Employee Scheduling Built for Restaurants

Yes, and it is the main reason a restaurant board is worth building rather than buying. We define each role and station as its own coverage requirement, so a Friday dinner is not five people, it is three servers, two on the line, a host and a dish station. The board shows a shortfall against each of those separately, which is the number that tells you whether service will hold. Certifications sit on the person rather than the shift, so a food handler card or an alcohol server permit that has lapsed takes that person out of the eligible list instead of surfacing as a problem on the night. Managers can also filter to their own side of the house so the kitchen is not scrolling past the floor. If you run a single counter concept where everyone does every job, skip all of this: role modelling adds friction and a shared sheet will serve you fine.

Staff open the shift on their phone and request a swap; the system only offers colleagues who are actually eligible, meaning the right role, a current certification, not already scheduled that day, and not pushed into overtime by taking it. The manager gets one notification and approves or denies with a tap, and the board, the printed view and the shift reminders all update from that single action. Every swap keeps a record of who offered it, who took it and who approved it, which ends the argument about who said what in a group chat at eleven at night. You can also let swaps inside the same role approve themselves, and reserve manager review for cross-role moves. If you want to know whether this is worth building, count the swap messages you handled last month and multiply by the three or four minutes each one really took, including the follow-up.

Build and Transfer starts at $1,900 one-time: we build it, hand over the code, and you own it with nothing monthly after that. Build and Maintain starts at $999 setup plus $149 a month if you would rather we hosted it, supported the team and made changes as the menu and the roster change. What pushes a quote above the floor is scope rather than headcount, such as several locations, a POS or payroll export, or unusual coverage rules, and that is scoped on a call rather than guessed here. Before you spend anything, run the comparison honestly: take the per-employee scheduling app you are considering, multiply the monthly fee by your headcount and by twenty-four months. If that total lands under the build price and the app already fits how you run service, buy the app. See /build-and-transfer and /compare for the full side-by-side.