How to rota a small cafe or pub
A small cafe or a pub does not need a different kind of rota. It needs fewer rows, and it fails faster when one of them is wrong. The open, the close and the person who can lock up are the week. Everything else is a variation.
List the work before the names
Write the shifts the place needs before you write a name. A breakfast open and an evening close are different jobs. If only two people can cash up, the close cannot be an open shift unless you are willing to teach someone else. A lunch service and an evening service on the same day are two shifts with a gap, not one bar from 11:00 to 23:00 with the afternoon pretending to be a break. The split shift entry is that point in longer form.
Leave Name blank, in a spreadsheet or in the product, when the hours are real and the person is not chosen. Publish that gap if the team should see it. Hide it as a draft if you are not ready.
Share the shifts people mind
The Saturday close and the Sunday open are the shifts that cause the argument. Count them over a month, not over a single week that happened to look even. A person can ask to swap a shift with someone else. A manager approves the swap. Two people agreeing in a group chat, and nobody changing the published week, is how both of them stay at home.
Sickness belongs on the same grid. Take the shift off the person who is off, and cover it, before the rest of the team arrives to find a hole. The reason stays with that person and their manager. It is not a score on the wall.
Publish it while the week can still change
Give people time to arrange the rest of their life. A rota published on Sunday night for a Monday open is a notice in name only. Shiftbrook keeps the draft private and shows the week after you publish. Staff do not see the drafts you held back. Clock-in, if you use it, is the phone against the pin at the site, default 100 metres, not a tablet on the bar and not a photo.
The hours are still not the wage. Tips paid directly by the customer do not count towards the minimum wage. A Sunday premium, if the contract has one, is payroll. Shop-worker Sunday opt-outs are a retail rule and do not automatically map onto a cafe or a pub. Read the rule that matches the premises. Approved hours download as a CSV. Sending approved hours to Xero Payroll UK is not available until that connection works end to end.
The hospitality page is the same idea without the worked week. The guide to building a rota is the fair-share version. Neither one is a story about a particular business. There is no customer on this page, because we are not going to invent one.