PAR - Earnings Call - Q4 2020

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the PAR Technology 2020 Fourth Quarter and Year-End Financial Results Review Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question at that time, please press star then one on your touch-tone telephone. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I would now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Chris Byrnes, Vice President of Business Development. Sir, you may begin.

Chris Byrnes (VP of Business Development)

Thank you, Valerie, and good afternoon to everyone. I'd also like to welcome you today to the call for PAR's 2020 fourth quarter and year-end financial results review. The complete disclosure of our results can be found in our press release issued this afternoon, as well as in our related Form 8-K furnished to the SEC. To access the press release and the financial details, please see the Investor Relations and News section of our website at www.parttech.com. I also want to ensure that all participants today have access to our earnings presentation and business review slide deck that will be used later in the call to better communicate the momentum in our software business. Individuals on the webcast should have access to the deck when they logged onto the call this afternoon.

For those just dialing in on the conference call, the presentation can be accessed on the investor page of our website, and we also include it as an attachment on the 8-K we filed this afternoon. At this time, I'd like to take care of certain details in regards to the call today. Participants on the call should be aware that we are recording the call this afternoon, and it will be available for playback. Also, we are broadcasting the conference call via the World Wide Web, so please be advised if you ask a question, it will be included in both our live conference and any future use of the recording. I'd also like to remind participants that this conference call includes forward-looking statements that reflect management's expectations based on currently available data. However, actual results are subject to future events and uncertainties.

The information on this conference call related to projections or other forward-looking statements may be relied upon and subject to the safe harbor statement included in our earnings release this afternoon and in our annual and quarterly filings with the SEC. Joining me on the call today is PAR's CEO and President, Savneet Singh, and Brian Menar, PAR's Chief Financial Officer. I'd now like to turn the call over to Savneet for the formal remarks portion of the call, which will be followed by general Q&A. Savneet?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon to everyone on the call today. I hope you and your families are well and healthy during these challenging times. As I communicated to you last quarter, 2020 presented incredible challenges for our company and the global economy as a whole, and I thus go out to all those impacted by the global pandemic. As I look back on 2020, I feel humbled at how hard our team worked to not only deliver our plan but serve our customers. Our focus on long-term return, customer obsession, and product development helped us end the year on a high note. We ended 2020 with the best bookings quarter in the company's history, continuing strong momentum from Q3. We entered a year with the largest backlog in our history, which should set the foundation for a very strong 2021.

This rapid growth has encouraged us to continue to invest heavily into our product and, for the first time in my tenure, make investments in sales and marketing. While the year presented a myriad of challenges, we view many of these challenges as creating opportunities that PAR is well positioned to take advantage of. Our financial position is stronger than it was a year ago, with more than $180 million in cash on our balance sheet at year-end. While we'll touch on the financials a bit later, I want to highlight upfront on our EBITDA performance in 2020. As many of you know, capital allocation is a discipline at PAR owned by all. During the crisis, we radically changed our spend, deciding to focus almost all of our investment into our software product growth. This drove our results later in the year.

The early-on struggles of the pandemic, the almost full shutdown of our business for seven weeks, and our continued investment into our R&D investment in software, our reported EBITDA came in at around a loss of $13 million. A remarkable feat when you realize that 2020 represented the most difficult operating period for the restaurants in history. Our company tightened our belts early on and positioned the company to reduce cash burn without sacrificing the ability to accelerate our strategic investments regarding products and people. Our client base is large and diverse, with thousands of restaurants around the globe using PAR products and services. That customer base represents our greatest asset for both future sales opportunities and the dependable revenue stream it currently produces. Restaurants are living through a dramatic change in their operating and business models. Technology will be at the center of that change.

We are building at PAR the platform to lean into this change. There is no question that the volume of software purchased by restaurants will grow tremendously over the next decade. Now, to briefly review the fourth quarter reported numbers before Brian gives further detail. In Q4, we reported revenues of $58.5 million, an increase of 10.6% when compared to Q4 2019. We saw revenue growth across all of our segments. Today, we also reported a GAAP net loss of $13 million, or $0.60 per share, compared to a GAAP net loss of $5.8 million, or $0.35 per share in the same period in 2019. On an adjusted basis, non-GAAP net loss for the fourth quarter of 2020 was $8 million, or $0.37 per share, compared to a GAAP net loss of $3.8 million, or $0.23 per share in the same period in 2019.

Now, moving to our business performance. If you jump to slide three of the presentation, you'll see a snapshot of Brink's performance in Q4. I'm very pleased to report that we had a record 1,525 new store bookings in the quarter, a 67% improvement from Q4 in 2019 and a 29% increase from the sequential Q3. I think this metric, more than any other, truly demonstrates momentum and velocity of our cloud point of sale software offering. Q4 Brink bookings were the highest number of signed orders in a quarter in our history and highlight the dramatic demand for the Brink product. As the slide shows, we reported ARR $24.7 million, a 29% increase from the same quarter last year. As the pandemic continues to slow down, we expect to see an acceleration in our activations as stores begin to open and normalize to our traditional activation pace.

Said differently, as stores open, our ARR should accelerate alongside our bookings. If you advance the slide forward, you can see that we now have 11,722 active stores and our reported backlog at the end of Q4 was 2,546 stores yet to be installed. Entering 2021 with over 2,500 stores in signed backlog sets up a foundation for a very strong year. Again, as our customers begin to open, we'll see an acceleration in activations that should help bring this backlog down. We installed 885 new Brink stores in Q4, a 42% increase from Q4 2019, a remarkable accomplishment during the pandemic. We'll continue to work with our customers regarding implementation schedules along with the enhanced in-store safety protocols to ensure our book-to-bill sequence is as seamless as possible. On slide five, you can see the ARR waterfall over the last five quarters as we continue to grow ARR.

I'm proud of our consistently annualized low churn rate of 5% in Q4. This is the fifth consecutive quarter that our annual churn rate has been at or below 5% and is a testament to the stickiness of our software offerings and the strength of our enterprise customers. To date, we have yet to lose a customer exceeding 50 stores. Slide six shows the improvement in COVID-related churn and proves out the minimal impact that COVID has had on store closures in our TAM and the inspiring strength of our customers. In Q4, COVID-related churn was at a low of 3% of our overall base, and we will continue to work and assist these affected customers to get back online and open their stores. These metrics are very positive signs for our business.

Slide seven shows Restaurant Magic being impacted in the quarter due to the pandemic and the spike of infections in Q4. Bookings reported in the quarter were 146, and ARR was reported $8.8 million. Combined, ARR with Brink and Restaurant Magic is now $33.5 million at the end of Q4. Slide eight gives the current site count for Restaurant Magic with installed stores now totaling 5,900. On slide nine, we reported an approximate $1.5 million increase in Brink-related hardware revenues from the end of Q4 last year, a 22% increase. We continue to see robust demand for the complete PAR solution of software, hardware, and services and the capabilities it provides our customers. We're encouraged by our continued strong performance and look to expand our market share consistently.

Now, to quickly review our product and hardware business in the quarter, that is our point of sale platform and drive-through communications business. Product revenues in the quarter increased by 8% from Q4 2019 and have been performing well during a very difficult COVID environment. As I briefly mentioned earlier, our integrated offerings and complete solution continue to be adopted by customers. I'm pleased to see the performance and product sales from our Q4 number, and to deliver this performance in a very challenged capital spend environment is nothing short of remarkable. Now, to review our government segment. Our government business delivered a solid quarter, evidenced by the 6.5% increase in revenues compared to Q4 2019. Our contract backlog at the end of Q4 was $151 million as of December 31, 2020.

Our intel solutions business was the driving force behind the growth in the quarter as ISR revenues increased 12% from last year's Q4. We continue to seek out contract opportunities where we can leverage our decades-long experience and our performance excellence, specifically in value-added revenue contracts that include more direct labor and high-tech contract work within our ISR business line. Now, some takeaways on our company coming out of 2020. Restaurants are looking for a platform to handle the rapid growth and digital transformation. Today, restaurants suffer from dozens of different and disparate products, siloed and lacking the modularity to make the solution work. We are building that connected platform. PAR Payment Services, our new all-in-one payment processing solution, continues to be introduced to the marketplace. Although we are very early in this initiative, I'm confident over time this will be a long-term driver of revenue growth for our company.

PAR payment services will give our operators the opportunity to take advantage of fantastic rates, a streamlined process, and the ability to offset hardware costs. With our strengthened balance sheet, we intend to be active in the M&A space as we continue to build out our software platform. All our focus is on adding additional software products that are feature-function-rich and will allow us to increase our subscription rates and make us stickier with the customer. In an average month, the Brink API is pinged almost 500 million times. This rich data set gives PAR a unique angle to value partners and future acquisitions. To recap, the last two years have been a consistent period of change for PAR. Our team, our business, our products, and most importantly, our culture have changed dramatically.

We have withstood a global pandemic, acquired new businesses, invested in our products, and have pushed our boundaries further than ever before. We've added hundreds of talented employees, which has created an energized environment and built on our storied history. I now feel strongly our company is ready to set the stage and define what the restaurant of the future will look, sound, and feel like. For too long, technology has been a zero-sum game for restaurants, creating a wedge between them and their guests. We're confident the changes we made at PAR set the foundation to bridge that gap. As always, I'd like to thank our PAR employees, partners, and customers for their commitment to our business and hard work and helping us achieve such extraordinary success during these challenging times of the pandemic.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Brian for more details on the Q4 numbers and then take your questions. Brian.

Brian Menar (CFO)

Thank you, Savneet, and good afternoon, everyone. Product revenue in the quarter was $21.8 million, an increase of $1.6 million, or 8%, from the $20.2 million reported in the prior year. During the quarter, the increase in product revenue was primarily driven by a $2.4 million increase of drive-through hardware sales. Additionally, the hardware associated with the deployments of Brink POS increased approximately $1.5 million, or 28%, versus the prior year fourth quarter. Offsetting these increases was the decrease associated with our traditional tier-one hardware customers. Service revenue that includes revenue streams from our subscription software was reported at $18.3 million, an increase of $2.9 million, or 19%, from the $15.5 million reported in the prior year fourth quarter. The company continues to expand our recurring revenue base, which includes both software-related services and hardware support contracts.

In total, the recurring software revenue streams contributed $3.1 million of the increase in service revenue. The company continues to gain momentum of its deployment of Brink POS and Restaurant Magic, noting a $3.2 million, or 85%, increase in software as a service revenues as compared to prior year, including $2.2 million related to the Restaurant Magic acquisition. Of the $18.3 million of service revenue reported in Q4 2020, $14.7 million, or 80%, is comprised of recurring revenue contracts as compared to $10.9 million, or 71%, of service revenue in Q4 2019. Contract revenue from our government business was $18.4 million, an increase of $1.1 million, or 6%, from the $17.3 million reported in the fourth quarter 2019. This is a result of an increase in value-added ISR contracts and subcontract revenues. Contract backlog continues to be significant, noting a total backlog of over $151 million as of December 31st.

Now, turning to margins. Product margin for the quarter was 17.4% versus 19.5% in Q4 2019. The 2.2% decline in profitability was a result of the disposal of inventory related to the acquisition of assets of the drive-through communications product line. We reported unusually low service gross margins during Q4 2020. This decline was primarily driven by $1.5 million in service inventory adjustments, $0.4 million of disposal of inventory related to the acquisition of assets of drive-through communications product line, $0.6 million in service level credits, and $0.3 million for increased investment in our call center. Service margin for the quarter was 13% compared to 32% reported in the fourth quarter of last year. Excluding the charges expressed above, the service margins would have been more in line with our historical service margins. Government contract margins were 8.3% as compared to 9.9% for the fourth quarter of 2019.

This decrease was driven by our mission system's line of business impacted by contract rate adjustments and lost reserves. GAAP SG&A was $13.6 million, an increase of $3.5 million from the $10.1 million reported in Q4 2019. The increase was due to a $1.2 million increase of variable compensation, $0.8 million of expenses for recently acquired Restaurant Magic, $0.6 million for increase in corporate support services, and $0.8 million increase in investments for restaurant sales, marketing, and management. Net R&D was $5.6 million, up $1.5 million, or 36%, from $4.1 million reported in Q4 2019. The majority of this increase is due to software investments made for the acceleration of Brink and Restaurant Magic product lines and hardware investments primarily in our drive-through product lines.

During the fourth quarter of 2020, the company also reported $1 million for the reduction to the contingent consideration liability related to the Restaurant Magic acquisition. Now, to provide information on the company's cash flow and balance sheet position. For the year-ended 2020, cash used in operating activities was $20.2 million versus $16.1 million for 2019, primarily due to increased net income loss. Cash used in investing activities was $9 million for the year-ended 2020 versus $24 million for 2019. In 2020, capital expenditures were $1.3 million versus $2.5 million for the prior year. Capitalized software associated with the investments for various hospitality software platforms for the year-ended 2020 was $7.9 million versus $4.1 million for 2019. In 2019, we used $20 million of cash for the Restaurant Magic and drive-through acquisitions and received $2.5 million in proceeds from the sale district to product line.

Cash provided by financing activities was $180.7 million for the year-ended 2020 versus cash provided of $65.6 million for 2019. During the year-ended 2020, we received net proceeds of $131.4 million for our public stock offering in the fourth quarter. In the first quarter of 2020, we received net proceeds of $115.9 million for our sale of the 2026 notes, of which approximately $66.3 million was used to repurchase a portion of the 2024 notes. Inventory increased from December 31st, 2019, by $2.3 million. It is important to note, we reduced inventory by $5 million sequentially from quarter-ended September 30th, 2020. Accounts receivable increased $1.2 million compared to December 31, 2019, primarily due to increased revenue in the restaurant segment. Days outstanding improved within the restaurant and retail segment from 77 days at 12/31/2019 to 74 days at 12/31/2020.

Days outstanding improved within government from 58 days at 12/31/2019 to 51 days at 12/31/2020. This concludes my formal remarks, and we'd like to turn the call back to Valerie for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star, then one on your touch-tone telephone. One moment, please. Our first question comes from Samad Samana of Jefferies. Your line is open.

Samad Samana (Analyst)

Hi. Good afternoon, and thanks for taking my question. Savneet, maybe I want to dive in a little bit. Just the acceleration comment for ARR really stuck out to me. If you could maybe just help frame that a little bit better, how we should think about that, that would be a helpful starting point.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Sure. We've had—in the last two quarters, we've had tremendous growth in bookings. Remember, PAR bookings are signed orders, so they're a real commitment from customers. Those bookings generally are on a six to eight-week book-to-bill cycle. We historically have been able to turn a booking on into revenue within six to eight weeks. During the pandemic, that's been elongated as we've got to work through not our own requirements, but the requirements of our customers to get into stores. As a result, you've had this very, very large backlog build-up of almost 2,500 signed orders waiting to be installed. As the pandemic wanes down, our ability to get into stores should become easier and easier, and we're beginning just to see that right now. You'll see this backlog burn down and ARR turn on very aggressively after that.

Our goal over time is that our bookings should be relatively close to our ARR added the following quarter. It's not always that linear, but right now, I think it's too way the other way because of the pandemic. As the pandemic comes down, our ability to launch and activate stores accelerates back to kind of our historical cadence, and we'll be able to burn down some of this large backlog. To me, it's incredibly exciting. We've got an enormous amount of the year already booked, and the year hasn't even kicked off. We'll be able to, I think, have a really, really strong 2021 as a result.

Samad Samana (Analyst)

Great. Maybe just another follow-up on the bookings. Obviously, just a really strong quarter there, considering you added as many in Q4 as you did in the first half of both this year and last year. Can you help us maybe think about, in terms of those bookings, how much of it was the average number of either sites? Or just helping us double-click into that, was it more driven by larger QSRs? Was it more blended from across the spectrum? Just how should we contextualize that 1,500-plus bookings number?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Yeah, it's a fantastic question. I would say in Q4, we saw growth across all segments, obviously, when you have that type of growth. We saw more accelerated growth kind of in our mid-market, the hundreds of stores as opposed to the thousands of stores, which has been an emerging segment for us and helps balance us out, actually. When there, we had a couple multi-hundred store unit chain wins. We saw a lot of growth there. I think if we were to talk pipeline, we saw the most growth in pipeline in the very large stores, the thousand-plus store, which I think bodes well for a strong 2021 on that end. I would say we had growth across all segments. The biggest growth, though, was in that kind of mid-market of hundreds of stores versus thousands of stores.

Samad Samana (Analyst)

Great. Maybe one last one on Brink before switching gears. I know payments is a newer opportunity, and it's still early days. Any color around maybe TPV so far that's running through PAR payments or the take rate that you guys are netting out at? I understand not wanting to give away the juice to potential competitors, but just how should we think about the early traction there?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Yeah. I'd say at the end of Q4, it's probably truly saying anything that's instructive. Q1 was really our first real quarter of actually selling the product. I would say what we learned in Q4, I think, was encouraging. We've learned that the rates that we sell to our customers are attractive, so i.e., them switching to our payment product is not going to cost them more. Second, I think we think the TAM here is quite large. I think our ability to offset hardware costs with payments over time is a really powerful addition.

I think, as we sort of indicated, I think our take rate here, if we were to sort of back into a take rate, if we were to sort of look at the average set customer that we think would come on to our product line, it roughly doubles our RPU per store. If the average store at Brink today is around $2,100, we think we'll get another $2,100-$2,500 per store that we turn on to payments. It is not so much a take rate, but a fixed deferred transaction model, which is how the enterprise operates versus down market where it is very much a spread business. If you sort of back into—if you want to sort of back into basis points, that is sort of 25-ish to 30 basis points.

Samad Samana (Analyst)

Understood. Maybe one more for me. If I think about the Restaurant Magic, obviously, it's been impacted by what's going on with the pandemic. Can you maybe—I know it's tough to look in the crystal ball, but how should we think about maybe what the durable growth there looks like? I know right now it's being depressed, but it'd be helpful to understand that.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Yes. If you look at the bookings, the Restaurant Magic bookings are very sensitive to the pandemic. If you sort of look at—we had good bookings in Q3, and that's sort of the result of the summer openings. Q4, we had weak results with, obviously, a lot of stress around November, December, and the pandemic coming back. I think this is—as the pandemic slows down here, the vaccines pick up. This should get back to that normal cadence of it should be growing as fast as Brink. There's no reason it shouldn't. One of the things we've done is, after the one-year completion of the transaction and the earnout that we had with the founders, we've now integrated Restaurant Magic fully. That sales motion is now coming out of the broader PAR sales team.

The account will have a nice attachment as opposed to treating them as separate products. I think as the pandemic healthy comes down to an end or just to a low base, this business should be growing at the same rate of Brink. I can make an argument faster, but this should not be growing any different than Brink in a sort of a normalized world.

Samad Samana (Analyst)

Great. Thanks for taking all my questions, guys, and congrats on the strong Brink bookings quarter.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from Stephen Sheldon and William Blair your line is open.

Stephen Sheldon (Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, thanks. First one, for some of the larger thousand-plus site wins with Brink that you talked about in the pipeline, can you maybe roughly frame how long it could take those big brands to maybe push higher adoption of Brink within their own site base and their franchisee site base?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Yeah. I would say in the large wins, their own site base comes very quickly. If we were to sign a large customer, we generally are able to start turning on the owned stores, corporate-owned stores within a quarter. It's relatively quickly. We've seen that with our big recent win, excuse me, that we announced last quarter. I think we'll see that in the next quarter as we announce more of these wins. Generally, the corporate-owned stores come very quickly because a lot of the work to get us going is there. I think on the non-corporate-owned stores, the franchise stores, depending on the size, if it's a multi-thousand unit chain, it's a couple-year process to get through most of them. If I look back in our prior business, Five Guys was a couple of years. I think some of our other customers were three years.

It's sort of in that two to three-year window you can get through the rest of the franchisees. Now, the pandemic has changed things and changed things for the better. Our sort of next large customer that I think we'll sign, I'd expect us to get through at a much more rapid pace than normal because, again, this pulls through where we're seeing that it's not just about picking Brink. It's about bedding Brink live. And they're kind of in that same bucket of us. It's like we both want to get live really, really fast. Historically, we say two to three years for a very large customer, for sort of a medium-sized customer within the year. I think we'll see that two to three years from the new logos we sign come faster because they've kind of jumped in as a result of learning from the pandemic.

I think that their need is almost acute as opposed to, "This is something we have to do. This is something we must do." I think we'll see some really potential for some of these sales cycles to get smaller.

Stephen Sheldon (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. That's helpful. Between Brink and Restaurant Magic, I think you talked about some integration on the go-to-market side. Maybe an update on that and plans to better integrate on the product side and what that could potentially look like from a client's perspective in terms of ease of use and functionality. Just any detail on the integration process there.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Sure. Yeah, on the sales and marketing side, we are integrated. The team that drives the go-to-market is now one team. Marketing is coordinated, and sales is run by the same account management team and the same go-to-market team that runs Brink. This creates an incredible amount of simplicity for our customer, right? They're not talking to two different account owners. They're not dealing with different pricing, different billing. It all looks as one. I think equally important for us is that it doesn't allow an opportunity for a new account not to look at the product, not to have the opportunity to bundle that product. I think there's just great logic to that.

On the product side, as we sort of move forward to the more modern infrastructure of Brink, the products have to speak to each other. We're not in the business of sort of buying revenue. We're in the business of sort of building great product. These products will begin to start talking to each other. What does that mean? From the most simple of sense, these products should have something like single sign-on, right? You shouldn't have to sign into both products. Over time, you should be able to take the data from both systems and have actionable insights to come back to the restaurant manager, owner, or the franchisee. We think that's the next level. We are beginning that sort of product integration. Literally, I think we kicked off a week or two ago.

We'll start to integrate the products more closely again in this year, which will help, I think, our customers see the value of bundling it upfront.

Stephen Sheldon (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from George Sutton of Craig-Hallum.

George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)

Thank you. I made a general technology future of restaurant technology statement. Obviously, major chains have been laying out some new formats that integrate things like drive-through and pickup and delivery. I'm curious how you feel you're addressing that new area of opportunity relative to your legacy competitive players.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Yeah. I think that change is part of the growth in bookings that we had. I never would have dreamed six months ago we'd have our best growth quarter ever in Q4. I think a lot of what you're saying is what's driving that, which is if I'm the CIO or CEO of that restaurant organization, I always knew I had to upgrade because I needed all the innovation, whether it's online ordering or QR code pickup or payments. I think what's changed, though, is the formats are changing. They're changing, and no one yet can perfectly predict that future. Is it going to be a virtual kitchen, a ghost kitchen, a dark kitchen, a drive-through kitchen? How is this all going to connect together?

It's creating the impetus to, which is I have to have a very, very modern infrastructure so I can be agile and adapt to whatever that change might be. I think it's definitely helping us. Like I said on the last call, and again, continuation, the bookings we're getting are really just coming at us at a pace that we're just trying to keep up with. Similarly, the pipeline is growing because, again, I think you as the restaurant owner or concept owner, excuse me, are at a point now where you just can't wait. That's what's really pulling through a lot of the demand. I don't know if it's related to that demand, but I think it's part of the whole story.

George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)

Perfect. As you talk about bringing ARR growth and the bookings growth and the ARR growth together, you mentioned one thing on the call, constrained capital spend. We also have, obviously, the COVID restrictions in terms of implementations. Can you bifurcate how much of an impact both of those have been relative to that?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Sure. The capital spend was more tied to our hardware business, where we were really encouraged that in this sort of market where our customers are definitely keeping their eye on their wallets, they continue to invest in our hardware solutions and our service solutions. We have been very encouraged by that. As it relates to activations, this is just a matter of literally turning stores on. That is where we have had limitations where certain concepts do not allow non-employees in stores, or they want a much more structured rollout schedule because, again, controlling exposure to their end markets. That limits our ability to get the stores rolled out until we get there. Another example is as certain state-by-state had different regulations on quarantining or visiting.

If we had an installer in New York who had to go install something in Massachusetts, he or she would have to come back to New York. They'd have to quarantine, get a COVID test. You didn't have the capacity as you normally would. As we've seen these restrictions come down, as we've seen states open, we'll see this sort of book-to-bill process come back to our more traditional sense, I believe. This backlog, which is, again, incredibly exciting, and we'll burn through it, will start to, again, turn into revenue very quickly. We still activated 885 stores, which is pretty tremendous in this environment. As these limitations come down, you'll see that number continue to grow and the ARR with it. We're really excited by that.

George Sutton (Senior Research Analyst)

Great stuff. Thanks, Savneet.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from Timothy Tidwell of Helio. Your line is open.

Hi. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. Great quarter and great year, guys, given the circumstances of COVID-19. In the release, Brink locations in ARR imply an incremental addition of 1,900 locations year on year and just over $100 million of ARR, which equates to about $53,000 of ARR for those incremental locations. That's obviously not going to be the correct way to think about it, as you have presumably had upsells and incremental increases in revenue from existing locations of Q4 2019. Can you give me a breakdown of what the new signings are going at, as well as how the existing locations have been upsold, in particular how the PAR payment services has been working out, please?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Sure. The store signed in Q4 are, I'd say, in line with our continued sort of price point of roughly $170-$175 a month per store. That number has grown over the last two years, and I think will continue to grow over time. I don't know the exact number, but it's around the same point, same price. I think over time, that number will continue to grow as we've had this expansion in the mid-market where price is higher than our traditional tier one. I think we'll continue to see that. That growth has all been price-driven. It hasn't been module-driven yet. We've grown that price from $158 to, I forget, $175 or $180, all through price. In time, it'll be module-based. We haven't had a module to upsell historically.

Restaurant Magic is really the first upsell product that we've got going on. As I said, now that we've just combined the sales forces earlier this year, we'll see some nice traditional RPO expansion there. On payment services, I just answered that in the last question or two questions ago. In Q4, we launched our beta. We had great success with the beta. Obviously, not a ton of customers, purposely so. We saw that our rates were competitive. We saw that we can make money with it. We saw that there's value to the end customer. We learned a lot. We learned that our ability to offset that hardware cost is a real advantage to our customers. Instead of taking the CapEx to upgrade your hardware, we can take that on, provided we recoup it in payments.

That deal is incredibly high ROIC for PAR. I think the path in 2021 is exactly what you're suggesting, which is we've got an incredible amount of just backlog and revenue that has to come out the door. We'll see really strong revenue growth. That revenue growth will come not just from sites, which has historically been completely our revenue growth has been 100% tied to site growth. That'll start changing to site growth plus what module do we upsell, whether it was payments, whether it was back office, and hopefully more and more as we acquire or build along that framework.

Great. Thank you very much. Just one follow-up. Do you have a view on when you might get to a bit positive or GAAP positive net income?

I think it's going to be very dependent on our growth. If we deliver our growth projections in 2021, I would suggest we should continue to burn. I don't think we're going to burn a lot of money, particularly relative to our cash balance. If our growth slows down, we can quite quickly turn the business back to break even. The levers are there already for us to get to break even. We are making a tremendous amount of investment in R&D spend. As I mentioned, we've sort of just made our first investment in sales and marketing spend, which is leading to, obviously, some of the great results that we have now. We could turn that on if we needed to. I think for the next year or so, we want to continue that dramatic investment because we're seeing great results from it.

Given how low-turn the base is, how much we think we can upsell, I just think that LTV continues to expand pretty considerably, right? Our LTV in 2019 and 2018 and 2020, I mean, it's the lowest it'll ever be because it was a single-product company that didn't have the product and service capabilities to actually serve that customer base. Now we're a multi-product company with the ability to actually upsell and handle that ability. I think the LTV to CAC equation is incredible. We will invest along that. Again, if it ever turns or if we're ever able to not keep up this growth, we can turn that spigot on. I wouldn't be surprised if the business as of today is profitable in 2022.

At the same time, if revenue growth accelerates, as I think it will, there might be an argument for us to not do that. I think we're dynamic with how we allocate capital. I think we'll sort of see how the first couple of quarters go and can potentially get some guidance on that. I'd say we can turn this business profitable by the end of the year if we need to. I'd argue if we see the growth that I think we're going to see, we'd probably wait, postpone that goal.

Thanks very much for taking my questions. I completely agree. Focusing on the growth, should it be there, is the way to go forward. Increasing the market share, that's what you should be doing. Thanks so much.

Sure.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from Anya Otterstrom of Sidoti. Your line is open.

Anya Otterstrom (Analyst)

Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. Congratulations on a great quarter. A lot of good questions asked already. I am just curious to see in the sales and marketing, the progress you made there. Do you have more changes to be made there to capture, or?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Sorry. We do. In Q3, we restructured our department. In Q4, we put in a new head of sales, a new head of marketing. We've seen tremendous results from it already. We just went through a rebrand. I think for the first time, we'll start to see some nice investments in there. I'm really encouraged by this. As I said, I did not expect the results to come so quickly. I think we'll continue that. Part of that sales and marketing spend is not sort of what you'd think of, go sign the next big logo or go do a big brand marketing campaign. It's also just getting much more aggressive about our existing customers.

Not only do we have sort of these 2,500-plus stores that are waiting to be installed—and again, these are signed orders waiting to be installed—we also have an enormous amount of white space in our existing logos that we have yet to sort of mine, if you will. We have a number of customers that we are 50% penetrated in that we need to get to 100%. Some of our investment is also going to be how do we attack those customer bases more effectively. Now that our product is finally to the point where we feel comfortable turning on that spend, we're focusing the results of that spend. I think Q4 was a great demonstration of that.

Anya Otterstrom (Analyst)

Thank you. You were alluding to the rebranding. Have you gotten any initial feedback on that?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

We have. We focused most of our initial rebrand—we put it out publicly a week or two ago. We focused on it first internally to our customers and our partners. In the next quarter, we'll go out externally, and we can share some of the feedback. So far, the feedback's been quite positive. I would say it's not as much about the optical rebrand, but it's also sort of what does that brand mean to our customers? What does that brand promise? What are we looking to achieve? PAR means a lot of things to a lot of people. That's the recipe for success. We sort of need to sort of say, "This is what PAR stands for," and help drive that change. A lot of work is going into getting that out there.

I would expect for you to see a lot of stuff coming out in Q2, the month, the quarter of Q2 externally. That helps kind of lay out what does that brand promise mean? What do our customers think when they see it? So far, it's been really positive. We also engaged our partners, suppliers, and our employees and made it a little bit more of a collective endeavor.

Anya Otterstrom (Analyst)

Okay. Thank you. With the strong backlog you have and, as you say, you're going to be able to accelerate the installments as the pandemic—we're getting through the pandemic—do you have the capacity to do those installments, or is that going to be a slower progress?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

We do have the capacity. As I said, most of the limitations in getting out have been purely pandemic-driven. In December, January, February, we had many of our customers said, "Listen, we really need Brink. We'll sign the order form and commit to it. We just need a slower rollout because we're trying to limit the amount of non-employees in stores." It was a little bit out of our control, as I think, again, stores opening is a huge, huge boom for us to sort of accelerate those activations coming forward. It is not so much our own capacity. It is very much right now at the limitation of our customers who I think are looking at the same data we're looking at as it relates to the pandemic and feeling more comfortable at it.

Anya Otterstrom (Analyst)

Okay. Thank you. That was all for me.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star then one when you touch down telephone. Our next question comes from Adam Wyden of ADW Capital. Your line is open.

Adam Wyden (Analyst)

Hey, guys. Terrific quarter coming out of COVID. Really excited about what you guys have in store. I'm going to take a step back because I feel like a lot of these questions have been super short-term, and it's kind of pissing me off. I had a couple of kind of high-level questions for you. McDonald's announced that they were divesting Dynamic Yield. You guys are clearly piloting inside of Taco Bell. We've seen it in the stores. I use this as an analogy. What attracted us to Brink and PAR initially was the scalability and the ability to get bigger customers. When we look at Toast, Toast has grown 100, but they're getting onesies and twosies. It doesn't scale. Once you get to 50,000 customers, it's much harder to grow 50,000 customers when you're adding one restaurant at a time.

You got Five Guys, then which led to a bigger announcement with Arby's, which led to a bigger announcement with CKE, which led to a bigger announcement to Dairy Queen. Dairy Queen's now 5,300 units. You're doing 3,500, 3,000, 3,500 RPO. Fabulous. My question to you is now everyone said McDonald's was going to build their own point-of-sale system. They're clearly taking a step back and divesting. You're in Taco Bell. You're getting deeper and deeper with Inspire, Jimmy John's, Sonic, Buffalo Wild Wings, all fair game. I mean, can you talk to me about the potential of winning, I guess, what it would be, a four-digit unit chain? Because right now you're at 11,700 units. We know that's going to grow. I mean, you could win a 7,000, 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 unit chain and double the company.

That, to me, is kind of the holy grail here relative to Toast. Please answer that. I kind of have a follow-up around it.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Let me first say this. We'll double the size of the company with the existing customers we have signed. We've got a tremendous amount of stores that are in backlog or they're yet to be installed of our existing logos. I think we'll double the company just from that. There's just a ton of white space, as I call it, to get through. I'm reticent to use customer names. A number of our large customers, we're not even halfway through, right? We've got just so much white space to, excuse me, pull forward. I think we'll do that. As it relates to our competitive positioning and the industry dynamics, there's no question that there's never been a better time to sell the product that we have.

Large restaurants, I think, have made the decision that they need to build in partnership with people like ourselves to make their technology vision come through. Twenty years ago, a company building its own software, its own point of sale made tremendous sense because their competitors could not build the product as well, gave them a competitive advantage. Today, software companies build better products than restaurants on average and I think well beyond on average. I do not think that is debatable. I think that the idea that you are going to keep a captive point-of-sale system, maintain the innovation for that system on your own is a ton of cost and burden for an organization that does not focus on building software. Think of it this way. If I had a large restaurant organization, the technology development group would be an important part of it.

I don't know if the best talent, the best leaders are going to go to that part of the organization as opposed to a software company where that's all the talent. I think that shift is there. That shift in sort of desire to sort of build in partnership now sort of dominates the industry thinking, which wasn't there just a couple of years ago. The last thing I'd say is our position relative to our competitors is getting stronger and stronger. Listen, us growing to 1,500-plus bookings in a quarter is incredible. It is as much a result of our success as much of our competitors not being able to keep up with the industry dynamics that we've seen.

As we come to the next few weeks and sort of start to get some more of our customer wins and talk more about our pipeline, a lot of this is that our large customers are saying, "Hey, I want this change in technology now," and then not being able to find a provider that can give it to them in time or the flexibility and modularity that we can do at Brink. The long-term roadmap has been very positive.

Adam Wyden (Analyst)

Nope. Nope. Nope. Large QR has really been implemented in the cloud. I mean, there's some legacy Aloha and Chipotle and stuff like that. From what we understand, there has been no real successful deployment in a purely cloud technology in over a couple of hundred units. I mean, we know that Burger King did an RFP and Toast basically said, "We can't do it. We can't do the customization." At least unless our channel checks are bad, our understanding is that there has been no successful fully cloud deployment in a chain more than a few hundred units. From what we understand, you guys are literally competing with yourselves. Am I looking into this the wrong way?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

I don't think so. I think the best way to say it is we compete against incumbency. It's very rarely against a competitive solution where we feel like we don't have the edge to win. When we lose, it's incumbency. I think the pandemic has really sort of challenged that incumbency, which is, "Can I really survive with the vendor that I've been with for the last decade that hasn't made these innovations?" That's how I look at it, which is we're competing against our incumbency more than we compete against any specific competitor.

Adam Wyden (Analyst)

Okay. That makes sense. I just want to ask you something else. There was a slide on Twitter. I think it was from one of Toast's kind of go-to-market, kind of test the waters deal where they talk about the SaaS per restaurant of addressable market of like $40,000-$50,000, not including payments. Obviously, you guys, Karen Salmon gave you some real bonehead deals, and you're kind of waiting. You're seeing $3,000 RPO on really great tier-one customers. Even with Restaurant Magic at $1,000-$1,500, you're still only looking at like $4,500 per box on kind of what I would call new ads. Can you comment about your ability to penetrate that, call it, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 number?

I guess my question is really is it kind of seems asinine that Toast says that they can get that because it's much harder to cross-sell products to onesie, twosies. I mean, if you get—use an example. Let's say you get Dairy Queen, and there's 5,300 units, and they all get onto Brink. It's much easier for you to sell them Restaurant Magic or whatever loyalty or back office than it is to sell up to one unit. I mean, can you talk about kind of the strengths of this platform and your ability to capture that RPO and TAM in a much more aggressive and efficient way than kind of your peers and how you think about the cadence of that? Because Toast basically said in their thing that they're going to get to 16,000 of RPO, not including payments, by 2024.

I'm like, "But it doesn't even make sense to me." I mean, I think you guys can do it, but I'm just kind of curious how you think about all that.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Yeah. I think the TAM—let me say it this way. The TAM for restaurants is whatever it is today is going to be a fraction of what it is in the future. I don't think if you asked any person in the restaurant business that they expected to have as much software as they have today that they would have ever dreamed. I think if we didn't ask the same set of restaurants in five years the same question, I think they'd again be shocked. The reason why I'm here, the reason why our team is here, is that we see that change where software is eating this industry in a good way. The idea that you might need computer vision and robotics, delivery management, artificial intelligence, machine learning—all of these things are just now hitting the restaurant industry.

Whatever that TAM is, whether it's 20,000 or 10,000, it's expanding tremendously. That's why we see this great opportunity because the point-of-sale system is the foundational platform that much of this comes off of. The idea that just in the 11,700-ish stores that we had at the end of Q4 takes on average half a billion pings per API, I think stresses just how important that product is as, again, the foundation of that platform. I expect us to rapidly grow into that TAM, both through new product and, again, as we've grown somewhat through price, but grown through new product and acquisition. We see it, I think, and more importantly, I think the industry sees it.

I think these single-product companies are coming back and realizing that their path to success is by partnering or being sold to a company like PAR as opposed to going at it on their own because it just doesn't make sense if you're that restaurant operator to manage 15 or 20 or 10 products per store. That is just asking for failure. I think that our position there is incredibly strong. Whatever I sort of tell you today, I think it's going to be a dramatic understatement of where it will go in the future.

Adam Wyden (Analyst)

I mean, look, if I look at Oracle or Salesforce.com or the one that I like is MarketAxess, which does fixed income pricing, I mean, you've seen a number of what I would call vertical SaaS companies cross-sell successfully. I mean, look, obviously, the playbook is there. I mean, look, Lightspeed does a deal every five minutes. I don't know whether they're good or not. Obviously, it's SMB. I think that the churn rate's much higher. I mean, look, I see that Toast is talking about going public at $20 billion. Lightspeed is trading at like 30-plus times revenue. I mean, you guys basically have—I mean, if I could just kind of go backwards on that, you guys basically did 1,500-some-odd bookings. You've got a backlog of 2,500. That backlog is going to get worked down as stuff opens up, which it will.

It looks like you guys are probably on pace this year in Brink, at least, to get to 2,000 bookings or installs a quarter. I just kind of do back-of-the-envelope math in conjunction with the wind-down of the backlog and getting to kind of 2,000. I mean, if you do, call it, 8,000 installs this year at 3,000, that's $24 million. You're talking about $50 million, $50 million Brink plus, call it, $10-$12 million, wherever Restaurant Magic. I mean, you're looking at something that should be $60-$80 million of ARR, not including acquisition. If I put a 30 multiple on that, that's $2 billion to $2.4 billion, not including the hardware business, which is making money, and government.

The market is still kind of saying, "You're a loser." I mean, I guess my question to you is, what do you think it's going to take to let people know that you're the winner here, that you're going to be the one that is going to basically become the vertical SaaS player? Because I mean, Lightspeed trades at double the multiple, and it's an inferior business, and they don't have the opportunity. I mean, neither Toast nor Lightspeed has the opportunity to cross-sell through these deep networks. Arguably, we should be trading at a much higher multiple given our ability to upsell and cross-sell. I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing and how you're seeing that in the market.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Sure. Let me—I think, listen, I think our execution is catching up tremendously, right? Again, I wouldn't have dreamed that we'd had this type of bookings and backlogs at the end of the year. It truly is incredible. I've never been more excited about—I am always careful not to use hyperbole—but to have 2,500 stores already signed going into a year, it's hard for us to screw up this year. I just think continued execution is really what delivers that. As we sort of said in our script, and we've always said, the platform that we're building has tremendous value to our customers. That's where I think every investment starts, which is actually delivering value. We are. I think we'll add more value than anyone else as we acquire and build new products.

I think it's us executing on that plan like we've been doing and continue to do. Again, as the pandemic rolls off, it very much changes our lives to this real acceleration in revenue growth. I think the pandemic has been interesting in the sense that we've, I think, proven that we are a unique product in this market. We've proven that we've got sort of dramatic advantage against our competitors. Now we've got this unique ability that as the pandemic winds down, we get this benefit of a tremendous tailwind of revenue growth because we've already signed all these stores. I think we get—I hate to say the best of both worlds with that opportunity. Adam, we've got a couple more questions before we get to—

Adam Wyden (Analyst)

I have one last question. If I take a step back and I look at you guys with all these monster chains, right, is it unreasonable to think that several years out you have a million restaurants in the United States, and obviously, a lot of these chains are global? I mean, if I take a step back and say, several years out, could this be a 100,000-unit restaurant deployment and 40,000, including payments? I mean, that's $4 billion in SaaS. At a 20-30 multiple, you're talking about a $100 billion company. I mean, really.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

I would say this. Our beehive at PAR is to be the largest company in the industry, largest hospitality technology company by 2030. Within five years, I think we'll be tremendously on the way there already. I think we're going to hopefully beat our targets. To get the numbers you talk about, I think are very reasonable. There are a million restaurants in the United States, 7.5 million globally that use point-of-sale systems. We are building for that. I think this TAM is enormous. Again, I think the more important part of it is, yes, the sort of volume count is high, which is the number of restaurants.

It's the RPO side that I think is growing at a rate that the world underappreciates just how much software is being bought by restaurants and how much of that is dependent upon the point-of-sale system, which is sort of our wedge in there. I do believe that.

Adam Wyden (Analyst)

I mean, it's basically like rent, right? I mean, if I think about it, my grandfather was in the steel service center business, and he said, "Look, you have a few costs, right? You've got labor, and you've got rent, and you've got cost of goods." You know what your cost of goods are. That's your R&D and your software development cost, right? You have your labor cost, right? And then you have your rent, right? If you think about a restaurant, whether a ghost kitchen or a virtual kitchen, I mean, look, you're not going to be on Fifth Avenue anymore. For all we know, all these restaurants are going to be in these tin sheds in the middle of freaking nowhere.

At the end of the day, if I can have your software and that can eliminate the amount of labor that I need to do online ordering and this and that, I mean, why can't—I mean, the math I'm doing is you have 2 million restaurants growing with inflation. You have 2% of sales is $40,000. That doesn't seem unreasonable. And that's not including payments. There is so much economic waste in a restaurant. I mean, why isn't this just like rent? I mean, the math makes sense to me, and it doesn't make sense to me in the context of Toast and Lightspeed because they're going after restaurants that are doing $500,000 or $700,000, and they can't be cross-sold into.

When I look at our store base and I look at a restaurant doing $2 million and growing and the ability to cross-sell, I mean, to me, it's like we're going to do it. I don't know. It's silly to me that the market is gravitating to these SMB, lower quality, higher churn businesses.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Let me say this to Adam, and then we do got to move to the last caller before time expires. I'd say the TAM is enormous. I think all of these companies are all fantastic. They're all going to grow at incredible rates. I've always said we could be a really average management team. We'll still have tremendous revenue growth. If we're a great team, we'll have well above industry growth. We're riding a wave, and we happen to be lucky to be the beneficiary of it. We're not sort of—there's no hubris in that we're actually that great. This is just a secular trend that's going to continue for a long, long time. I think that's what you're touching on. Adam, I'm going to pause you. We're going to go to the next caller just for the function of time.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from Amman Mahal, Investor. Your line is open.

Hi, there guys. Just have a few questions. The first one was just on the—you talked about the acceleration this year from the booking sort of backlog, the 400 closed stores that were reopened. I'm just wondering about the existing 11,700 site count on Brink. How many of those are kind of under-earning? So I'm thinking of kind of partially limited hours, partially open stores. Is there a variable element to the Brink ARR that you'll also see a benefit from as some of these stores reserve to kind of normal operating hours?

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

At the moment, there's no variable element to it. If the store is open and running, we're billing them. For stores that are down for a period of time, we don't bill them. We take a conservative view on that. Over time, though, there will be a variable element as payment becomes a bigger part of our base, which is transaction-based as opposed to the lights being on. At the moment, you don't have variability from stores being partially open. Again, there is tailwind. As these stores come back online, we start billing them again. We'll start to see that, I think, again, as the pandemic winds down, we'll see some nice pull-through there.

I mean, you look at that installed base. Where do you see kind of most—and look at the history of that. Where have you seen kind of most upsell and additional product kind of purchases coming from within that installed base today? I'm just intrigued kind of what's the main upsell that you're sort of generating right now.

Sure. At PAR, we've never upsold a product. It has historically been a single product, which is Brink point of sale. There have been small modular add-ons that were sort of bundled into Brink. Again, this is going back a decade, an integrated loyalty solution, integrated online ordering solution. For most of our customers, they buy a point of sale, and then they use our API to buy additional product, whether it be online ordering or delivery or loyalty or something else. It all sort of plugs into that point of sale system. We now are starting to just begin that upsell motion with our back office product and our payment products this quarter. I think you'll see us do more. The underlying trend underneath this, though, is very positive, which is our restaurant customers are not looking to manage 50 different vendors per store.

They sort of want this platform impact, both for them to build on, but both for us just to simplify their lives. That is where I think that upsell happens. Historically, we do not have data. It is never, as I say, gross and net retention have been the same. We just have it because there has never been an upsell. I think that is the excitement here, which is the last caller of the TAM is just getting tapped into.

I guess maybe to follow up to some of the questions previously, on the tier-one customers, could you maybe just talk a little bit more around sort of the sales cycle to get some of those guys on and also how their demands and what their sort of needs, how it differs from kind of tier-two and tier-three customers that you've been signing up more readily on Brink?

Sure. Tier-one customers are generally a sort of year-long sales cycle to win the corporate mandate. That has changed during the pandemic where we've had some real shortened sales cycles, which we'll talk about in our next quarter. Historically, it's around a year sales cycle. Subsequent to that, you quickly roll out the corporate stores. As I mentioned, if it's a multi-thousand-unit chain, it'll be a two-to-three-year process to convert those franchise stores onto Brink. That's generally how we look at it. In the mid-market, it's three to six months. It's a very different program where it's generally mostly corporate-owned, and you can sign and turn those stores on very, very quickly, which is where we've seen a lot of the growth, as I mentioned, in Q4.

The very down market, where we sell through resellers, call it chains that are less than 50 stores, is sort of a couple-month sales cycle. We have a lot less visibility down there because we're not talking to the customer directly. That is also the only part of our market that really has churn, as I mentioned. We've never really lost a large chain since Brink existed. I think that, again, shows the durability of the business, but also the ability to upsell because they must like the product if they've never shut it off.

Maybe just on gross margins of kind of your service revenues, they've kind of consolidated to include the line items. That's kind of calling it in the mid-30s now. The software elements, I imagine, are substantially higher than that. Can you maybe just give me a sense of how we should think about our trending going forward?

Yeah, absolutely. In our service line, we combine our software-related businesses and then our service businesses, which are anything from field service to warranty advance exchange type repair work. That margin over time will expand. The software business is much higher margin than our traditional service business. Over time, we'll see a nice growth in that business. I think over time, we'll look to sort of give a lot more breakouts of that business line so you can sort of follow that margin growth. I think you'll see really nice margin growth in that business historically because, again, the mix shift is moving much to the higher margin business. The non-software side of the business should stay consistent, should be nice margin as it's been for 20-30 years. The growth will really be coming from the software side.

Can you give me a rough split between the gross margin of software versus gross margin of fuel and warranty services just to get a sense of the differential in profitability?

Yeah. We historically have not—in the end, we give a lot more specificity here, but we have not broken it up. I would say this. Our software businesses will be very much like other software products that sell to the same ACV levels that we do. We should be 70-80% gross margin in time with our product. We are not there today primarily because, as we have talked about in the past, the business is running incredibly inefficiently, and we have sort of got excess spend. We see a really nice trajectory in gross margin growth in the next couple of years. I would expect us to be in that range over time. I do not expect us to not be in that range as we—I do not see us being any different than any other software product that sells at the price point that we sell to.

That's already happening. Again, the new products we've built, the new products that we've acquired have all come in that sort of 70-80% gross margin range. We should be no different. On the, excuse me, on the non-software side of our services revenue, you're in the 30s of gross margin. That is somewhat volume dependent. As we grow Brink, that business line sells more hardware, so more services are affiliated with that. I think it's very traditional that other sort of hardware businesses that package software, installation, implementation is not a business that we make a ton of money in on the gross margin level. Warranty, advance exchange, those field services are actually where we make nice margins. As we grow, I think that business line, that part of the margin line will stay relatively flat.

As growth slows, you'll see also increased margin there because you're doing less implementations where the gross margin is relatively low.

Yeah. I think it'd be great if over time you could separate out the software gross margin and sort of report that separately. That'd be really good to see. Maybe just one last question for me. Just on kind of competing with incumbency when you're looking to gain customers, has COVID actually kind of helped maybe drive some of those sort of lagging competitors with retail products to actually raise their game and kind of add online ordering or curb collection to their products? Have you seen sort of them raising their game in any way over the last sort of six to nine months?

I'd say this is what we've seen. I think the younger, more dynamic companies that reacted, I think, well during the pandemic focused on the down market part of the business. Those that were trying to come up into our part of the world, which is the enterprise side, I think retrenched and said, "Hey, where are we going to be great? Let's focus on the market we're great," which is that sort of SMB customer base. That removed a chunk of competition from our world today. On the traditional competitors, the older companies, I don't think we've seen a dramatic change. I think there's no doubt that everybody reacted to try to help their customer base. Nobody was trying to hurt their customers. I think it's very hard to—it's the innovative dilemma.

How do you turn a product line that's made a ton of money for you, sit down with a ton of cash, and turn that into a dramatic reinvestment vehicle? I think it's tough. I think they're structurally challenged to make such a drastic change to their business. I think our results sort of show it. I don't think we would have had this dramatic growth in bookings we've seen the last couple of quarters if the competitive response was very strong.

Okay. That's great. Thanks very much, Jay. Congrats on your good call. I'm looking forward to seeing how this year develops. Cheers.

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr. Savneet Singh for any closing remarks.

Savneet Singh (CEO and President)

Thanks, everybody, for joining. Look forward to welcoming you on future calls.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. Thank you all for participating. You may all disconnect. Have a great day.