Friday afternoon used to be roster afternoon. Three spreadsheets, four WhatsApp threads, and a printout that was already wrong by Monday.
That’s the universal story. Every hotel manager has done it. Open Excel, copy last week, change the few that need changing, paste a screenshot into the group chat, hope nobody calls in sick. Then on Monday the breakfast cook doesn’t show up and you find out half the team was working off last month’s version.
Shift Scheduling replaces all of that. One screen, one week at a time, AI does the boring bit.
What Shift Scheduling does
Every department gets its own folder — Front Office, Housekeeping, F&B, Kitchen, Spa, whatever you run. Inside each folder is a clean 7-day grid: employees down the side, Monday through Sunday across the top. Drop a shift template onto a cell, drag it to another, click AI fill to propose the rest of the week, click Publish when you’re happy. Every employee gets an email in their language listing every shift they’re on. End of week, they confirm what they actually worked. End of month, you export one CSV that drops straight into payroll.
That’s the whole loop. Templates, grid, AI, publish, confirm, export.
How it works
Open Schedule → Departments. Click + Folder, name it after the department, tick the employees who actually work there in Roster, grant Read/Write to whoever should manage it. Add three or four templates — “Reception morning 07–15”, “Late shift 14–22”, “Breakfast 06–11”. Now you’re set up.
Each Friday: open the folder, click AI fill, write one line of context — “Two on every morning, one on weekend evenings, Ole prefers Tuesdays off” — review the proposal, edit the cells the AI got wrong, click Publish. Email goes out. Done.
Each Sunday: employees see their week on My week, tap Confirm on shifts they actually worked. Reality differed by more than ten minutes? Tap Edit, change the times, write a one-line note. The manager sees the variance flagged automatically. No silent over-time, no end-of-month surprises.
Key capabilities
- One folder per department, one 7-day grid per week
- Five shift kinds in the same grid — work, vacation, sick, day off, bank holiday
- Reusable shift templates with one-click drop
- AI-fill the empty week from a one-line prompt, five runs per folder per week
- Publish in one click — every employee emailed in their language
- My week tab — every employee sees and confirms their own shifts
- Self-confirm includes vacation, sick, holiday — not just hours
- Variance warning when actual differs from scheduled by more than 10 minutes
- Manager bulk-confirm the whole week
- Overview tab — GM / HR view across every department, total scheduled vs confirmed hours, open shifts, warnings
- Copy week, clear week — start from last week’s published shifts, or start clean
- Payroll-ready CSV export — UTF-8 BOM, Excel-friendly, hotel-wide
- Permission separation — Read, Write, Delete, Roster (the manager who creates the folder isn’t auto-added as an employee)
- Audit log on every action
- Multilingual — English, German, Spanish, French throughout
Who it’s for
GMs whose Friday afternoon disappears into rostering. Department heads who run a different rota every week and want to stop reinventing it. HR teams that need hotel-wide visibility into scheduled vs confirmed hours without full admin access. Owners who reconcile payroll by hand at month-end and want the CSV ready to upload instead.
If your hotel has more than five employees and still rosters on paper or in spreadsheets, this is the upgrade.
Why the Roster permission matters
In most scheduling tools, the manager who creates a department schedule is automatically a member of that department. Then they spend the rest of their life filtering themselves out of the grid. We split the two: Write means “I manage this folder”, Roster means “I appear as a row, I work shifts here”. A front-office supervisor can manage the Housekeeping schedule for a week of cover without becoming a fictional cleaner on the rota.
Sounds minor. In daily use, it’s the difference between a tool you trust and a tool you fight.
Why self-confirm changes payroll
Most scheduling software stops at “we planned this”. What actually happened was a separate conversation, usually on paper, usually weeks later. We close that gap inside the same view. Each employee taps confirm on shifts that ran as planned, edits the ones that didn’t. The manager sees the variance flagged. The payroll CSV exports both: what we planned, what we actually paid. Reconciliation goes from a day to a coffee.
The honest part
Scheduling software has been a mess for years. Either it’s a generic SaaS tool that doesn’t know what a “Spätschicht” or “guardia nocturna” is, or it’s a behemoth PMS feature buried four menus deep. Neither fits how hotels actually plan.
We took the question seriously: what would the manager build for themselves, if they could? The answer was a folder per department, a week at a time, AI to fill the boring parts, employees responsible for their own truth, HR with one screen, payroll with one button. That’s what shipped.
How does your hotel build next week’s roster today — paper, Excel, WhatsApp screenshot, or something built for it?