A rota for hospitality
Hospitality runs on opens, closes and the gap between lunch and dinner. Shiftbrook is the rota, the clock-in and the timesheet for that week. It is not a booking diary, a stock list, or a wage.
The week is two services, not one bar
A lunch and a dinner on the same day are a split shift. Draw them as two shifts, with the afternoon as a gap, not as a six-hour unpaid break glued onto one long bar. Each half has its own start, end and break minutes. If you know the hours and not the person, publish an open shift so the hole is visible. Drafts stay off the team’s phones until you publish.
Weekends, opens and closes are the shifts people mind. Share them across weeks. The product will not score whether the share is fair. It will show who has the Saturday close and who does not. A person can ask to swap a shift with someone else. A manager approves the swap. There is no group-chat version of the published week.
Sickness, tips and the floor
Leave and sickness sit on the same grid as the rota, so you do not publish a close onto a day that is already off. A sickness reason stays with the person and their manager. It is not a score, and it is not shown to the rest of the team. The fit note guide explains the seven-day self-certification and what a fit note can say. Shiftbrook does not store the note.
Tips paid directly by the customer do not count towards the National Minimum Wage. A service charge you distribute might be different, and the GOV.UK page is the place to check. This product does not know what was in the tin. It knows the hours. Clock-in compares the phone with the pin on that site. The default radius is 100 metres. It does not take a photo, and it is not a shared tablet on the pass.
What you do not get
There is no table plan, no covers forecast, and no comparison of hours with sales. Working-time warnings can appear when you save a week: the 48-hour average, 11 hours between shifts, and the weekly rest. The warning does not refuse the save. A 12-hour close is still one statutory 20-minute break under the usual adult rule, not a break every six hours. The rest-break calculator shows that for a single day.
The free plan covers up to 5 staff and one location on the first organisation. Past that, the paid plan is £3 per active person per month, with a £15 minimum. A 14-day trial of the paid plan does not ask for a card. When the trial ends, the organisation returns to the free plan. Further locations, for a second site, are on the paid plan. Approved hours download as a CSV. Sending approved hours to Xero Payroll UK is not available until that connection works end to end. The pay run, the tronc and the booking system stay outside Shiftbrook.
Questions
Can I publish a lunch and a dinner as one shift?
You can, and you should not if the afternoon is free. Two shifts on the same date keep the gap out of the hours. One bar from the first start to the last finish makes the afternoon look like work.
Does clock-in use a tablet at the pass?
No. The person clocks in on their phone. The phone is checked against the site pin at that moment. It is not followed between punches, and there is no photo.
Sources
Split shift · Rotas · Clock-in · Retail