Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the 2022 second quarter financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Chris Byrnes, Vice President of Business Development. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Michelle, and good morning to everyone. I'd like to welcome you today to the call for PAR's 2022 second quarter financial results review. The complete disclosure of our results can be found in our press release issued this morning, 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.partech.com. I also want to be sure all participants today have access to our earnings presentation and business review slide deck. Individuals on the webcast should have access to the deck when they logged on to the call this morning.
For those just dialing in on the conference call, the presentation can be accessed on the investor page of the website and also included as an attachment on the 8-K we filed this morning as well. 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 morning and it will be available for playback. If you ask a question, it will be included in both our live conference and any future use of the recording. I'd like to remind participants that this conference call includes forward-looking statements that reflect PAR 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 morning 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 Bryan 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?
Thanks, Christopher, and thanks to everyone for joining us to review PAR's second quarter 2022 results. During the second quarter, we continued to drive growth in our subscription services revenue and saw a strong gross margin expansion as we continue to realize the benefits of scale and operational efficiency. The business is performing and the strategy is working. We continue to measure against near-term expectations while simultaneously making strategic progress against this large opportunity that's in front of us. As a company, we delivered a strong second quarter with a reported total Q2 revenues of $85.1 million, a 23.4% increase from one year ago.
Our revenue growth was driven across all business lines and specifically around our software recurring revenues, resulting in $98.6 million of total live ARR at quarter end and a year-over-year growth rate of 29% from Q2 last year. This acceleration continues to be driven by a 32% growth in ARR coming from Punchh and a 31% increase coming from Brink. Equally important, as we scale, is the dramatic improvement we have been able to drive in gross margin on our subscription services revenue. At thw end of Q2 2022, we've now achieved a 73% gross margin, a significant improvement from the 53% we reported at the end of Q2 of 2020. We expect this positive trajectory to continue to expand over time. This growth has been driven by intense ROI-focused engineering, improved Brink architecture, and economies of scale.
Strong results this quarter continue to be driven by a high level of execution across the business and continued strong demand for PAR's unified commerce. We've established strong momentum and have continued to build on that throughout the quarter. In Q2, we activated 962 new Brink sites, and on a net basis after churn, Brink active store count now totals over 17,700, a 34% increase from one year ago. Brink bookings total nearly 950 stores in the quarter. We expect both metrics, activations and bookings, to increase in the second half of this year as inventory concerns are subsiding alongside strong visibility in a ramp up in go live dates for new customers. Additionally, we continue to see ARPU expansion in our pipeline, which will help the revenue momentum.
We continue to see impressive low churn rates for Brink, approximately 4% annualized. This low churn rate shows the trust our customers have in our products and ensures our ability to provide and also capture value for PAR in the long run. Now turning to Punchh. We continue to outperform with Punchh and added more than 3,500 sites in the quarter and now total more than 62,300 sites, a 29% increase in the last twelve months. We signed 12 new customer logos in Q2 that added to our impressive contracted store list. Punchh further enhanced its impressive list of integration partners with the addition of nine new partners in the quarter. We also added important product features and enhancements that include campaign management, mobile framework, multi-platform offers management, along with machine learning and AI.
Applications like Punchh make it easier for brands to connect with their most loyal customers and increase customer lifetime value. We're also beginning to see momentum within the grocery and C-store segment and hope to announce future customer wins later this year. The growth in these emerging verticals is a validation of the work the team has put in to expand our TAM the last couple years. PAR Payment Services had another strong quarter, and we're extremely excited by the pipeline of customers who have engaged with PAR for our integrated payment services. They're attracted to PAR Payments for their competitive pricing, transparent costs, and full integration with Brink and Punchh. PAR Payments cuts across all PAR customer types, and we look forward to sharing more data later this year.
Even though it's still early on in our payments initiative, we've seen notable customer wins during 2022 and believe this revenue stream will be meaningful and an accelerator to our future financial performance and gives us strong confidence in hitting our 2022 goals. To update you on Data Central, we experienced a solid bounce back in Q2 and saw net new activations at more than 350 stores as we went live with California Pizza Kitchen and signed a sizable franchisee of a noted tier one chain. I'm encouraged about the opportunity that Data Central has ahead of it because it's a proven solution that solves the biggest challenges the restaurant industry faces today, labor and food management. For the last 2+ years, restaurants have focused tech spend on the front of house with CRM, loyalty, digital, and delivery.
Now that most restaurants have upgraded the front of house tech stack, they're struggling with operational issues and profit leaking out the back door via food and labor challenges. We've added to our sales staff to take advantage of this opportunity, and importantly, have improved the scheduling features of the product and expect to accelerate sales in the marketplace around labor solutions. As we continue to strive to report meaningful metrics to our fast-growing subscription services revenue, we'll now report 12-month contracted ARR, which is live sites plus sites signed with the expectation of going live in the next 12 months, with much of that contracted ARR going live in just the next six months. This number should give investors a more accurate view of our future revenues, and is a number I personally track internally.
Today, 12-month CARR stands now at $115 million, paving the way for a strong rest of the year and beyond. Our product and hardware revenue continues to perform well in a difficult and challenged environment. Product revenues in the quarter continued to strengthen year-over-year, and we reported $28.4 million in this recently ended quarter, a 19% increase from one year ago. The capital purchase environment for restaurants is always tricky, and this has been even more so with the pandemic, inflation pressures, and the global supply chain difficulties. As I mentioned previously, we're not immune to these challenges around the supply chain, and we have experienced some margin impact with costs associated with the current situation.
We continue to monitor the supply chain environment closely and the realities occurring in Asia, and specifically China, in regards to the pandemic and the impact of specific shutdowns. Now to briefly report on the government business. PAR Government has delivered a strong year-over-year performance for the second quarter. PAR Government is up 17.4% in revenue over the same period last year and has outpaced its Q2 2021 profitability by 48%. Enhanced focus on contract financial performance is resulting in bottom-line acceleration. Our government segment performed above plan for both revenue and earnings. Our ISR business had a solid quarter driven by increased demands for recurring services resulting in a 28% year-over-year revenue growth and improved contract margins.
Our government segment also delivered improved performance for mission systems and product business lines, and I'm confident this segment will continue to outperform for the foreseeable future with a solid contract backlog and future award opportunities. Now to our acquisition. As most of you hopefully saw, this morning we announced that we acquired MENU Technologies, a fast-growing omnichannel ordering solution. The MENU acquisition adds a robust e-commerce solution, including online ordering, kiosk, menu management, delivery management, dispatch, and much more. MENU now allows PAR to consolidate the restaurant's off-premise and on-premise orders into one unified tech stack. This is an important deal for our company. Although small in size, we believe MENU is the best-kept secret in restaurant technology. We worked incredibly hard to win the MENU team over, as we think MENU brings a level of product sophistication we have not seen elsewhere.
Our logic in buying the business is simple. First, MENU provides PAR a best-of-breed solution for off-premise ordering. Our customers have been asking us for an alternative view, and we feel we just acquired the modern version of today's incumbents. A product that gives restaurants complete configuration, end-to-end commerce, and a very special customer-focused culture. This acquisition should help significantly expand PAR's ARPU and potential and provide years of potential upsells. In enterprise software, product wins, and we think we've acquired the most innovative solution in the market. MENU already has corporate contracts with several of the largest restaurant brands in the industry, extending PAR's leadership in the restaurant tech in the upper echelons of tier one. Second, the MENU acquisition marks PAR's expansion into international markets.
MENU is already offering solutions to enterprise restaurants in 25 countries located in Europe, North and South America, and now allows PAR to leverage its brand and reputation to push not only MENU, but other portfolio products internationally. Third, and most important, MENU accelerates PAR's plans to unify the restaurant. Beginning immediately, PAR will initiate an effort to unify MENU within PAR's unified commerce solution, so that brands no longer need to maintain two different systems for on and off-premise ordering. One cloud-based system will manage all transactions, become a true system of record, and allow for extensibility. As innovation accelerates the number of ordering channels, a unified system allows that channel expansion to function seamlessly while ensuring uninterrupted operations.
Other benefits of adding MENU to PAR include a more seamless experience that puts the customer at the center of every transaction, regardless of the channel they use to order and pay. The acquisition centralizes key functions like menu management for all systems to a shared model across both commerce and loyalty solutions. It could also natively connect the kitchen management system across channels to better manage customer experiences as well as manage demand into the kitchen. The combination will also provide a material reduction in cost for brands who may be managing multiple systems to offer integrated customer ordering through across channels, while also accelerating innovation for brands as new possibilities are unlocked by unified commerce. I certainly hope you're as excited as I am about this addition to PAR and our unified commerce offering. We diligently sought out the correct partner we needed to acquire.
We literally evaluate every player in this space, and are confident that MENU accelerates our path to becoming the world's largest restaurant technology company. I also want to reiterate that we are just getting started as we seek out other transactions with best-in-class companies that we can add to our unified commerce offering. Each time we allocate your capital, it's with a purpose to drive long-term shareholder value. I'm incredibly humbled about the work that's happening at PAR. We believe our vision of unified commerce gives us the opportunity to become a once-in-a-generation company. With our unit economics and technology advantages, we believe we'll win and provide unified commerce to key vertical markets. Looking ahead, we have sufficient cash to execute on our strategy.
We're prioritizing and making excellent progress on integrating past acquisitions and ensuring that appropriate controls are in place, while simultaneously making notable progress on our internally developed projects as well. We feel confident in hitting our 30%-40% growth target for the year, and while the macro environment could be challenged, we see real reasons to be optimistic at PAR. As always, I would like to thank all of PAR's employees for their dedication and effort over the past quarter. Across the organization, people have stepped up to ensure we meet the needs of our customers while at the same time embracing the changes necessary to create a company for long-term sustainable success. They continue to act as owners of our company. With that, I'd like to hand it off to Bryan Menar, who will review our financial performance in greater detail.
Thank you, Savneet, and good morning, everyone. Total revenues were $85.1 million for the three months ended June 30, 2022, an increase of 23.4% compared to the three months ended June 30, 2021, with growth coming from both restaurant, retail and government segments. Net loss for the second quarter of 2022 was $18.8 million or $0.70 loss per share compared to the net loss of $10 million or $0.39 loss per share reported for the same period in 2021. Adjusted net loss for the second quarter of 2022 was $9.8 million or $0.36 loss per share, compared to an adjusted net loss of $9.2 million or $0.36 loss per share for the same period in 2021.
Product revenue in the quarter was $28.4 million, an increase of $4.5 million or 18.6% from the $23.9 million recorded in the prior year. We continue to see strong hardware sales, both with our tier one legacy customers and across our Brink customer base. Service revenue was reported at $35.8 million, an increase of $8.6 million or 31.6% from the $27.2 million recorded in the prior year, driven by subscription services revenue from our Punchh and Brink offerings. Total subscription services revenue reported in Q2, 2022 was $23.4 million compared to $16.5 million in Q2, 2021.
The annual recurring revenue rate of subscription services exiting the quarter was $98.6 million, an increase of 29% compared to Q2 2021, driven by 31% growth in Brink and 32% growth in Punchh. Our recurring revenue base, which includes both software related services and hardware support contracts, continues to expand. Of the $35.8 million of service revenue recorded in Q2 2022, $31 million was comprised of recurring revenue contracts as compared to $23 million in Q2 2021. The contract revenue from our government business was $20.9 million, an increase of $3.1 million or 17.4% from the $17.8 million recorded in the second quarter of 2021.
The increase in contract revenue was driven by a $2.4 million or 27% increase in our ISR solutions product line. Contract backlog continues to be significant, noting a total backlog of $184.5 million as of June 30, 2022, compared to a $141.2 million backlog as of June 30, 2021. Now turning to margins. Product margin for the quarter was 14.7% versus 22.8% in Q2 2021. The decreased margin was primarily driven by a $1.5 million charge for excess and obsolete inventory. Product margin, excluding the excess and obsolete charge, was 20% for Q2 2022.
We are keenly focused on product delivery in a supply challenged market, but we continue to improve processes to efficiently balance customer demand and more modest inventory levels. We continue to also monitor our pricing to properly reflect changes in a dynamic input cost environment. Service margin for the quarter was 40.9% compared to 30.3% reported in the second quarter of 2021. The substantial margin improvement over multiple periods continues to be driven by improvements in hosting and support services costs and a higher mix of SaaS software. Service margin during the three months ended June 30th, 2022 included $5.4 million of amortization of identifiable intangible assets, compared to $5 million during the three months ended June 30th, 2021.
Excluding the amortization of intangible assets, total service margin for the three months ended June 30, 2022 was 55.6%, an increase from 49.2% for the three months ended June 30, 2021. Government contract margins were 11.1% as compared to 7.9% for the second quarter of 2021. The increase was driven by higher margin mission systems contracts and lower corporate expenses across all product lines. In regards to operating expenses, GAAP SG&A was $26.4 million, an increase of $3.5 million from the $22.9 million recorded in Q2 2021. The increase was primarily driven by $1.9 million in sales and marketing expenses, $1 million in internal technology infrastructure costs, and $0.6 million increase in corporate management expense.
Net R&D was $10.1 million, an increase of $1.5 million from the $8.6 million recorded in Q2 2021, as we increased spend across our software product development organization. Net interest expense was $2.5 million, compared to $4.9 million recorded in Q2 2021. The decrease is driven by the refinancing of the Owl Rock loan with the issuance of the 2027 notes in September 2021, and a reduction of accretion resulting from our January 1, 2022 adoption of a recent accounting pronouncement. Now to provide information on the company's cash flow and balance sheet position.
For the six months ended June 30, 2022, cash used in operating activities was $31.6 million versus $33.1 million for the prior year. Cash used in the six months ended June 30, 2022 was primarily driven by additional net working capital requirements due to $11.6 million increase in accounts receivable related to our government segment and a $7 million increase in inventory. These increases will be temporary as we expect accounts receivable and inventory to revert back closer to December 31, 2021 levels during the second half of 2022. Cash used in investing activities was $5 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, versus $381.7 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021.
Investing activities during the six months ended June 30, 2022 included $1.2 million of cash consideration for the Q1 2022 drive-thru tuck acquisition. Capitalized software for developed technology costs for the six months ended June 30, 2022 was $3.2 million versus $3.8 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021. Cash used in financing activities was $1.8 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022 versus $319.3 million for the prior year. Financing activities for 2022 was driven by stock-based compensation related transactions, while 2021 activities included financing related to the Punchh acquisition.
Day sales outstanding decreased within the restaurant and retail segment from 58 days at December 31, 2021 to 47 days at June 30, 2022. Day sales outstanding increased within the government segment from 55 days at December 31 to 89 days at June 30, 2022. The interim increase is expected to be reduced to normalized levels during the third quarter. This concludes my formal remarks, and we'll now move to Q&A.
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Mayank Tandon with Needham. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Good morning. Congrats on the quarter. Sav, you shared a lot of information on the acquisition, but just to clarify, maybe I missed this, how much did you pay for the acquisition? Could you share any financial metrics in terms of ARR growth and revenue contribution and how that should flow through the balance of 2022 into 2023?
Yeah. In regards to the acquisition cost, and you'll see this also as a subsequent event in our 10-Q filing later on today, the base investment was $25 million, comprising a mix of both cash and equity. There is an earn out that linked to that. It's also primarily driven by ARR growth over the next 24 months.
As far as revenue expectations, it's de minimis now, but with a very strong ramp expected over the next 12 months here. What's amazing about MENU, and I mentioned, you know, we really do think it's the best kept secret in restaurant technology. They've signed meaningful contracts with some of the largest restaurant brands internationally, and are right at that sort of point where they're taking contracted revenue live. It'll be small this year, and we expect to accelerate, you know, meaningfully in the out years with pretty decent visibility.
Understood. In terms of the contracted ARR, that's a very helpful metric, but could you just provide any framework in terms of how you're thinking about the back half of the year, given all the concerns around the recession or economic slowdown? Have you seen any slowdown in decision-making from your customers and prospects? It doesn't sound like it, but we'd love to get any sort of thought process around your expectations for the back half of the year, especially.
Yeah. You know, in the beginning of the year, we sort of guided to 30%-40% ARR growth, and we still feel really confident about that, and we think the next couple of quarters will actually be faster growth than the last quarter if you know, the world holds up. Now a lot of that we feel is being driven by our Brink initiative with payments, where we're seeing really strong adoption. That adoption, we haven't seen an ounce of customer pushback as it relates to the macro environment or anything, you know, macro related. We haven't really seen that change. The pipeline is in fact expanding, not contracting, and that gives us some good confidence.
Our other parts of our business, we expect to see a slowdown in hardware revenues in the back half of the year. While we haven't really seen it yet, that's just an expectation that as rates go up and as the economy slows, franchisees of the large tier one chains who are hardware only customers will probably pull back. We're getting ready for that. We're not seeing that in an aggressive way yet. We've seen small signs of it here and there, but that's where we would expect to see a slowdown. Our contract ARR that I put out there, you know, I think it's a very good guide. We expect to turn most of that live in the next six months, which is why we put that metric out there.
It's what I track internally. That's a good guide for sort of on the ARR side. To your question, if the economy slows down significantly, we will see that impact in our hardware business.
Great. Thanks for that color. I'll get back in queue. Thank you.
Please stand by for the next question. Our next question comes from Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Your line is now open.
Hey, thanks. Wanted to also ask about the ARR. You know, and I guess specifically, you know, great to see that contracted ARR number. I think if that all goes live, I think that would imply about 30% ARR growth. Just curious what you're also seeing on the pipeline side. You know, is what you're seeing in the pipeline also giving you some confidence about that 30%-40% ARR growth number? Just any detail on the pipeline across the different businesses.
Yeah, absolutely. I'll go one by one so you have some color. The short answer is, you know, we think we'll hit that number as the economy could turn, things could change, but we feel pretty good about it now. You know, product by product, the hardware business, you know, pipeline is hard because it's a very short sort of window and customers could change quickly. I think we see orders coming in. We obviously had a good quarter, but we expect that the volume of the pipeline there to contract in the event the economy slows down.
On the Brink and payment side, we feel we see strong pipeline of go lives happening, and we've got pretty good visibility into that for the next six months. We are in the process with, you know, a couple of large accounts that will set us up nicely for the following year. Today, pipeline seems as strong as it needs to be for us to hit those goals. Yeah, I don't think it's a reach for us to hit those goals, otherwise we wouldn't say it. We feel, you know, pretty decent about the Brink pipeline. That will be the key for the second half. Can we expand that pipeline so that 2023 is a successful year?
2022, we feel confident is, you know, there's not a lot we can do in 2022 to dramatically impact 2022, but it has tremendous impact on 2023. On the Punchh side, pretty much everything we have contracted or booked to date is all that we have is what we'll execute in Q the second half. Any business that we sign in the second half of the year as it relates to our Punchh product will probably go live in 2023. Now, that's excluding upsells and cross sells. We have really strong visibility into Punchh for the remaining six months as it relates to ARR. Everything we sign for the next six months will be real CARR for the following year.
Short answer is Punchh, we have very strong visibility from now to the end of the year of where we think revenue will go, because that revenue's been booked and plans are rolled out in the second half of the year. Payments is a business that can impact 2022 immediately. It does not have a long go live cycle as most of these customers are already on Brink. That's where we have probably our, not probably, without question, our strongest pipeline. The demand for payments is accelerating, you know, ahead of our expectations. As hardware supply chains weaken, it should help us bring payment devices, which is our limiting factor in turning that revenue live at the moment. Payments, the pipeline is very strong.
I'd argue if the economy weakens, that business will get stronger and stronger because it's a net cost savings to our customers. That's an easy switch for CFOs and CIOs to make. Lastly, on Data Central, the bar is low here. Short answer, you know, we feel momentum. We've got a great leader there in Marcus Wasdin, who, you know, often says we've got, you know, strong but fragile momentum, and I think we'll see that continue to grow. We're in a couple of processes we feel very confident about. Data Central, I think the pipeline is very strong.
In short, you know, I think because our businesses are contracted, there are longer sales cycles, the rest of the year is very much executing on what's been signed this year, outside of payments and parts of Brink. We have very good visibility for this year. From here till the end of the year, it's very much gonna be what impacts 2023.
Got it. That's incredibly helpful. Maybe shifting to the MENU acquisition. That was great to see and clearly a lot to dig into there. Can you give some more background there between their focus on SMB versus enterprise? How aggressively do you plan to take this out as an option to your current U.S. enterprise customer base, you know, as an alternative to the other online ordering solutions that you currently partner with?
You know, PAR is an open solution, and we'll always be supportive of every single restaurant technology company. You know, we sort of look at the companies. Incumbency is a company of the past and they become sort of toll keepers that kind of stifle innovation. We wanna be the opposite of that. It won't have any impact on any of our partners. Specific to your question, you know, priority one, two, and three within that acquisition is taking live the revenue that MENU has already contracted. MENU is truly a special set of products.
You know, I've probably met, you know, 100 different digital ordering companies, kiosk companies, and it's hands far and away the best product we've seen. And when I say that, it's not a singular product. It's an online ordering product. It's a mobile product. It's a loyalty product. It's a kiosk product. It's a dispatch product. It's a rails product. It's truly incredible what they've built, and it's 100% built for the enterprise. And that's really where it aligns with what PAR is building. It's not taking an SMB product and making enterprise. It's already an enterprise product. And so our goal with MENU is to take live the revenue that they've worked very hard on the last few years and helping them take that live.
That is predominantly in international markets, the 25 markets that I spoke about on the call. Of course, we see tremendous opportunity in bringing their products to the United States. We've been sort of pounded on by our customers to find alternatives to what they have today. We expect to eventually bring that to the United States and into our unified solution, and we've got pilots with a couple of our existing customers today. We're not waiting on that. I'd say priority one is taking live the revenue that's already been contracted, and priority two will be bringing it to the United States and bundling into our unified commerce solution, which is the real reason we acquired it. Over time, I suspect the U.S. to be a huge and probably the biggest market for MENU.
Today, we've got to take live the revenue that's been contracted. Again, it is like I said, it's just an incredible product that we're really, really excited about.
Great. Thank you.
Please stand by for the next question. Our next question comes from Jim Masago with FactSet. Your line is now open. Please stand by for our next question. The next question comes from Samad Samana with Jefferies. Your line is now open.
Hey, good morning, Savneet and Bryan. Hope you guys are doing well. A few questions for me. I guess I just wanted to first make sure. Contract ARR in last quarter's presentation was above $116 million, so it's $115 million in 2Q. I'm curious why it was down $1 million quarter-over-quarter. Was there a change in either what you're including in that or just maybe help me understand that, and then I have a couple of follow-up questions.
Sure. Yeah. We mentioned on the call, it's definitely not down. What we did was to give you better visibility, we changed the definition of contracted ARR to be just the next 12 months. Most of that next 12 months CARR is the next six months. We think that gives you a lot more visibility. It's a number that I track, which is what's the revenue we've contracted that's gonna go live in the next 12 months. Again, most of it will go live in the next six months.
Gotcha. I apologize. I must have missed that part. Okay, that's helpful. Then I guess just as I think about Punchh, it's still growing, you know, above the overall ARR growth. I guess I am curious, you know, if I think back to when you guys acquired it was growing, you know, well north of the mid-40s%. This quarter, I know it was a tough comp, but you're talking about growth decelerating to the low 30s%. I'm just curious, is it just changes that are going on in the sales organization? Are sales cycles getting longer there? Maybe what's driving some of that slowdown in that Punchh ARR growth?
Yeah, just one question. When we bought the business, it had grown about 30% year-over-year from the prior year, and then it, you know, obviously accelerated a lot with, you know, our go live motion plus, you know, the cross-sell, upsell. I think it's just scale, right? We're still adding huge amounts of ARR every quarter and every year. As we scale, you know, I think that growth rate will sort of stabilize. As you've heard me say, we wanna maintain that 30%-40% growth rate. Now it's continuing to take that product internationally, leveraging the MENU acquisition, and new product upsell. We believe we'll continue to grow the Punchh business 30%-40%.
I think when we were growing, you know, 45%, that was a moment in time where we had just incredible cross-sell opportunities through the Brink acquisition. We think it'll stabilize around this rate as we sort of think for all of our products will sort of be in that 30%-40% range.
We're seeing good movement now in adjacency markets with grocer and also with convenience, especially with that product.
Great. Then maybe just one last one for me. Just, you know, any update on maybe what the new Brink ARR trends are in terms of ARPU per site. Are you seeing better pricing? Are you seeing similar pricing to what you've seen maybe over the last two or three quarters? Just anything that you can see that gives us an idea of maybe what the size and scale of the deals you're landing and the price you're able to retain even as you do that.
Thanks for asking that question 'cause I wish I expanded more. The short answer is, you know, we've been taking live a lot of sites that were contracted, this doesn't sound crazy to you, in 2016. That has weighed down the ARPU. The average ARPU of Brink for signed contracts over the last 12 months has been significantly higher than the contracts signed obviously in 2016. In the second half, we should benefit from that momentum of the signed deals, and allow for us to expand revenue growth within the Brink product line. You'll see a reversal starting slowly, but will really pick up. In 2023, we'll have a lot of benefit of taking live the contracts that we've put out there.
You know, Brink list price is up considerably just in the last 12 months. As we've found ways to monetize things like APIs, and additional product modules, it'll continue to grow. We'll see a reversal of that trend. Unfortunately, the revenue that goes live, we put in ARR, is oftentimes, you know, older contracts that we. You know, they're a great sign that we've now taken live revenue that was contracted years ago and that was stuck because of, you know, whether management or product issues. We've been, you know, unfortunately not getting the benefit of all these sites, and I think that will reverse now.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions.
Please stand by for the next question. Our next question comes from Anja Soderstrom with Sidoti. Your line is now open.
Hi, thank you for taking my questions. A lot of good questions asked already. I'm just curious, how did you come about with the MENU Technologies AG acquisition, and how long have you worked on it, and why now?
We've been spending a lot of time on this idea of unified commerce. Unified commerce doesn't work unless you can bring together off-premise and on-premise orders. Off-premise are things like online orders, mobile orders, you know, everything that's not in the store. We haven't obviously had a solution for that. We've spent, you know, I'd say two years looking for a product, really a year and a half, but let's call it two years, to find a product that will work for us. The great challenge in that market though is that most people focus on the SMB market. While there are great companies there growing very quickly, it's incredibly hard to take an SMB product and make it enterprise, particularly in restaurants.
We really did scour the world trying to find the best product. As I said in my remarks, you know, in the end, you can have the best marketing, the best sales team, you know, the most savvy management team, but product wins, and we needed to find the best product. We discovered MENU, I want to say, you know, nine months, a year ago. You know, candidly, we didn't believe what we saw. We'd never seen a product that a company that had so much product that was still so relatively young in its maturity. We took a long time to convince them to become part of PAR.
During that time, we developed immense appreciation for not only the product suite, but just the obsession they have over making customers happy, you know, something we can continue to learn from at PAR. While it's a small acquisition, you know, it's one that our entire team has rallied behind, been a huge part of, and you'll see us continue to grow. What's exciting about it is this wasn't our intent when we went on the journey, but it now gives us an international foothold that we'll continue to expand, and we'll start by pushing Punchh aggressively internationally, but eventually all of our products.
We love that it fills a product gap that we needed, which was to sort of off-premise ordering, but it also brings us internationally, which is an area that we want to expand to as well, as there isn't a really dominant enterprise player internationally. And then the sort of final benefit is, they've got contracts signed. You know, we're not, this is not a new experience. When they go to the next large customer, it's not going to be a new experience. They sort of know the RFP process, they know the testing process, security process, and everything in between. I think we'll be very excited about what we discover.
Okay. You're also benefiting from the stronger dollar, I guess, when you acquired it.
I think so. I mean, it was part stock for us, part cash, so we did benefit some and
Okay.
I think the key to the acquisition for the MENU team will be their ability to grow the ARR efficiently and hit some of the earn-out targets that we put out for them, which will be in our subsequent 8-K filing, which you'll see. I think to them, the motivation is to drive that earn-out.
Okay. How do you see in general the M&A environment now, and what does that mean for your government business potential spinoff?
You know, I think this is our second quarter where we've printed revenue from our new contract that's driving a lot of the growth that you see. You know, as we continue to see that and the margin expansion, we'll constantly explore the opportunity set that exists for that business. You know, given the growth, given the margin expansion, you know, it's a business that should get a good multiple in the event that our board decides to monetize it.
Okay. Lastly, and just in terms of the sort of uncertain economy, how is the customer sentiment, the sort of sales cycle been affected, if at all, by what's going on in the economy now for you?
You know, today, we're not seeing a tremendous change. As I mentioned on the call, we expect to see it in our hardware business, and I think we'll potentially see it, you know, in other parts of our business. We're not. You know, it's one of those things where we talk about it with our customers, but we're not seeing that elongation of sales cycles quite yet. Without question, it can and should happen. If it does happen, I think it'll be more of a 2023 issue as 2022 is very much, you know, being booked, now.
You know, it's something that I think if it happens. We'll be ready for it, and we're taking precautions, slowing down hiring, focusing on price, being more efficient. Today I would say we continue to be surprised by the revenue that's going live.
Okay. Actually one more last one. In terms of the unified solution now when you added the MENU acquisition, is there like sort of do you have a hit list of potential customers that you think are gonna be more prone to signing on now when you have an even more robust solution?
Of course. I think first and foremost, as we integrate the MENU product into PAR, it'll make us more attractive over our existing products. Those customers that are in sales cycles for just Brink or just Punchh or Data Central should find us more attractive because we can unify their on-premise, off-premise to the back office. That is a really attractive proposition. You know, illustratively, if we're in a process, and let's just say Brink is in second place and not first place, this should help us push that over the finish line. I think it'll just naturally bring more revenue forward on our existing products. The second part of your question, the MENU product is very well focused on the enterprise customer.
It's not a product for the single store restaurant, it's a product for global international brands that want an alternative to the incumbents that exist today. It's highly focused on being scalable, completely configurable, and really giving control back to the restaurant. You know, today, I think if you talk to restaurant companies, they're, you know, they're happy with what they have, but they're not blown away. Particularly this ability to be configurable and integrated such that the kitchen is as smart as the online ordering system, and they're speaking the same language. You know, none of that exists today, and MENU gives them that opportunity now.
Okay, great. Thank you. That was all for me.
As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone. Please stand by for our next question. The next question comes from Adam Wyden with ADW Capital. Your line is now open.
Hey, guys. A couple questions for me. I just wanted to clarify your contracted ARR definition. So, that doesn't include Payments, correct? And you made another comment around Brink that it doesn't include all of Brink. So it's largely Punchh. Is that right? Like, can you kinda clarify what's in there and what's not?
Sure. The majority of the delta between the ARR live revenue and contract revenue is Punchh. A small portion of it is Brink. That's because we don't put anything in contracted revenue from Brink unless it's a signed order for that store. As an example, if we sign a big chain today, none of that goes to contracted revenue until we have visibility into that revenue coming in the next 12 months. What we've done is just made it very specific. CARR is that revenue that we have visibility into the next 12 months. It's predominantly Punchh with a portion of Brink and a small portion of payments.
Right. That wouldn't include potential price increases. It wouldn't include. I mean, it basically is very light on Brink as it relates to, you know, new l ive activation. Doesn't include pricing, doesn't include payments in any material amount. Is that a fair way to describe it?
That's fair.
In a perfect world, you know, you know, if the economy kinda keeps together, you know, we should, you know, there could be upside to that.
Absolutely. You know, as I said, I track this number very closely internally because I know we'll hit it and now it's about how do we get above that.
Right. I've got two questions. The first one is more qualitative. If you think about the journey, and I've been on the journey a long time now, you know, you started getting momentum, you know, then COVID hit and you had your first kind of like 1,500 Brink live units, activation, whatever you wanna call it. Then, you know, world went to hell in a hand basket. I think everybody woke up and, you know, because of the nature of getting into the stores, it made it very harder, you know, hard to, you know, activate Brink even though everyone knew that they needed, you know, kind of off-premise and digital. Now you have the supply chain and the inflation.
I mean, do you think people are kind of up to this and saying it's almost kind of like a perfect storm in terms of like the necessity. I mean, at what point do you think, you know, the customers say kind of like, "Yeah, I get it's inflationary, but like, you know, and costs are up, but like, you know, we're gonna bite the bullet and make some investments to reduce that." I mean, I get it, payments is easy 'cause it reduces the cost day one. I mean, for all intents and purposes, a lot of the stuff that you're doing does reduce costs day one, you just need, you know, they just need to see it in a model, in a workforce.
I mean, do you think people kinda look at the, you know, the last two years and say, "You know what? Like, you know, I can't control revenues, but, you know, I can spend a little bit of money up front and get a big return." I mean, it's kinda, 'cause it's like, this is like these are the ideal conditions for your business.
You know, I think you're right. The long and short of it is we've become very good at sort of selling the ROI of our solution. You know, one of our leaders I think has done a tremendous job in showing the customers, "Here's what happens when you install Brink. Here's what happens when you install Brink with another module of PAR." That ROI is definable. It's real math, and it's not sort of fluffy stuff, it's actual data that we have. I think that's exactly how we sell. You know, I think the last year and the next couple of years are very strong environments for us to continue to see this growth that we see now.
I don't think we're at a point where enterprises don't get that value today. It's just about convincing them to go faster. You know, it's not a market where you know, we're losing tons of business to competitors and giving up. It's a business where when the customer goes, we go and we feel we've got a strong probability of winning that deal. It's just about building that momentum, and this environment could potentially help accelerate that with these customers to push them over the edge.
Good. My last question is around M&A. You know, I'm not sure if you called out what the ARR contribution is for MENU or what you expect it to do. You know, obviously, you know, we're in this kind of logjam where private companies are in general or at least historically traded at higher multiples of ARR relative to the public comps. You've seen, you know, Vista and Thoma Bravo, you saw Avalara last week. Companies are out there buying. I mean, just to use Avalara as an example, I think they paid 11 times ARR or 12 times or something when you do fully diluted and options, blah, blah.
You know, that business was probably later in its maturity and had, you know, a similar growth rate to kind of Brink and all the rest. You know, I look at, you know, PAR today and I think it's, you know, obviously it's definitely material undervalue to that. But the question is when you, when you look at private equity, you know, they are taking advantage of what I would call the $30 million-$40 million of kind of cost of being public. Not just the New York Stock Exchange listing cost, not just the, you know, the controller, CEO, CFO, blah, blah, but also just kind of the systems in place.
You know, we've kind of benchmarked it and, you know, for a company of this scale, you know, we think, you know, it could be $20 million, $30 million, $40 million of kind of duplicative cost. There are obviously some public company players like Agilysys, like Olo, like TransAct Technologies. You know, there are companies out there, that might not have the same valuations in as the private markets, where you could effectively do a transformational deal like Punchh in the public markets and kind of, you know, get that, you know, scale and duplicative cost and kind of, you know, synergy value.
I mean, how do you think about kind of going after companies like that or, you know, in the absence of, you know, private market deals that make sense, you know, kind of doing something in the public markets where you can kind of, you know, take advantage of the dislocation there?
You know, I think that the macro of your comment is very true, which is, you know, if I look at our acquisition, you know, when the numbers get printed and, you know, 18 months from now, let's call it the end of 2022, I think it'll be a home run deal for PAR. You know, I take great pride and I think that, you know, the Punchh acquisition not only beat expectations but was incredibly accretive to PAR shareholders. I suspect this deal will be as well. We start from there. The business has to. The model has to work. Today's environment provides opportunity.
If we had tried to acquire, you know, MENU a year ago, and by the way we did, you know, it would've been a very different price and been very, very hard, to work. We feel that we can be the aggressor today. We've staffed up a really high quality M&A team now that's uncovering rock after rock. As I said, you know, MENU was the best kept secret. You know, it's a business that, you know, I don't know if many people realized that was out there.
We want to use this environment to be aggressive and you know, if there's a larger asset out there that we can make work and put our playbook into work in that organization, and that playbook being drive gross margins so that we can reinvest in product. Well, but it's you know, these are oftentimes opportunistic approaches where you've gotta find the right asset that serves the same end market that wants to sell. Obviously, if it doesn't want to sell, we'll work very hard to convince them to sell, but that can take some time.
The short answer is this acquisition, while small, is completely illustrative of what the point you're saying, which is there was no way we could have made the math work a year ago, but we can today, and I expect we'll continue to do that for the rest of the year and next year.
Okay. All right. That's it for me. Thank you.
I am not showing any other questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to Savneet Singh for closing remarks.
Thanks everybody for joining, and we look forward to updating you next quarter.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.