Introduction
Onboard is the operating system for independent restaurants — reservations, floor plan, guests, staff, vouchers, and AI in one place.
Overview
Onboard bundles every tool a restaurant needs to run a service into a single, modern application. It replaces the patchwork of spreadsheets, paper books, generic CRMs and third-party reservation tools that most independent venues juggle today. Reservations, an interactive floor plan with sections and table combinations, a unified guest CRM, staff and shift planning with certifications, a menu module with an embeddable widget and an optional hosted menu page, digital tickets & vouchers, a versioned knowledge base, an internal team chat with voice messages and Neo, the built-in AI assistant — they all live in the same workspace. On top of that sits a native mobile app that serves guests (discover, book, feed, offers) as well as staff and managers.
A workspace is the top-level container for one or more restaurant locations, billing, team members, and brand settings.
Module catalog
Onboard is organized into ten modules. Restaurants subscribe to the ones they need — tables and the floor plan are bundled into reservations.
- Reservations & tables. Public booking widget, live floor plan, sections, table combinations, QR codes per table, deposit/guarantee policies, waitlist with auto-promotion.
- Menu. Editor with allergens, additives, price tiers, specials and sourcing notes. Publishes to an embed widget, a hosted menu page on a custom domain, and a per-table QR view.
- Tickets & vouchers. Gift cards with partial redemption, purchasable event tickets, Stripe guest checkout, QR validation, scheduled gift delivery.
- Team & shifts. Three database roles plus per-person module access, certifications with expiry tracking, onboarding checklists, shift planner with swaps and time tracking.
- Knowledge base. SOPs and playbooks with full-text search, version history and mandatory read-receipts.
- Team chat. Threads, mentions, reactions, polls, shift swaps, DMs, voice clips, scheduled messages — push to web, iOS, Android.
- Neo, the AI assistant. Anthropic Claude with ~180 tools, scoped to the calling user's role — also the guest concierge in the mobile app, the docs chat and the support chat. See Neo.
- AI booking gateway. A Model Context Protocol server lets ChatGPT, Claude.ai and partner concierges book on a guest's behalf via OAuth 2.1 with Dynamic Client Registration.
- Reports & analytics. Covers, revenue, no-shows and staff productivity. See Reports.
- Mobile app. One native iOS app (iPhone + iPad) for guests — discover, book, feed, offers, foodie level, Wallet passes — and for staff and managers: check-in board, tables, shifts, scanner, chat. See the guest app and the team app.
Who is it for
Onboard is built for independent restaurants and small groups — from a single bistro with thirty covers a night to a regional group running ten locations. Hosts, managers, service staff and owners each get a tailored view that matches their role. Multi-location workspaces share billing and team, but every operational module (reservations, menu, shifts, knowledge, chat) is scoped per location.
Core principles
The product is shaped by four principles that show up everywhere in the docs:
- Operational, not just transactional. Every feature is designed to help a service run smoother tonight, not just to record what happened.
- EU-first. Data is hosted in Frankfurt, and GDPR controls are built into the guest CRM, not bolted on.
- Real-time. The web app, mobile app and widget all share a live state — there is no "refresh" button anywhere in the UI.
- AI as a teammate, and as a channel. The internal assistant has the same role-based view as the user it serves. The MCP gateway lets external agents (ChatGPT, Claude) book on guests' behalf — so being discoverable inside an AI search is the same problem as being discoverable on Google.