The straight answers.

No commission on your bills — 0% for founding partners for the first 24 months. Zikiti’s platform fee is charged to the diner, calculated as 15% of what they save, and it never comes out of your payout. The only deduction on your side is card processing at 3.15% + $0.30 — Stripe’s published Canadian card rate of 2.9% plus the 0.25% Connect fee on split payouts, passed through with no Zikiti markup and none of it kept by us.

For reservations, you do. You set a discount for each hour of each day, and anything above the reservation minimum agreed when you sign publishes instantly with no approval step. Going below that minimum needs a short exception request. Walk-in discounts work differently: they’re a single flat rate per restaurant, set with you at onboarding, and you can request a change to it any time from your dashboard.

Through Stripe Connect, directly into your own bank account — Zikiti never holds your money. What you receive is calculated independently of anything on the diner’s side: the discounted bill, plus the full tip, less card processing. Payout timing follows Stripe’s standard schedule for your account.

Every booking puts a $3.00 per guest hold on the diner’s card, and 45 minutes before the table — the moment they lose the right to cancel free — that hold is charged and paid to you. You have the money before they walk in. If they arrive and settle through Zikiti it is credited against their bill; if they never turn up, you simply keep it. Nobody has to mark a no-show, and Zikiti’s fee on one is $0.00 — we don’t make money when you lose a table.

Entirely. 100% of every tip goes to the staff member who served that table, and Zikiti never takes a share. Tips are calculated on the pre-discount bill, so a discount never reduces what your server earns. Because each transaction is attributed to a named employee, you get per-employee tip totals rather than one lump figure.

Real reservations. A booking consumes actual, finite capacity for that time band — it is never a cosmetic “discount reservation” with no table behind it. You control how many covers are available in each slot, and a slot with nothing left is genuinely unbookable.

Not email accounts. Staff sign in on a shared device with your restaurant’s code and their own 4-digit PIN, which is what makes per-employee tip attribution work. Staff see only the live service board and today’s bookings — never your financials, settlements, or profile settings. Those are owner and manager only.

They’re stored in a private vault that isn’t publicly readable at all. Opening one generates a short-lived link that expires in minutes, and every single access is written to an audit log with who opened it and when. There is no permanent shareable URL to any document you upload.

Typically three to four weeks from application, through six stages: apply, a conversation with a partner manager (within two business days), verification and agreement, Stripe and profile setup, a soft opening to a small slice of guests, then public launch. The full timeline is here.

No — Zikiti runs alongside whatever you already use. There’s no POS integration today, so Zikiti bookings and bills live in your Zikiti dashboard rather than flowing into your existing system automatically. If that matters for how your floor runs, raise it in the conversation at stage two so it’s planned for rather than discovered later.

You control your own hours and discount schedule at all times, so you can set a day or an entire week to no discount without leaving. Exit terms are set out in the partnership agreement you sign at stage three — read that section properly before signing, and ask about anything in it.