Rota, Timesheets and Leave: The Admin Nobody Wants

Every hospitality business runs on three pieces of admin that nobody enjoys and nobody can skip: who is working, how many hours they actually did, and who is off.

Most venues do all three in a group chat and a spreadsheet. That works until somebody leaves, somebody disputes their hours, or an inspector asks to see a contract.

Who it is for

Any venue with staff. It is most useful where there are more than about five people, or where part-timers and students make the rota change every week.

The rota

Build it, publish it, and every member of staff sees their own shifts on their own phone.

That last part removes the most common weekly failure: somebody not seeing the version of the rota that replaced the one in the group chat. There is one rota, it is the current one, and each person sees theirs.

When leave is approved, the rota knows. When somebody's availability changes, you find out when you are building it rather than on the day.

Hours and timesheets

The rota is what you planned. Timesheets are what happened, and the gap between the two is where payroll arguments come from.

Tracking the hours actually worked gives you a record rather than a recollection, which matters in exactly two situations and both of them are unpleasant: a dispute about pay, and an inspection. Neither is improved by a spreadsheet somebody rebuilt from memory.

Leave

A leave request arrives somewhere you can answer it, instead of at midnight in a chat where it scrolls away.

Approve or decline, and the rota reflects it. The record of who asked, when, and what was decided exists afterwards, which is the part that matters when somebody remembers it differently six months later.

Nobody can approve their own leave — self-approval is blocked for everybody except the owner. That is not distrust, it is the reason an approval step exists at all; an approval you can grant yourself is a formality.

Roles, so the right people can do the right things

Your team are on your account with their own roles rather than sharing one login.

A manager can build the rota and approve leave without being able to see billing. A member of staff can see their own shifts and documents without seeing anybody else's pay. You decide who gets what, and you can change it when somebody is promoted.

This is also what makes the rest safe to switch on. Handing everybody the owner's password is how a venue ends up with staff who can issue refunds.

Contracts and the document vault

The paperwork half, which is the part venues are worst at and most exposed on.

• Contracts issued from a template and signed in the app, with the signed copy kept against the person.
• A document vault for right-to-work documents, certificates and anything else you are expected to be able to produce.
• Training assignments, so you can show that a named person completed a named course on a named date.

The common thread is that all three answer the same question — can you prove it? — and a drawer, a group chat and somebody's memory cannot.

What it connects to the rest of

Because your staff are on the same account as everything else, two useful things follow.

Sales are attributed. Staff identify themselves at the till, so you can see who took what. That identification is for attribution — what somebody is allowed to do is decided by their role, not by a PIN on a shared device.

Training is the same system as courses. Build your induction or your allergen training once and assign it, rather than running a separate thing that nobody records.

Start with the rota, not the vault

The temptation with a workforce module is to set all of it up at once, which is a fortnight of data entry before anything is better.

Start with the rota, because it is the thing you rebuild every week and the thing your staff ask about most. Once that is running, timesheets follow naturally from it. Leave is the next one, because it removes a recurring annoyance rather than adding a new task.

Contracts and the document vault come last, and they come one person at a time: issue the contract when somebody joins rather than back-filling fourteen people in an afternoon. Within a few months the vault is complete without anybody having spent a day on it, and the back-fill you never did was mostly for people who have since left.

What it costs

Nothing extra. The workforce tools are part of your account rather than a separate subscription, and there is no per-employee charge for the rota, timesheets, leave, contracts or the vault.

A worked example

A restaurant with fourteen staff, half of them part-time.

The rota takes an hour a week to build and is seen by everybody without being sent anywhere. Leave requests stop arriving as messages. When a former employee queries their final pay, the hours are there. When the contract for a new starter is needed, it is issued, signed and filed the same day rather than sitting unsigned in a folder for three months.

None of that generates revenue. All of it is time and risk, which is what admin actually costs.

What it connects to

• Staff hiring and training — finding the people in the first place
• Sell courses and training — building the induction you assign
• The Mosey till — where staff identify themselves and shifts are counted
• Claim your place on Mosey — the account all of this sits on
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page