The Stacked method

How we score

Every number on this site comes from people who run venues. Here is exactly how it is collected, who counts, and what money cannot buy.

Where it comes from

The Stack Review. Eleven steps covering POS, payments, workforce, inventory, loyalty and learning, and how well each one actually holds up in service. It reaches us two ways.

In person
Our insight team runs discovery face to face, in the venue, with the people who use the tech every day.
Submitted online
Groups and individual operators complete the same eleven steps themselves through this site.

Both routes answer the same questions and are held to the same standard. Nothing is scraped, bought or estimated. If we do not have the data for a category, we say so rather than filling the gap.

Who collects it, and who cannot

Discovery is run by our insight team. They are on flat salaries with no commission of any kind, and they sell nothing. Their job is to find out what is actually happening in a venue, not to move a product.

The person who sells our partner packages cannot access the audit data. Not the raw submissions, not the scores before they publish, none of it. Access sits with our founder, who does not sell.

That separation is deliberate and it is the whole reason these numbers are worth reading. Nobody who stands to gain from a score can see it, let alone change it.

Who counts

Six rules are applied before a single number is published.

Every submission is verified
Audits run in person are verified on site by our insight team. Self submitted ones must come from a genuine venue or group domain. Free domains do not qualify.
Vendors and consultants excluded
Submissions from technology suppliers and paid consultancies are filtered out automatically before anything is scored.
Minimum 40 venues per category
A category stays unpublished until it clears the floor. Thin data gets shown as thin data, never as a ranking.
One vote per venue, refreshed yearly
Multi site groups cannot stack submissions. Responses older than twelve months drop out of the current quarter.
Money never moves rank
Partner packages buy visibility. They do not buy a score or a position. If that ever changes, this page changes first.
Fifteen venues before a score shows
The Stacked Score is an operator satisfaction measure out of 10. Below fifteen venues we show nothing rather than a guess.

What a partner package buys

Visibility. A link on your listing, priority placement on the marketplace, a seat at our events, a place in our content. That is the whole list.

It does not buy a score, a rank, or a position in the Quarterly Index. If that ever changes, this page changes first and we will say so in writing.

When a partner scores badly

We publish it. Approved partners are told so they can put it right, not so they can argue about it.

If an operator's experience improves, they can rescore, and the profile shows when it was last updated. We do not take a score down because someone asks us to.

Where this data is weak

It is UK only. It is self reported. It skews towards operators already in our orbit, which means groups are better represented than single sites.

Some categories are thinner than others, and we mark those rather than hide them. If you think a number is wrong, tell us and we will look at it in the open.

Last updated 1 August 2026 · Questions about the method: hello@wearestacked.io