Restaurant staff rota software for kitchen and front of house

A restaurant rota is really two rotas pretending to be one. The kitchen starts early with prep, works through lunch, maybe breaks, then runs dinner until the last cheque is cleared. Front of house comes in later, peaks harder, and finishes when the last table leaves. Then there's the pot wash, the bar, and the host stand, each with its own rhythm.

Get the balance wrong and you either have three servers standing around at 3pm or one chef plating 60 covers alone on a Saturday.

Why restaurant rotas go wrong

Most of the pain comes from the same few places:

• Kitchen and floor planned separately. The head chef does the kitchen rota on paper, the GM does front of house in a spreadsheet, and nobody spots that both have given the same Sunday off to their best people.
• Bookings that change after the rota is out. A 25-cover party lands on Thursday and the rota doesn't move with it.
• Split shifts nobody can read. "11-3, 5-close" written in a cell is easy to misread at 9am.
• Availability held in someone's head. Students' timetables, a server who can't do Mondays, the chef's childcare.
• Wages discovered after the fact. You find out the week was overstaffed when payroll lands.

What good restaurant scheduling software looks like in the UK

The software should let staff tell you when they can work, let you plan for bookings and events, build a sensible first draft, and let you see the cost before you publish. It should treat kitchen and floor as areas on one rota, show split shifts clearly, and put the final version on everyone's phone without a download.

How ShiftComplete handles a restaurant rota

ShiftComplete is an operations and team-scheduling app built for UK hospitality. It runs in the browser on any phone, tablet or computer.

Availability set by your team

Every staff member marks each day as available, partial or off, weeks ahead, with a note if they need one ("partial: lectures until 2pm"). The chef's childcare and the server's college timetable are written down, not remembered.

Events for bookings and busy nights

Add events to the days that need extra cover: a 30-cover party on Saturday at 7pm (+1 floor, +1 kitchen), Mother's Day lunch, a wine-pairing evening. They're built into the draft, and day notes let you leave context on the rota itself ("Large party, set menu, allergens on the booking sheet").

Weighting the right people

Your sous chef on Friday and Saturday, your strongest server on the big party, your most experienced host on a busy Sunday. Weight the people you want on and the draft takes it into account.

A fair draft in seconds

ShiftComplete builds a draft rota from availability, events and weightings, fair across the team so the good shifts and the late finishes are shared out. Then you drag shifts to adjust it. You stay in charge; it just saves you the blank page.

Split shifts and areas on one rota

Each person can have up to four time blocks in a day, each tagged with an area you define: Kitchen, Pass, Floor, Bar, Host, Pot Wash. A chef de partie's Saturday might show 10:00 to 14:30 Kitchen and 17:00 to 22:30 Kitchen; a server who covers the bar for the lunch lull can show that too.

Labour cost while you build

Labour cost is shown as you build the rota. Add a shift and you see the number move. That makes it a planning decision, not a post-mortem. Our guide to labour cost percentage explains how to set a sensible target for your style of restaurant.

Holidays and publishing

Holidays are recorded so nobody gets rota'd while they're on a beach. When you're happy, publish: the rota appears on every staff member's phone under My rota, and you can email it as well.

A worked example: a 60-cover neighbourhood Italian

A family-run Italian with 60 covers, open Wednesday to Sunday, lunch and dinner, with 14 staff: head chef, sous, two cooks, a kitchen porter, a GM, an assistant manager and seven part-time servers and bartenders.

1. Staff set availability for the next fortnight. Two servers are partial on weekdays because of university.
2. The GM adds Saturday's 30-cover birthday party (+1 floor, +1 kitchen from 6pm) and a note that Wednesday lunch is usually quiet.
3. She weights the sous chef onto Saturday and the assistant manager onto Sunday.
4. ShiftComplete builds the draft. She moves one server from Wednesday lunch to Thursday dinner, watches the labour cost fall, and publishes.
5. The kitchen and floor see one rota, with every split shift laid out block by block.

Split shifts are common in restaurants like this, and they bring rest rules with them: adults working more than six hours are entitled to a 20-minute break, plus 11 hours' rest between working days. GOV.UK lists split working days as one of the situations where compensatory rest can apply. Our guide to split shifts in hospitality covers how to plan them fairly.

Beyond the rota

The same login runs the rest of the restaurant: temperature logs for every fridge, freezer and hot-hold point with out-of-range readings flagged; every menu item mapped to the 14 UK allergens and searchable by servers on the floor; opening, closing and cleaning checklists that differ by weekday; incident and maintenance logs; and a weekly report with an exportable audit log. It helps you keep the records an EHO asks to see. You remain responsible for the standards themselves.

Pricing

£1.49 per staff member per month, with every feature included. No per-site fee, no contract, and staff can be removed any time. The 14-person Italian above would pay £20.86 a month. For 100+ staff, talk to us.

Try it free for 60 days with no card. Set-up takes about five minutes and you can book a free 15-minute set-up call if you want help getting the first rota out.

What an operator says

"The rota stopped being a Sunday-night argument the week we switched over. The chef stopped being the only person who knows what's in the kitchen. And the EHO turn up to a screen, not a box file." Graeme Kirkham, Owner, The Lounge Oswestry & Knock & Snitch

Read the Kirkham Hospitality story.

Who it suits

• Independent restaurants where the owner or GM writes the rota.
• Food-led sites that run lunch and dinner with split shifts.
• Small groups that want separate venues under one login, a group dashboard and area managers.
• Head chefs who want the kitchen rota on the same page as front of house, not in a notebook.

Prefer to start with a spreadsheet? Use our free staff rota template and move across when you're ready.