Restaurant shift roster planner — weekly grid
A 7-day × staff grid that turns Saturday-night roster scribbles into a clean printable plan. Drop your team in, pick a shift preset for each cell (Morning, Evening, Split, 12h Day, Weekly Off, Leave), and watch total hours, overtime, and labour ₹ update live. Anyone crossing 48 hours flips into overtime. Anyone with zero weekly-off cells throws a red flag against the statutory 24-hour weekly rest. Print on A4 landscape for the staff-room wall, or export CSV into your payroll workbook. Free, no signup, runs in the browser.
Roster inputs
Spice Route Kitchen
| # | Staff | Role | Mon 5 on duty | Tue 6 on duty | Wed 5 on duty | Thu 5 on duty | Fri 5 on duty | Sat 5 on duty | Sun 5 on duty | Hrs | OT | Labour ₹ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ravi Menon | Manager | 48 | ₹8,640 | ||||||||
| 2 | Priya Nair | Captain | 48 | ₹6,720 | ||||||||
| 3 | Arjun Reddy | Server | 48 | ₹5,280 | ||||||||
| 4 | Suresh Yadav | Cook | 48 | ₹7,680 | ||||||||
| 5 | Lakshmi Iyer | Cashier | 48 | ₹6,240 | ||||||||
| 6 | Mohan Das | Helper | 48 | ₹4,320 | ||||||||
| Totals | 5 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 288 | ₹38,880 | |||
- Sat — no cook on roster (kitchen under-staffed)
- Sat — no cook on roster (kitchen under-staffed)
How to plan a fair week
A week of restaurant labour is a balancing act between four constraints: cover demand by day-part, staff preference, statutory rest, and the labour-cost % band the format can carry. Independent operators usually solve only the first one — they roster to demand, and let the other three fall where they land. That is the route to last-minute swaps, weekend burnout, and the labour line creeping past 25%.
The fair-week sequence is the opposite. Start by blocking every staffer's weekly off before any shift goes on the grid — usually a midweek day, rotated so the same person doesn't always get Tuesday. Then layer in your fixed-shift people (the head chef who does only mornings, the closing bartender who does only evenings). What's left are the floating slots — servers, helpers, cashiers — and that's where you spread the Friday-and-Saturday load so no one stacks two weekend doubles in a row. The grid in this tool surfaces over-48h totals in red the moment you cross them, so you catch the burnout shift before you publish the roster, not after a complaint lands on WhatsApp.
Run the labour ₹ total against your revenue forecast for the week. If you're at 28% before tips, you have a roster problem, not a revenue problem — usually one or two doubles that could be split across additional staff, or a day where you've over-staffed the lunch trough.
Weekly off and statutory minimum rest
One continuous 24-hour off in every 7-day stretch is not a preference; it is the floor written into the Shop & Establishment Acts that govern restaurants in every Indian state. The exact section number changes — Karnataka S&E Act §13, Maharashtra S&E Act §16, similar language in Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Telangana, West Bengal — but the standard is the same: 24 consecutive off hours, not split into two half-days, not bunched with another rest day to make a 48-hour gap once a fortnight.
The roster flags anyone with zero WO cells in the week so you spot the gap before publishing — most weekly-off violations are accidents (someone covered, no one rebalanced), not deliberate. Pair the weekly-off discipline with the daily-hours cap (9 hours / day, 48 hours / week in most state rules; doubles count toward the daily cap), and the overtime calculator linked below handles the pay-rate side of anything that spills over.
Where this fits
- Shift roster planning for restaurants in India — the field-by-field reference behind this planner, including day-part demand mapping and rotation policies
- Restaurant labour cost percentage — India guide — what the live ₹ labour total should land at for QSR, casual, fine-dining, cloud, and bar formats
- Labour cost percentage calculator — roll the week's total wage bill into the labour line and check against the format band
- Attendance register / muster roll generator — once the roster is printed, the muster roll captures the daily P / A / L mark
- Restaurant overtime calculator — for anyone the roster flagged as crossing 48 hours, compute the statutory double-rate pay slice