Guide · the team

A restaurant rota that survives a busy week

Most restaurant rotas are written on a Sunday night from last week's memory and corrected all week by text message. The ones that hold up start somewhere else: from the covers you expect, the hour the last table leaves, and the hours people actually worked last time.

Published 24 October 2026 · A practical guide for restaurants in Great Britain, not legal advice.

Start from the covers you expect

The question a rota answers is how many hands each service needs, and the honest answer comes from covers. Take the same week last year, or the last four weeks if you are new, and write down the covers by day and by service. Then add what you already know: the party of twenty on Thursday, the school holidays, the match on Saturday afternoon.

Turn covers into people with your own ratios rather than someone else's. A floor that runs well at one server for every twenty to twenty-five covers at dinner will need more at a Sunday lunch where every table orders at once. The kitchen scales differently: a quiet night still needs a cook on every section that is open.

In Slotora the covers report shows what each day and service really did, and the bookings already taken for the week ahead are on the host stand. Those two numbers are what you staff to.

Overnight shifts and the late close

A shift that starts at five in the evening and ends at one in the morning belongs to two dates, and a rota on paper usually loses one of them. The person closing on Friday is then rostered for the Saturday brunch, and nobody sees that there were seven hours between the two.

Write the close as a shift of its own with a real end time, and read the next morning against it. The Working Time Regulations count the eleven hours of daily rest from the moment the last shift ends, not from midnight.

Slotora's rota takes shifts that run past midnight as one shift, per login and per station, so the closing bartender's Saturday starts where Friday really ended.

Copying last week, then changing what changed

Copy the week that worked
Most weeks look like the last good one. Copy it whole, then edit, rather than building every shift again.
Change the days the covers changed
The bank holiday, the private party, the closed Tuesday. Edit those days first, and leave the rest alone.
Check the joins
Look at each person's late finishes and early starts side by side. That is where a copied week breaks the rest rules.
Publish it at the same time every week
A rota that appears on Thursday afternoon every week is one people plan their lives around. Late changes then become the exception you discuss, not the habit.

Rostered hours against worked hours

The rota says who should be there; the clock says who was. The gap between the two is where the wage bill drifts: the server kept on for the late table, the porter sent home early on a quiet night, the half hour after close that nobody wrote down.

In Slotora staff clock in and out, and the time is taken from the server rather than from the phone in their pocket. A manager can correct a missed clock-out, and the correction is stamped with who made it. Each week shows rostered against worked hours, person by person, so the drift is a line on a screen rather than a surprise in the payroll.

Working Time Regulations basics

The Working Time Regulations 1998 apply in Great Britain. Five of them shape a restaurant rota.

Daily rest: eleven consecutive hours in each 24-hour period (regulation 10). Twelve for a young worker.
A break: at least 20 uninterrupted minutes when the working day is more than six hours, which the worker may spend away from the workstation (regulation 12). A young worker gets 30 minutes after four and a half hours.
Weekly rest: 24 uninterrupted hours in each seven days, or two of 24 hours or one of 48 in each fortnight if you decide so (regulation 11). Young workers get 48 hours a week.
The 48-hour week: an average of 48 hours for each seven days, overtime included, normally over 17 weeks, unless the worker has agreed in writing to work more (regulation 4).
Records: enough to show the limits were kept, retained for two years, in any format you reasonably choose (regulation 9).

These regulations cover Great Britain. Restaurants in Northern Ireland and in Ireland should check their own working-time rules with an adviser before copying these numbers.

Sending hours to payroll

Your payroll provider or accountant needs one thing from the rota: the hours each person worked, checked by a manager, in a file they can read. The hours page in Slotora exports them as CSV files, with the managers' corrections already in.

The pay itself, the tax and the holiday pay are worked out by your payroll, not by Slotora. The rota and the time clock keep hours, and a clean record of hours is most of what a payroll provider asks for.

Hear when Slotora opens

Restaurant rotas: short answers

How much rest must staff get between a late close and an early start?

In Great Britain, eleven consecutive hours in each 24-hour period, counted from the end of the last shift. Twelve for a young worker.

When is a rest break required?

When the working day is more than six hours: at least 20 uninterrupted minutes. Thirty minutes for a young worker after four and a half hours.

Does Slotora calculate wages?

It keeps the hours: the rota, clocking in and out, and rostered against worked hours, exported as CSV. Pay is calculated by your payroll.

Sources (legislation.gov.uk, checked 24 October 2026)

Staff hours and the time clock in Slotora · Staff logins and devices · Covers reports · Pricing

The Tips Act for restaurants · All guides