Catering staff scheduling software built around the event, not the week

Why a generic rota tool does not fit catering

Shift tools are built for a restaurant: the same room, the same hours, roughly the same people each week. Catering is the opposite. Tuesday is two servers on a drop-off, Saturday is a chef, four servers and a driver at a venue an hour away, and the only thing the two jobs share is that both have to be costed before you quote them.

So staffing here hangs off the event rather than off a calendar week. You staff a job, not a Tuesday.

Assign the crew to the job

Each event carries its own shifts. You add the roles the job needs, put people in them, and the crew becomes part of the event record alongside the menu, the venue and the timings — not a separate schedule you have to keep in step by hand.

Every staff member carries two numbers: what you pay them and what you bill for them. Both matter, and most tools only track one.

Staffing cost lands on the invoice by itself

This is the part that changes the margin conversation. Billable shifts become staff lines on the event invoice automatically, grouped by role. Change the crew and the invoice follows.

That means the labour on a job is costed at the moment you staff it, not reconstructed afterwards from memory. A catering job that lost money usually lost it on labour nobody added up until the week after.

Licences, insurance and certificates that expire quietly

Every caterer has a drawer — physical or digital — of food-handler certificates, alcohol licences, insurance, allergen training. They all expire, and none of them announce it.

Documents here are stored against the person they belong to, with the issue date, the issuing body and the expiry date. A daily sweep checks what is coming up and warns you 60 days and again 30 days before anything runs out. You get told while there is still time to renew, rather than the morning of a job when a venue asks to see it.

The categories cover licences and permits, insurance, training certificates and contracts, so onboarding paperwork for a new hire sits in the same place as the certificates they have to keep current.

What this does not do

Straight answers, because the wrong tool costs you more than no tool:

• No GPS tracking or geofenced clock-in. If you need to see where crew are on a map in real time, use a workforce app built for that.
• No interactive courses or quizzes. It writes the documents (see below); it does not build click-through training modules with scoring.
• No payroll run. Pay rates are tracked and costed; paying people happens in your payroll system.

If live crew tracking is the main thing you need, a dedicated workforce tool will serve you better. If what you need is staffing tied to the event, to the quote and to the invoice — and a warning before a certificate lapses — that is what this is.

The paperwork a new hire needs, written for you

Hiring somebody means an onboarding pack, a contract, a handbook and a health & safety policy — the documents most small caterers never get round to writing, and then need the week a venue or an inspector asks.

Those are generated for you, for your company, from templates built for catering:

• Employee onboarding pack
• Staff handbook
• Employment contract template
• Health & safety policy
• Employee exit checklist

There is also a free-text option, so a document the templates do not cover — an allergen briefing, a service standard, a prep-station procedure for new starters — can be written from a sentence describing what you want. Each one lands in the same document store, filed against the staff member it belongs to, with the same expiry tracking as everything else.

So the full arc for a new hire sits in one place: write the contract and the handbook, file their certificates, and get warned before those certificates lapse.

Where it sits

Staffing is one part of the same record as the event, the quote and the invoice. Change the guest count and the knock-on reaches all of them.

Moving from another tool

If you are on another catering platform or running this out of spreadsheets, we will move your menus, recipes, staff and client list across with you on a call rather than handing you an import template. Get in touch and we will set it up together.

Price

Starter is $99/mo for one seat and Pro is $149/mo for three. Every feature is on both plans — they differ on seats, storage and how much AI you get each month. Extra seats are $15/mo. The 14-day free trial takes no credit card. See pricing.

Related reading

Catering staff scheduling: a practical guide covers the method — the six mistakes, and how to schedule a crew without the chaos — whatever software you end up using. The true cost of catering labour covers what a shift actually costs you once everything is counted.