General hospitality
Duty manager, bar, kitchen, floor. The neutral starting point.
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Free tool · Rota template
A free rota template that gets overnight shifts right.
Most spreadsheet rotas break the moment a shift crosses midnight. This one doesn't — and it also costs the week live against your labour target, and flags the two Working Time rules hospitality breaks most often. Built for UK pubs, bars, restaurants and cafés.
No email required
Download the template
Works in Microsoft Excel (2016 or newer), Google Sheets, Apple Numbers and LibreOffice Calc.
What makes it different
Three things most rota spreadsheets get wrong.
- Overnight shifts. A shift from 17:00 to 01:00 is eight hours. In a naive spreadsheet it comes out as minus sixteen, so people either fudge it or split the row. This template adds a day whenever the end time is earlier than the start.
- Labour cost as you build. The Summary sheet divides labour cost by your expected net sales and bands the answer green, amber or red against your target. You find out the week is over budget before you publish it, not after payday.
- Two Working Time checks. It flags any shift over six hours with under a 20-minute break, and any shift starting less than eleven hours after that person's last one finished. Both are the mistakes a busy manager makes at 5pm on a Thursday.
What it looks like
One row per shift. The maths looks after itself.
Grey columns are calculated — you never type in them. The two check columns stay blank until something needs looking at.
| Day | Role | Name | Start | End | Break | Hours | Rate | Cost | Break check | Rest check |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Duty manager | Alice | 09:00 | 17:00 | 30 | 7.50 | £12.50 | £93.75 | ||
| Monday | Bar | Bob | 17:00 | 01:00 | 0 | 8.00 | £12.50 | £100.00 | Needs a 20-min break | |
| Tuesday | Bar | Bob | 09:00 | 17:00 | 30 | 7.50 | £12.50 | £93.75 | Under 11h rest |
Bob's Monday late shift ends at 01:00 on Tuesday and he is back at 09:00 — eight hours later. That is the rota mistake nobody notices until someone is too tired to be behind a bar, and it is exactly what the rest check exists to catch.
Pick your venue
Four versions, already set up with the right roles.
Same engine, different role rows — so you are not deleting "Chef de partie" out of a pub rota before you start.
Pub rota template
Adds cellar, glass collector and door — the roles a wet-led week actually needs.
Bar rota template
Cocktail bar, barback, glass collector, door. Built for late trading.
Kitchen & FOH template
Head chef through to runner and host, kitchen and front-of-house on one sheet.
Six steps
How to use it.
- Open it in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice, and put Monday's date in cell B3.
- Enter one row per shift — date, role, name, start, end. Times go in as
17:00, not as text. - Add unpaid break minutes. Hours and cost calculate themselves.
- Add hourly rates. Look up the current National Minimum Wage band for each person's age — the rates change every April, which is why this template ships with the rate column blank rather than a figure that will be wrong by next spring.
- On the Summary sheet, type your expected net sales (excluding VAT) and your target labour percentage.
- Fix the week before you publish it. Green means you are within two points of target. Red means change something now.
Setting a target
What labour percentage should you be aiming at?
Rough UK benchmarks for a single-site independent, gross labour against net sales. Add two to four points if you are loading employer NIC and pension into the figure.
| Venue type | Healthy range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Wet-led pub | 22–28% | Drinks service carries fewer labour hours per pound taken |
| Food-led pub / gastropub | 28–34% | Kitchen brigade on top of front-of-house |
| Casual dining restaurant | 26–32% | Table turns matter more than headcount |
| Fine dining | 30–38% | Higher labour per cover, usually with higher GP to match |
| Café / coffee shop | 25–32% | Small teams — owner hours often go uncounted |
| Cocktail bar | 24–30% | Skilled labour, higher spend per cover |
| Hotel F&B | 28–35% | Multi-department, breakfast plus service |
These are benchmarks, not targets. A wet-led pub at 30% has a problem worth solving; a fine-dining restaurant at 32% may be perfectly healthy. Set a target inside your own trading pattern. There is more detail, including the full formula, in the labour-cost percentage guide.
The two checks, explained
What the flags actually mean.
“Needs a 20-min break” appears when a shift is longer than six hours and you have entered less than twenty minutes of break. Under the Working Time Regulations 1998, a worker is entitled to an uninterrupted rest break of twenty minutes when daily working time is more than six hours. In hospitality this is the most-breached rule in the book, usually by accident on a short-staffed Saturday.
“Under 11h rest” appears when someone's next shift starts less than eleven hours after their last one finished. The Regulations provide for eleven consecutive hours of rest in each twenty-four-hour period. The classic breach is the close-then-open — finish at 01:00, back on at 09:00 — which is eight hours and is very easy to roster without noticing.
Both flags are a prompt to look again, not legal advice. Different and stricter limits apply to workers under 18, and some sectors and workforce agreements vary. Check your own obligations.
Prefer paper?
Print a blank week.
Some kitchens still want a sheet on the wall. Printing this page gives you a clean blank grid with the spreadsheet's columns and nothing else — no navigation, no marketing.
Weekly rota
Venue: ________________________ Week commencing: ________________________
| Day | Role | Name | Start | End | Break | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | ||||||
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| Tue | ||||||
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hospitalityapp.co.uk
Being honest about it
When the spreadsheet stops working.
A spreadsheet is genuinely fine for a small team and a steady week. Plenty of good venues run on one for years, and we would rather you used a good one than a bad one.
It stops being fine at a predictable point. A spreadsheet cannot tell your team the rota has changed — that is still a WhatsApp message somebody misses. It cannot stop you rostering a person who booked the week off, because it does not know about the holiday. It cannot tell you what people actually worked versus what you planned, so payday becomes a negotiation. And it cannot let someone pick up a shift you could not fill without you re-sending the file.
When those things start costing real money, that is the point to move to something that does them. Our rota module publishes to everyone's phone, blocks a double-booking, reconciles planned against actual from clock-in punches, and shows the same labour-cost figure this spreadsheet calculates — except live, as you drag shifts around.
Common questions
About the template.
Is it really free?
Yes. No email address, no sign-up, no trial. Download it, change it, share it. We publish it because operators who outgrow a spreadsheet sometimes come looking for software, and we would rather be the people who gave them the spreadsheet.
Does it work in Google Sheets?
Yes. Upload the .xlsx to Google Drive and open it with Google Sheets — formulas, conditional formatting and both checks carry across. It also works in Excel 2016 or newer, Apple Numbers and LibreOffice Calc.
Does it handle shifts past midnight?
Yes, and this is the thing most spreadsheet rotas get wrong. 17:00 to 01:00 is calculated as eight hours, not minus sixteen.
Why is the hourly rate column empty?
Deliberately. National Minimum and National Living Wage rates change every April and vary by age band. A figure baked into a downloadable file is wrong within months, and a wrong wage figure is worse than no figure. Look up the current rate for each person's band.
Can I use it for more than one venue?
Yes — take a copy per venue. It is not built to consolidate several sites into one view; if you need that, it is what the multi-site side of the app is for.
Do I have to credit you?
No. Use it however you like, including commercially, with no attribution.