Hospitality Scheduling Software for Restaurants, Cafés & Venues

The booking sheet comes first

Everything a restaurant decides about staffing is downstream of one document, and it is not the rota. It is the covers expected. Ninety on Saturday with two seatings needs a different floor and a different pass than forty on a Monday, and the gap between those two nights is larger than the gap between two ordinary weeks in most other businesses.

A rota drawn from a template is therefore wrong in a specific and expensive way. It is roughly right on the average night and clearly wrong on the two nights that carry the week. Building from the bookings instead is not more work, it is the same work done in a different order.

Prep is a shift, not a favour

The two hours before service are real hours and they are frequently missing from the plan. When they are absent from the rota they are also absent from the cost, which is why a kitchen can look correctly staffed on paper and still be twenty hours over by the end of the month.

Two teams with one door

The kitchen and the floor share a service and almost nothing else. One is a brigade with stations and a running order. The other is a room where the constraint is how many tables a person can look after without the service falling apart. Their busy moments are half an hour apart, their skills do not transfer, and a person short in either one is felt by both.

Planning them separately on one screen is what makes a total cost meaningful. Each has its own floor, each is drawn on its own pattern, and the labour number at the bottom is still a single figure the general manager can act on.

Training that an inspector will ask about

Food safety and allergen responsibility are not internal policies, they are conditions under which a venue operates, and they are checked. The question is rarely whether the training exists. It is whether somebody trained was on the floor during that service, on that date.

Holding certificates against the person, with expiry dates, turns that from an audit exercise into an ordinary constraint. A lapsed certificate stops the shift being offered. A service without allergen cover shows up before the rota is published rather than after an inspection.

Labour against covers, read early

Every operator knows their labour percentage and most of them learn it too late to do anything about it. Read after the fact it is a verdict on a month that has already happened. Read while the rota is open it is a series of small decisions: a start time moved by an hour, a fourth server who begins at six rather than five, a prep shift that does not need to be a full day.

That only works when the hours are recorded rather than remembered. A shift reconstructed from memory at the end of the week is close enough to be believed and wrong often enough to matter, and it is the reason the projected number and the payroll number so rarely agree.

The afternoon somebody calls in

A chef de partie is ill at three, ninety covers are booked, and the difference between a difficult service and a bad one is how fast the gap reaches the people who could fill it. Not a chain of calls to whoever answers first, but the same message to everybody qualified, at the same moment.

Agency cover deserves the same treatment. A temporary hand who appears on the rota and in the cost report is a manageable expense. One who exists only on an invoice at the end of the month is the reason a good week ends up with a bad labour figure. The Shifton feature set keeps the rota, the clock, notifications and reporting in one account.

More than one venue

Groups share people whether or not anybody planned it. A server on two sites belongs to one payroll and two rotas, and the hours reconcile only when both venues read the same record. Beyond that, a group gets something a single site cannot have: labour against covers compared between venues, which turns an argument about who is overstaffed into a number.

What this is not

This is not a till, a reservations platform or a stock system, and any venue trading properly already runs all three. This is the layer beneath them: who is working, what they are trained for, what hours they actually did and what the service cost. Operators tend to look at it when the team passes about fifteen or when the second site opens.

Getting started

A team of ten or fewer runs at no cost with no time limit, which covers a café or a small dining room outright: the rota, the basic clock, the phone app and reporting. Above that, modules are added one at a time at $0.50 per employee a month with a trial of up to 60 days on each, long enough to run a full season through the reporting first.

The gap between lunch and dinner

A split day is the ordinary shape of restaurant work and the most common source of quiet resentment in a team. Two unpaid hours in the middle of a shift is either a fair arrangement everybody understood before they accepted the job, or something that was never really agreed, and the difference between those two is whether it appeared on the rota.

Planning the split explicitly, with the break recorded as a break rather than left as a gap, keeps it honest on both sides. It also makes the labour figure correct, because the hours paid and the hours somebody was on the premises stop being treated as the same number.

Seasons, holidays and the week nobody planned for

A menu change, a holiday weekend, the first week of a school break. Each of them moves covers in a direction the venue already knows from last year, and each deserves a saved pattern rather than a fresh guess made on a Thursday. That pattern is the only institutional memory a restaurant has about what actually worked.