Four kitchens, one rota, and a Friday lunchtime that used to be Sunday night

The problem was never the rota itself

Morag Dunlop runs operations for Harbour & Vine Kitchens: three restaurants and a bakery a few streets apart in Leith, 84 people between them. Each site manager kept their own spreadsheet, in their own format, and posted a screenshot to their own group chat every Thursday.

“Writing a week took each manager two or three hours,” she says. “But the real cost came after. Swaps happened in the group chat and nobody told me. The bakery borrowed a kitchen porter from the Shore and he was paid twice. On Monday I would spend the morning matching paper sign-in sheets to four different spreadsheets for payroll.”

Two weeks, one site at a time

They moved the bakery first, because it had the smallest team and the earliest start. The Midshift onboarding manager imported its spreadsheet on a call, built templates for the 05:00 bake and the 07:30 counter open, and the manager published her first week that afternoon.

The three restaurants followed over the next ten days. Staff who worked across sites were added once and appeared on every rota they could be rostered to, with the travel time between sites respected.

What changed

Site managers now spend about 40 minutes a week on the rota. Swaps go to people trained for the shift and come to the site manager for one tap, so they are on the rota — and on the payroll — the moment they are agreed. No-shows fell by 38% in the first quarter, which Morag puts down to one thing: “Everyone has their shifts on their phone and gets a reminder. You can’t say you didn’t know.”

Payroll is the part she mentions first. Approved hours from all four sites go to Xero in one export on Monday morning, with Sunday and bank-holiday rates already applied.

“Sunday night used to be four spreadsheets and a group chat. Now I publish the week before lunch on Friday, and the swaps sort themselves out without me refereeing.”

— Morag Dunlop, Operations manager, Harbour & Vine Kitchens