One row a month. That is all we take.

A participating venue's sales are already recorded in its own till system. Once a month we read a single summary line, set the venue name aside, and turn it into benchmarks for the whole sector that go back to the venues taking part. This page sets out exactly what that involves, and what is never touched.

Example row, made up figures
Period2026-08
Net sales£48,223
Wet / dry / misc31,400 / 14,923 / 1,900
Transactions5,680
VAT£9,645
Refunds£186
Venueanon

That is the row. One per venue, per month, with the name set aside. The figures shown are made up to show the shape of it, not taken from any venue. There is no view of a single night, a single till or a single sale.

Three steps, once a month

The connection is read only and runs in one direction. Nothing is ever written back to a venue's system.

1 Your monthly totals Net sales, the wet and dry split, transactions, VAT and refunds. READ ONLY · ONCE A MONTH 2 Name off, pooled Keyed on an ID and grouped by region and by size band. MIN. FIVE VENUES PER FIGURE 3 Benchmarks back to you Averages, medians and movements across the panel. NO VENUE NAMED, NO TOTALS Never read: customer data, card details, ticketing, staff hours, or any individual sale.
  1. Your monthly totalsNet sales, the wet and dry split, transactions, VAT and refunds.Read only · once a month
  2. Name off, pooledKeyed on an ID and grouped by region and by size band.Min. five venues per figure
  3. Benchmarks back to youAverages, medians and movements across the panel.No venue named, no totals

Never read: customer data, card details, ticketing, staff hours, or any individual sale.

What is never collected

Not "held securely". Not collected at all. The system is never asked for any of it.

  • Customer data No names, email addresses, postcodes or loyalty accounts. Nothing that identifies a person who bought a drink.
  • Card and payment details Card takings are read as one monthly figure. No card numbers exist anywhere in the data.
  • Ticketing and bookings There is no connection to the box office, and no interest in one.
  • Staff hours, rotas and pay Available and deliberately left alone. Sales per labour hour would be a useful benchmark and it is not worth what it would cost a venue.
  • Items and products No product lists, no basket contents, no individual transactions. Category totals at most, and only ever as totals.
  • Anything written back The connection is read only. Nothing is ever sent to a venue's system, changed in it, or switched on.

Four rules every published figure passes

  1. 01No venue is ever namedNot in an edition, not in a chart, not in a conversation with another operator. There is no version of this where a venue appears next to its numbers.
  2. 02No absolute figures, everNo revenue totals and no transaction counts are published. Percentages, averages, medians and direction only. Per-unit ratios such as spend per transaction are published because they are ratios, not revenue.
  3. 03At least five venues behind any numberAggregation only protects a venue while the group is big enough to hide in, so no regional or size cut is published if fewer than five venues sit behind it.
  4. 04The panel size is always statedEvery edition says how many venues its figures are drawn from, so a reader can judge the strength of a benchmark instead of taking it on trust.

Questions, or a request to come out

Where a venue's data is used, the lawful basis is legitimate interests, assessed and written down before any of this began, on the footing that the data is commercial rather than personal, that the outputs are aggregated, and that no venue can ever be identified in anything published.

If you would rather not take part, say so and your venue comes out of every future pull. Rows already held can be deleted on request. The one thing that cannot be undone is an edition already published, because a median across dozens of venues cannot be unpicked and reissued.

If you have questions, email us.

Email us about your venue

Where the data is held

The monthly pull runs in Make, in its EU region. Figures are held in Google Workspace on a TheatreOps account, and analysis runs from monthly extracts. Published editions go out through beehiiv. Nothing venue-level is shared with a third party, and no raw data is exported or sold.

Is any of this personal data?

The venue figures are commercial data about an organisation, not personal data about a person, so data protection law largely does not apply to them. They are anonymised and aggregated before anything is published, and they are treated as confidential business information throughout, which is a higher bar than the law sets here. The personal data TheatreOps does hold is the newsletter list and work contact details, and that is covered in the privacy notice.