Hospitality rota software for a business that is open when people are off.
Restaurant, café, hotel or venue — hospitality scheduling is not hard because there are a lot of shifts. It is hard because the trading hours change, half the team is casual, everybody is trained for a different set of jobs, and the busiest days are the ones people most want off.
The shapes a restaurant, café or hotel rota actually has.
These are the things a generated hospitality staff rota has to get right before anybody would trust it enough to publish it.
Trading hours that move
A Sunday is not a Tuesday and December is not February. Requirements are set per day and saved as templates, so a summer week and a quiet week are two named patterns rather than a rebuild.
Two services, and the gap between them
A restaurant's day is a lunch and a dinner with a lull nobody should be rostered across. Requirements are blocks inside the day — two on the floor from twelve, four from six — so the week is built around the sittings, not a flat headcount.
Mixed contracts on one rota
Contracted staff whose availability is a contractual baseline, and casual, zero-hours staff who are only scheduled where somebody has recorded that they can work. Both on the same week, scheduled by different rules.
Duties, not just headcount
Front of house, kitchen, pass, kiosk, a supervisor on until close. Ask for a role when it must be that job, or an area when you need somebody covering a part of the business and the solver can pick.
The shift that never moves
The Sunday opener, the standing closer. Fixed on the person, carried into every solve, and visible in the template against everything else the day needs.
Leave in the middle of a busy week
Approved holiday is an input to the solve, not something to remember afterwards. The week is built around it, and the rota shows it in the days it covers.
Hours that have to add up
Assigned against contracted hours for everyone on the week, on the same screen as the rota, so nobody is quietly short or quietly over.
Running a pub or a bar? The late close, the Friday that fills from five and the bar as its own headcount have a page of their own.
Same software, three different weeks.
The product does not change between them. What changes is how the requirements are set up — and that is where a generated week is won or lost.
Restaurant rotas
Lunch and dinner as separate blocks, front of house and kitchen as separate requirements, and a supervisor on until close. Somebody trained only for the kitchen is only ever put in the kitchen; ask for the floor as an area and the solver picks whoever is trained for it and free.
Café rotas
An early open, a breakfast and lunch trade, and a quiet afternoon. Make opening a role and only somebody trained to open is put on the first shift. Casual staff are scheduled only where their availability has been recorded, and breaks are worked out by age band.
Hotel and venue rotas
Departments on different clocks — front desk across the day, housekeeping in the morning, the restaurant in the evening — each with its own requirement blocks, and the busy season saved as its own template. More than one site? Each is planned separately, with its own staff and requirements.
Still building the week in a spreadsheet? Start with our free staff rota template — its example rows are front of house and kitchen — and come back when it stops being enough.
Set up how you trade, once.
Two front of house from opening, a third from five, one kitchen from ten, a supervisor until close. That is a normal week for a restaurant or a café, saved as a template, and it is what every solve is trying to cover.
When the pattern changes — a season, a fixture, a bank holiday — you build that week once and keep it, rather than remembering what you did last time.
Seven days, including the two that pay for the other five.
Most weeks are decided by the weekend. A generated week has to be strongest exactly where you can least afford to be short, with coverage measured against your own requirements and everybody's hours against their contract.
Written in a leisure operation, not a lab.
RotaBot was built by a general manager at a golf centre in West Sussex, against that site's own rota — variable opening hours, front of house and kitchen and kiosk, contracted and casual staff on the same week, and the Sunday-night reconciliation that anyone who has run a venue will recognise.
Which is why the awkward cases were in it from the start. They were not imagined for a demonstration; they turned up because somebody had to publish a week that real staff would turn up to.
What your team sees
Nothing, until you publish. After that, the published week in a browser — read-only, so the rota stays one source of truth: the shifts they are on, and who else is on with them. No group chat, no photograph of a printed sheet, no one asking you what they are doing on Thursday.
Availability and leave are held on each person's record and kept by a manager — a contracted person's baseline is contractual, and a casual person is only scheduled where somebody has recorded that they can work. The rota is built around whichever applies.
See it build a week like yours.
Tell us how your site trades and we will show you the same week solved against it.