Hospitality rostering: a practical guide for Australian venues

What makes hospitality rostering different

The basics are the same everywhere: the right people, in the right place, for the right hours. What makes hospitality harder is everything around them.

• Most of the team is casual. Casuals come with changing availability, uni timetables, second jobs and no set hours. The roster is rebuilt every week rather than copied from a fixed pattern.
• Demand comes in peaks. Breakfast, lunch and dinner rushes are short and sharp, with quiet hours in between. That’s why split shifts and staggered starts are common, and why one person too many at 3pm costs as much as one too few at 7pm.
• Late nights and weekends are when you trade. Your busiest hours are often the ones the award pays more for, so the same roster can cost very different amounts depending on when the hours fall.
• Awards are detailed. Penalty rates, casual loading, minimum engagements, breaks, split-shift rules and junior rates all affect what a shift costs and how it can be rostered.
• People come and go. High turnover means new starters to train and roster around, and a roster that relies on the same three experienced people every Friday is fragile.

Rostering hotels

A hotel with rooms runs several businesses at once: a front desk that never closes, housekeeping that follows occupancy, and food and beverage outlets with their own hours. Common pain points:

• Handovers on a 24-hour front desk. Fix: overlap shifts by 15 to 30 minutes at handover, and roster the night shift as its own section, so a gap overnight is obvious.
• Housekeeping hours that ignore occupancy. Fix: roster housekeeping from forecast check-outs and stay-overs, not a fixed headcount, and keep a few casuals you can call in for heavy days.
• Outlets with different trading hours. Fix: give breakfast, the restaurant, the bar and room service their own sections and hours, so each is rostered against when it’s actually open.
• Functions booked weeks out with numbers that change. Fix: roster from the event sheet once numbers are confirmed, and agree a cut-off with the events team for final changes.

Building a roster around forecast demand and wage budget

A good roster starts from how busy you expect to be, not from who’s free. Five steps:

1. Forecast each day. Start from the same week last year and the last few weeks, then adjust for bookings, functions, events, school holidays and the weather.
2. Turn the forecast into hours by section. Decide how many people each section needs at each part of the day. For example, one server per so many covers, or one bartender for a quiet room and two once it fills.
3. Set the wage budget. Many venues set a target wage cost as a percentage of sales. If Saturday is forecast at $12,000 and your target is 30%, that day’s wage budget is $3,600, and it has to include penalty rates, casual loading and super, not just base pay.
4. Build the roster, then check it against the budget. Fill the peaks first and taper the shoulders. Stagger starts so people arrive as the rush builds, and cut from the quiet edges of the day, never from the peak.
5. Compare with what actually happened. Each week, look at rostered against worked hours and forecast against actual sales. The gaps tell you how to roster next week.

If you’re starting from a spreadsheet, our free roster template is laid out by section and adds up hours, including shifts that finish after midnight. There’s more on mixing contract types in rostering casual, part-time and full-time staff.

How Kaslu Work helps

Kaslu Work is rostering and clock-in built for Australian hospitality groups. It has a waitlist, and the first pub group is being set up with the team. Here’s what it does today:

• Rosters laid out by section. A weekly view for each venue and section, by the hour, with a monthly view of weekly spend. Drag or draw shifts, copy last week, and publish when it’s ready. Staff get an email when a roster is published or a shift changes.
• A budget on the roster. Each venue has its own budget, and every shift is costed under the venue’s award as you build, with weekend, evening and public holiday rates. Super, overtime and allowances aren’t included.
• Availability, swaps and leave. Staff set when they can work and you’re warned before rostering against it. They propose swaps and request leave, and a manager approves.
• Clock-in checked against the venue. You draw a boundary around the venue. A clock-in from inside it is accepted, one from just outside or from a mocked location is flagged for a manager, and one from further away is refused. Staff clock in on their own phone or on a venue tablet, and clock-ins made without signal sync later.
• Worked hours you can export. Rostered against worked hours for every shift, split shifts included, exported to CSV for your payroll software. Every manager correction needs a reason and keeps the original.
• Several venues, each its own way. Each venue has its own boundary, sections, trading hours, rounding and budget. Certificates such as RSA, RCG, food safety and first aid are stored with expiry dates.

What it doesn’t do: calculate award pay, run payroll or connect directly to payroll software yet. If you’re comparing tools, our page on choosing a Tanda alternative has a checklist.

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