price your pro-shop merchandise against, rather than the invoice line.
The words about the people who visit.
Waiver
The liability release a guest signs before taking part. Digital waivers should be signed before arrival, versioned when the wording changes, and re-signed when it does: a waiver signed against an old version may not protect you.
Guardian consent
A parent or legal guardian signing on behalf of a child. The rules vary by state and the details matter: who may sign, whether they must be present, and how you prove it later.
CRM
Literally “customer relationship management”, but the word is used for two very different things: a sales pipeline for chasing corporate deals, and marketing automation for sending campaigns. Why it matters: ask which one a vendor means. Many say CRM and ship only one of them.
Guest portal (My Account)
A logged-in area where guests see their bookings, balances and waivers without calling you. Ask specifically what they can do there: viewing is common, canceling is less common, and rescheduling is rare across this whole industry.
Segment
A group of guests picked out by something they have in common, visited twice, never returned, birthday next month. Marketing to a segment works; marketing to your whole list mostly annoys people.
Lapsed guest
Someone who used to come regularly and has stopped. The most valuable list in your business, and one you can only build if bookings, visits and payments live in the same system.
Churn
The rate at which customers or members stop. For venues the harder number is the share of first-time guests who never return at all, at timed-activity venues that is most of them.
Lifetime value (LTV)
What a guest is worth across every visit, not just the first. It is the number that justifies spending real effort on a second visit, and most venues have never calculated it.
Opt-in and consent
Permission to contact someone, recorded with what they agreed to and when. Legally required for marketing email and text in most of the world, and the record is what protects you if it is ever challenged.
Membership vs pass
A membership is a recurring subscription with benefits and member pricing. A pass is a prepaid pack of sessions that draws down as it is used. Different revenue, different accounting, frequently confused in sales calls.
Hardware and operations words.
FEC
“Family entertainment center.” Industry shorthand for a venue with several attractions under one roof: karts and bowling and axe lanes and a kitchen. If you run more than one thing, you are an FEC whether or not you use the word.
Kiosk
A self-service screen guests use to check in, sign a waiver, pick a session and pay without staff. “Kiosk mode” means the machine is locked to that one app so nobody can browse the web on it.
KDS, kitchen display system
The screen in the kitchen that replaces printed tickets. Orders appear, get bumped when done, and timings are tracked. Ask whether a vendor drives screens, physical printers, or both.
Tab
An open running bill a guest adds to during a visit and settles at the end. In a venue the useful version spans the whole visit: the race, the drinks and the hoodie on one tab.
Modifier
An option on a menu item: no onions, large, extra shot. Sounds trivial, is the main reason kitchen orders go wrong when the software handles them badly.
RFID / cashless
Wristbands or cards that carry credit around the venue for arcades and attractions. A separate category of vendor from booking software, and usually an integration rather than a built-in feature.
Digital signage
Screens showing leaderboards, session times, now-racing boards or menus. Useful when driven from live operational data, and near-useless when it is a separate system somebody has to update by hand.
Throughput
How many guests you can actually move through an attraction per hour, including briefing, loading and cleanup. It is the real ceiling on your revenue, and it is usually lower than the theoretical one.
Turn time
The gap between one session ending and the next starting. Shaving two minutes off it across a Saturday is often worth more than any price increase you could get away with.
The words specific to racing venues.
Heat
One race with a set group of drivers. A busy day is a long sequence of heats, and building that sequence by hand, classes, ages, groups who booked together, is one of the most tedious jobs on the floor.
Grid
The starting order. Usually set by qualifying times, by a previous heat’s result, or at random for casual sessions.
Transponder
The small device on a kart that a timing system detects as it crosses the line. Each one has an ID, so the timing system knows which kart just passed.
Timing loop
The wire in the track surface that reads transponders. Physical infrastructure with an installation lead time, not something to leave until the month you open.
Race control
The operator screen that runs a live session: start, flags, penalties, restarts, driver swaps. On a busy night two people may need it at once without overwriting each other.
Rental vs competition
Rental (or arrive-and-drive) is the walk-in public in your karts. Competition is licensed, sanctioned racing, often in the driver’s own equipment, with regulations and technical inspection. Very different software requirements.
Championship / series
Results carried across several race nights into a standings table. The details that cause arguments are drop rounds, bonus points and how a tie is broken, so the software should be explicit about all three.
Rig (or pod, or bay)
One simulator station: seat, wheel, pedals, screens, PC. Sim racing software is very often priced per rig, so count yours before comparing quotes.
Launcher vs booking tool
The most useful question in sim racing software: does it actually start the session on the machine? Some products only book the bay and leave a staff member to walk down the row and start each PC by hand.
Dedicated server
The machine that hosts a multiplayer race so every rig is in the same session. Someone or something has to start it, configure it for the event, and shut it down afterwards.
Track layout
One circuit often has several configurations, short, full, reversed. A personal best only means something if it is scoped to the exact layout, and cheap systems frequently get this wrong.
Hot lap
A single fastest lap, usually run as a competition or leaderboard challenge. The simplest and most reliable way to give a first-time guest a reason to come back.
The words in the quote and the agreement.
This last group is the one worth reading twice. Most of what traps a venue for an extra year is in here somewhere.
SaaS
“Software as a service.” You rent it monthly, it runs in the vendor’s cloud, updates arrive automatically and there is no server in your back office. The opposite is on-premise, where the software runs on a machine you own and maintain.
Module (or SKU)
A separately-priced chunk of a product. Why it matters: check which modules the advertised price actually includes, in this industry the feature you called about is frequently in a higher tier.
Per-seat pricing
Charging by number of staff logins. Painful for venues, because a weekend team of twenty is a normal Saturday, and it quietly turns hiring into a software decision.
Implementation (or onboarding)
The one-time setup: configuration, data entry, page build, staff training, go-live. Usually a separate fee. Ask what is actually included and who does the work.
Migration
Moving your existing customers, gift-card balances, memberships and history from your current system into the new one. The gift-card balances are the part that goes wrong, and they are the part your guests will notice.
Integration
Two systems exchanging data. Ask what the integration actually does in each direction and how often. “We integrate with X” can mean anything from live two-way sync to a nightly file.
API
A documented way for other software to talk to your venue’s data. Matters more every year, because it is also how AI assistants and your accountant’s tools will reach your system.
Webhook
A message the system sends you the moment something happens: a booking made, a payment taken. The difference between finding out instantly and polling for changes.
Uptime and SLA
How often the system is available and what the vendor commits to in writing. Ask what actually happens when it is down on a Saturday, not just what percentage is promised.
Auto-renewal
A contract that renews itself unless you give notice in a specific window. Why it matters: multi-year auto-renewal plus a long notice period is the single most common way a venue ends up stuck for another year.
Early termination fee
What it costs to leave before the term ends. Read the formula, not the headline, in this industry it is sometimes a multiple of the remaining contract value rather than a flat fee.
Data ownership
Who owns your guest list. Check for language claiming joint ownership or perpetual rights to use your data, and check that you can export it in a usable format without paying to do so.
Quote-only pricing
“Contact us for pricing.” Sometimes genuine complexity. Often it means different customers pay different amounts for the same product, and you have no way to know which one you are.
Multi-tenant
Many customers running on shared infrastructure, isolated from each other. It is what makes modern software cheap enough to be worth buying, and it is why updates arrive without an upgrade project.
Ask us. We would rather you understood the quote.
A buyer who understands what they are buying is a customer who stays. If a vendor, including us, uses a word you do not know, make them define it before you sign anything.
Thirty minutes. No slide deck.
Related pages
Where these words show up in practice.