A café roster app for early opens, small teams and student staff

A café day starts before anyone else's. Someone has the keys at 6.45, the ovens on by 7, the first commuters through the door at 7.30. By 3pm the lunch rush is over, and by 5 the floor is mopped. The team is small, often six to ten people, and a good half of them are students: Leaving Cert students on Saturdays, college students around lectures, and a summer crew that arrives in June and leaves in September.

That makes the roster fiddly in a way a pub or restaurant roster isn't. Fewer people, but more of them have hard limits on when they can work, and the roster changes every term.

Three things that make café rosters harder in Ireland

Staff under 18

Plenty of cafés hire 16 and 17-year-olds, and the Workplace Relations Commission sets clear limits for them:

• No start before 6am.
• Finish by 10pm on a night before a school day; up to 11pm when there's no school next day, and then no start before 7am.
• A 30-minute break after 4½ hours (adults get 15 minutes after more than 4½ hours).
• 12 hours off in every 24, and two days off in every seven.

You also have to keep a register of employees under 18. Our guide to young workers goes further.

Different pay rates on the same shift

The national minimum wage from 1 January 2026 is €14.15 an hour for staff aged 20 and over. The reduced rates are €9.91 under 18, €11.32 at 18 and €12.74 at 19. A Saturday shift with a 17-year-old, a 19-year-old and an adult supervisor has three different floor rates, so it helps to know exactly who worked what.

Part-timers and their leave

Most café staff are part-time, which usually means annual leave at 8% of hours worked, up to four working weeks. And for public holidays, a part-timer qualifies once they've worked 40 hours in the 5 weeks before. Ten public holidays a year, and the June and August Mondays fall right in the middle of the busy summer.

What a good café roster app does

• Lets staff set their own availability around school, lectures and exams.
• Builds a fair week so the early opens don't always fall to the same two people.
• Shows who opens and who closes, plainly.
• Gets the roster to staff who may not check email but always have their phone.
• Keeps the opening routine with the roster, not on a sheet taped to the fridge.

How ShiftComplete works for a café

ShiftComplete is a roster and operations app built for hospitality. It runs in the browser, so there's nothing for you or your staff to install.

Availability around school and college. Each person marks days as available, partial or off from their phone, weeks ahead, with a note ("school days finish 4pm", "exams 2 to 13 June, off"). You stop collecting it on scraps of paper by the till.

Events for the days that change. A Saturday market, a christening order, a school mid-term week when the families come in. Add the event to the day and the draft roster includes the extra cover. Day notes carry the detail ("Bread order in at 7, check it against the docket").

A fair draft in seconds. Weight the people you want on, such as your most experienced barista for the Saturday open. ShiftComplete builds a draft from availability, events and weightings, fair across the team. You look it over, make sure no 16-year-old has a shift before 6am or a close past 10pm on a school night, and drag things into place.

Fixed weekly schedules. If your manager always opens Monday to Friday, set that once and it's there every week.

Publish to every phone. The roster appears under My rota on each phone and can be emailed too.

The 7am opening, as a checklist

The opening shift is where cafés get caught out: the fridge that wasn't checked, the sanitiser that ran out. ShiftComplete's checklists can differ by weekday, so Saturday's open can include the extra bake. Every tick is named and timestamped, with a photo if you want one. Temperature logs for the display fridge, milk fridge and freezer take seconds on a phone, and out-of-range readings are flagged on the dashboard. Allergens for every item on the counter are mapped to the 14 allergens and searchable by staff. These are the records an EHO from the HSE asks to see.

A week in a nine-person café (an example)

Picture a café near a college, open 7.30am to 5pm Monday to Saturday, with nine staff: an owner-manager, a supervisor, a chef, two full-time baristas, two college students and two 17-year-olds who work Saturdays and holidays.

• The college students mark Monday and Wednesday mornings as off for lectures.
• The 17-year-olds are available Saturdays only during term, so they're rostered 9am to 3pm with a 30-minute break at 12.
• The owner adds an event: a mid-term week, so +1 on the counter from 10am to 2pm.
• The draft gives the two 7am opens on Saturday and Monday to different people, and she publishes on Thursday.

Pricing

€1.99 per active staff member per month. Every feature included, no per-site fee, no contract, and you can remove staff any time. A nine-person café pays €17.91 a month. The first 60 days are free with no card. Set-up takes about five minutes, and you can book a free 15-minute call for help.

Built in our own hospitality group

ShiftComplete was built inside our own hospitality group, Kirkham Hospitality, which runs The Lounge in Oswestry and Knock & Snitch. Owner Graeme Kirkham:

"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

Who it's for

• Independent cafés and coffee shops with six to twenty staff.
• Cafés that employ school and college students.
• Bakery cafés with early starts and a separate kitchen team.
• Owners with two or three sites and staff who cover between them.

For the leave rules in detail, see our guide to annual leave in hospitality.