Designing a Unified Integration Dashboard for Hospitality Businesses

I was brought on to design a platform for restaurant and bar operators who were drowning in disconnected systems. The problem was clear: a typical multi-location operator juggles between their POS terminal, vendor invoice portals, inventory spreadsheets, CRM tools, and accounting software every single day. No single source of truth existed for their business data. They needed a platform that could do three things:

1. Connect everything. Pull sales data from POS systems (Toast, GiveX, Oracle Micros), invoices from vendors (SAQ, Breakthru Beverages), and customer data from CRMs (Salesforce) into one unified dashboard.
2. Automate invoice processing. Use OCR to extract line items, taxes, discounts, and vendor details from PDF invoices automatically, eliminating hours of manual data entry per week.
3. Scale across locations. Let operators manage multiple restaurant and bar locations from one account, with location-specific billing, access controls, and configuration.

The target users ranged from single-location bar owners to multi-unit restaurant groups with 10+ locations. Whatever I designed had to be simple enough for a bar manager yet powerful enough for a regional operations director.

Before designing anything, I spent two weeks shadowing restaurant managers and bar operators during their daily routines. I sat behind the bar during a Friday night rush, watched a manager reconcile invoices on a Monday morning, and observed how a regional director reviewed weekly numbers across six locations.

The Existing Workflow (Before)

A typical morning for an operations manager looked like this: open Toast POS to check yesterday's sales, log into the SAQ portal to download new invoices, open a shared Google Sheet to manually enter invoice line items, switch to Salesforce to check customer retention data, and email the owner a summary. This cycle repeated daily.

• Managers were switching between 4-6 different tools every day, each with its own login, interface, and data format.
• Invoice data entry was entirely manual. A single vendor invoice with 30 line items took 15-20 minutes to enter into the accounting spreadsheet.
• There was no way to see sales and expenses side by side. Revenue looked great until you factored in purchase costs that lived in a different system.
• Multi-location owners had to repeat the entire process for each location, multiplying the inefficiency.

Hospitality software looks the same everywhere. Dense tables, grey sidebars, small text, enterprise-grade dullness. The operators I shadowed had four of these open at once. They blurred together. Nobody could tell at a glance which tool they were looking at.

I chose a neo-memphis visual direction for a specific reason: recognition speed. When you open a tab and see rounded geometric shapes, a warm cream background, and purple accents instead of another grey-on-white grid, your brain registers "this is my operations dashboard" in under a second. That matters when you're switching between six tools during a lunch rush.

Working with the engineering team, I designed a three-layer architecture. The top layer is what operators see: a dashboard, sales analytics, expense tracking, an integration hub, and a marketplace. The middle layer handles the heavy lifting: OCR processing, data sync pipelines, POS connectors, invoice processors, and access control. The bottom layer connects to external data sources: POS APIs, vendor invoice feeds, and CRM systems. Each layer is independent, so adding a new POS integration or invoice vendor doesn't require redesigning the dashboard.

The integration wizard is the centrepiece of the platform. It replaces the old process of emailing API credentials back and forth, waiting for a developer to configure a connection, and hoping the data format matches. Now an operations manager can connect a new POS system or invoice vendor in under two minutes, without writing a single line of code.

The wizard walks users through location selection, data source configuration, integration setup, and billing. Each step validates before allowing the user to proceed, so misconfigurations are caught before they cause sync failures.

Invoice processing was the single most time-consuming task for operations managers. A distributor like Breakthru Beverage Missouri sends multi-page PDF invoices with dozens of line items - cases of Landmark P Noir, Barritts Ginger Beer, Bota Box, Jameson Irish Whisky, Knob Creek Bourbon, each with case counts, bottle sizes, pack quantities, item numbers, and extended pricing. Before the platform, someone had to open each PDF and manually type every field into a spreadsheet. One invoice took 15-20 minutes. Multiply that by 10-15 invoices per week, per location.

The OCR engine changes this entirely. The operator uploads a PDF and the system presents a split-screen view: the original invoice on the left with colored highlighting over detected fields, and a structured extraction panel on the right. The panel walks through all 13 fields one at a time (invoiceNo, invoiceDate, vendor, itemNo, quantity, unitPrice, and more), letting the operator verify each parsed value before hitting Approve. The whole process takes under a minute per invoice.

A single-location bar owner and a ten-location restaurant group have fundamentally different needs, but they both need to start somewhere simple. The multi-location system was designed to grow with the business.

Each location gets its own configuration: which POS system it uses, which vendors supply it, what billing plan it's on, and who has access. The "Add Location" flow captures business details, assigns a billing plan, and requires TOS agreement before activation. This means a restaurant group can have Location A on Toast POS with the Pro plan, while Location B runs GiveX on the Starter plan.

From the owner's perspective, all locations appear in a single sidebar. Clicking a location name filters the entire dashboard, sales data, expense data, and integration status to that specific location. A "View All" option shows aggregated data across the portfolio.

Hospitality businesses have complex team structures. The owner needs to see everything. The general manager needs to configure integrations but shouldn't change billing. A consultant brought in for a quarterly review needs read-only access to analytics. The bar manager at Location B should only see Location B's data.

I designed a six-tier role hierarchy that maps directly to how hospitality businesses actually operate:

Users are invited by email with a specific role assignment. The invitation flow lets the inviter select which locations the new user should have access to, preventing accidental over-provisioning of permissions.

The marketplace is where operators discover new integrations. Instead of a flat list of connectors, I designed a categorized browsing experience. Each data source has a card showing its name, supported data types (expense, sales, or both), a brief description, and a "Connect" action. Operators can filter by category (POS, Invoice, CRM, Analytics) and see which integrations are already active for their account. The settings panel lives alongside the marketplace, giving operators a single place to manage their business profile, billing details, payment methods, task history, and configuration preferences.

Available data sources at launch included:

• Sculpture Hospitality - expense and sales data for inventory management
• Toast POS - full POS integration with order-level detail
• GiveX POS - POS and loyalty program data
• Breakthru Beverages - beverage distributor invoice automation
• SAQ - Quebec liquor board invoice processing
• Salesforce Retail CRM - customer relationship data
• Google Sheets / Microsoft Excel - spreadsheet import and export

Data sync is the backbone that makes everything else work. Two different sync strategies run in parallel, each optimized for its data source type:

Real-time sync handles POS data. When a server closes a check on Toast, that order appears in the platform dashboard within seconds. The POS connector maintains a persistent connection to each POS system's API, subscribing to order events and transforming the data into the platform's normalized schema on the fly.

Scheduled sync handles invoice data. Vendor portals like SAQ and Breakthru don't offer real-time feeds. Instead, the pipeline runs on a configurable schedule (hourly, daily, or on-demand), pulling new invoices, running them through OCR, and staging them for operator review.

Both paths converge in the same data pipeline: incoming data is validated, transformed to match the platform schema, deduplicated against existing records, and loaded into PostgreSQL. Every sync operation is logged with status (success, partial, or failed), duration, and record count, which feeds into the integration logs viewer that operators use to troubleshoot issues.

OCR accuracy was solved by continuously updating the recognition dictionary. Early on, the OCR review interface assumed 90%+ accuracy across all vendors. Non-standard invoices initially hit 60-70% accuracy, but instead of redesigning the UI, we built a continuously updating recognition dictionary that learns from operator corrections. Each time an operator fixes a misread field, the correction feeds back into the dictionary for that vendor's template. Over time, accuracy improved to 95%+ even for irregular formats, and the original "quick review and approve" flow worked as intended.

Billing complexity was significantly underestimated. What seemed like a simple pricing page (Starter $11/mo, Advanced $35/mo, Pro $69/mo) became deeply complex when each location could be on a different plan, each plan has overage charges ($0.20-$0.40 per extra task), and enterprise clients needed consolidated invoicing across locations. The billing module took nearly as much design effort as the integration wizard itself.

The role system needed more user research upfront. The six-tier role hierarchy was based on how we assumed hospitality businesses operate. In practice, some businesses wanted custom role combinations (a "Location Manager" who can also configure integrations for their location, but not others). A more flexible permissions model would have avoided several rounds of iteration.

• Mobile companion app for on-the-go access to dashboard summaries, push notifications for integration failures, and quick invoice approval.
• Webhook notifications for real-time alerts when sync failures occur, invoices arrive, or sales targets are hit.
• Advanced analytics dashboards with trend analysis, location comparisons, and predictive insights for purchasing decisions.
• API for third-party developers to build custom integrations and extend the platform beyond the built-in marketplace.