How our own three takeaways run on Fire Suite

Before

Like most of the trade, we ran on paper and WhatsApp:

• the rota was a sheet, photographed into a group chat, and there was always somebody looking at last week's;
• hours were added up on a Sunday night with a calculator, trying to remember who stayed to close on Thursday;
• the menu board was printed, so it was wrong the week prices went up;
• staff who covered at two of our shops were counted separately at each.

We looked at the software sold for this. It was built for offices and priced per employee, and most of it didn't know what a pay week was. So we wrote our own.

A week now

Building the rota

Staff put in when they can work, per day. Auto-build places people from that and tells us where we're short before the week starts. Publishing puts it on every phone at once.

Every shift

There's a tag by the door of each shop. Android phones tap it; iPhones scan its QR. Same tag, same action, to clock in and out. Nobody bought a clocking machine.

Monday morning

The pay week has already added itself up from the punches: each person's hours at their own rate, the split between bank and cash, and a total for each shop. We check the flagged differences, freeze the week, and the payslips go into each person's app.

Above the counter

The lunch menu comes on at eleven and the evening menu at five, on their own. If a card machine goes down, "Cash only" can go across every screen in two taps.

What went wrong first (and is now built in)

Most of Fire Suite's awkward-looking rules exist because the simple version cost us money first.

• One person, three accounts. Staff who covered across shops had a separate login at each. Nobody saw their whole week, and it quietly cost us money every week before we noticed. Now one person is one account, and their hours add up across every shop.
• Trimming hours to the rota. It's tempting to pay what was planned. But somebody who stayed an hour late worked that hour. So worked time is flagged against the rota, never quietly cut.
• Forgetting to clock out. Without a limit, one missed tap can look like a twenty-hour shift. Now a shift closes at the rota end or the shop's closing time, and the record says which was used.
• A rate change rewriting the past. Change somebody's rate and a spreadsheet will happily recalculate weeks you've already paid. Now a paid week is frozen and stays as it was.

What it doesn't do

It doesn't run payroll. It works out hours and gross pay, and payroll is run separately from the frozen weeks. It doesn't make right-to-work checks for us either. It keeps the documents and the expiry dates in one place and tells us before they lapse.