Choose Restaurant Rota Software in the UK

Most independent restaurants do not lose money on a rota because the spreadsheet is ugly. They lose it in the gaps. A shift is agreed in a group chat on Tuesday and nobody can find the message on Saturday. A server closes at midnight on Friday and is put down to open at 7am on Saturday, because nobody counted the hours between the two. A new starter is added to the rota but not to the payroll sheet. Two people think they are on the same Sunday lunch, and a third thinks they are off. That is why a manager spends part of every week rebuilding who worked what.

The labour market adds pressure to get this right. The Office for National Statistics reported on 15 September 2026 that accommodation and food service activities had a vacancy rate of 2.8% in June to August 2026, joint second highest of the industries it lists, behind mining and quarrying at 2.9%. A restaurant that is short of people is badly placed to lose the ones it has to a rota that changes without notice, a close followed by an early open, or a tips split that nobody can explain.

The legal side has also moved. Since 1 October 2026 the time limit for bringing a claim to an Employment Tribunal has been six months instead of three, according to the Government's Employment Rights Act timeline update of 25 September 2026 (updated 1 October 2026). That means a dispute about hours, breaks or tips can be raised for twice as long after the event, and the restaurant's only defence is what it can show. A rota kept in chat messages shows very little. This research does not suggest that any rota tool removes legal risk. The point is narrower: a dated, exportable history of who was rostered and who worked is the evidence an employer will want to be able to produce.

The second problem is price. Rota software looks cheap on its entry page, because the entry page shows a price per user for a small team. A restaurant with five people on the rota and a restaurant with thirty are not the same customer. Seasonal staff, part-timers and weekend students all count as people, and on a per-user plan each one is a line on the bill. Clock-in, payroll reports and messages are often extra again. Most of the pages that rank for this search are written by rota vendors, and few of them work out a monthly total for a real team. This guide does that work, using only each provider's own published page.

The mockup above is a real TableSpark product screen: the rota's week view on a laptop, with the Day and Week switch, the shift presets and the Publish drafts button. Later sections come back to it.

This is a description of what the rules say and what a rota should be able to show. It is not legal advice, and a rota tool does not make an employer compliant. The employer is responsible for the rules; the tool is where the evidence sits.

The Working Time Regulations 1998 are in force. They set limits that a rota can break without anyone noticing, and the table lists what each says and what a rota should record.

Three of those deserve a plain reading. The 11-hour rule is the one restaurants trip over, because of the late close followed by the early open. GOV.UK gives the example directly: a worker who finishes at 8pm should not start again until 7am the next day. The 20-minute break applies when a worker's daily working time is more than six hours, and GOV.UK adds that the break does not have to be paid, which depends on the contract. And the records rule says the employer must keep records adequate to show whether the limits are met and retain them for two years from the date they were made. The regulation says records may be kept in whatever format the employer reasonably thinks fit, so a software export can serve, provided it shows what it needs to.

GOV.UK sets the limit for workers under 18 at 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week. A rota that includes 16 and 17 year old part-timers needs those limits applied by whoever builds it.

The National Living Wage and National Minimum Wage rates changed on 1 April 2026. GOV.UK lists £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, £10.85 for 18 to 20, and £8 for under 18 and for apprentices. A 40-hour week at £12.71 comes to £508.40 before employer National Insurance and holiday pay. The real cost of a rota is the labour it schedules; the subscription is small beside it, and its job is to make that labour visible.

The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 came into force on 1 October 2024 and makes it mandatory for all tips to be passed on to workers without deductions. Workers can enforce their rights through the Employment Tribunal, and tribunal judges must take the statutory code of practice into account where relevant. The code says an employer should use a clear and objective set of factors to allocate tips, and one of the factors it lists is hours worked during the period when the tips were received. That is the link between a rota and a tip pool: if tips are split by hours, the rota and the hours record are the evidence behind each person's share.

The code also sets the clock and the record. Tips must be distributed, at the latest, by the end of the month following the month in which customers paid them. A tipping record must include all qualifying tips received at the place of business and the amount allocated to each worker, and it must be kept for three years from the date the tip was paid. A worker may ask to see the record once in a three-month period. The two retention periods differ: working time records are kept for two years, tipping records for three. GOV.UK's glossary entry also repeats a point worth knowing: since 2009 it has been illegal for tips to count towards minimum wage pay.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 is being brought in by stages, and rota owners hear a mix of dates that is easy to misread. This is the position on the Government's timeline update of 25 September 2026, which itself says all future dates remain subject to parliamentary processes and may change.

In force now: statutory sick pay without the Lower Earnings Limit and waiting period, and Day 1 paternity leave and unpaid parental leave, both from 6 April 2026, and the six-month tribunal time limit from 1 October 2026. Announced but not in force on 11 October 2026: strengthened tipping law, listed as taking effect by the end of 2026; the reduction of the unfair dismissal qualifying period to six months for dismissals from 1 January 2027; and a right to guaranteed hours, a right to reasonable notice of shifts and short-notice payments, which the timeline lists under 2027 with timings to be updated after consultation. For guaranteed hours and notice the right wording is "expected, timing to be confirmed". Some rota vendors advertise guaranteed hours as a built-in feature. That describes a right that has yet to commence, so it is no reason to buy on its own.

What a restaurant can do now is what the future rules would reward anyway: publish rotas with good notice, and keep a record of when a shift was published, changed or cancelled.

The pages this research read charge in four ways. Deputy and Planday charge per user per month, often with a minimum spend or user count. RotaCloud and Rotaready price by employee band, so the bill steps up as the team grows. Findmyshift charges per team up to a stated size. TableSpark prices the rota inside a restaurant plan, so the price does not depend on headcount. The question is therefore not "what does rota software cost" but "what does it cost at my headcount, with the add-ons I will actually need".

The worked example is a restaurant with a rota of 5, 10, 20 or 30 people. A person counts whether they work forty hours or one Sunday a month, because that is how the providers below count. Every price is taken from the provider's own page, read on 11 October 2026. The table lists the published prices first.

These prices are not like-for-like, because providers charge for different things. Every row except the first covers a rota and nothing else: none of them includes the restaurant's website, its bookings, its guest records or its search set-up. The first row is a complete restaurant plan with the rota inside it.

The arithmetic follows, provider by provider, at the four team sizes.

RotaCloud. The pricing page has an employee slider, and with monthly billing it showed Standard at £10 a month for 1 to 5 employees, £20 for 10, £40 for the 15 to 20 band, £60 for 30 and £100 for 50. Pro showed £15, £30, £60, £90 and £150 at the same settings. So a team of 5 pays £10, a team of 10 pays £20, a team of 20 pays £40 and a team of 30 pays £60 on Standard. Clock-in is the add-on to watch. RotaCloud's Time and Attendance, which covers clock-in, timesheets and the payroll report and export, showed "4.50" for 1 to 5 employees and "9" for 10 employees. The page does not print the currency or period beside those figures; this research reads them as pounds a month. On that reading, a 10-person team that wants payroll export pays £20 plus £9, which is £29 a month, and the add-on prices at 20 and 30 were not read.

Deputy. On monthly billing the page shows £3.60 a user a month for Lite and £4.75 for Core, with prices excluding taxes. Annual view shows £3.25 and £4.25. The page says auto-scheduling, demand forecasting and wage budgets start at Core, so a restaurant that wants the rota built from forecast demand is on Core. At Core monthly prices, 5 people cost £23.75, 10 cost £47.50, 20 cost £95 and 30 cost £142.50 a month. At Lite monthly prices, 10 people cost £36, 20 cost £72 and 30 cost £108, and a team of 5 at £18 falls under the £20 monthly minimum per invoice that the page's FAQ states for monthly plans. On annual view Core is £42.50 for 10, £85 for 20 and £127.50 for 30. The page FAQ also says annual plans do not allow employee numbers to be lowered or the plan to change, and carry no refunds on early cancellation, which matters when the team is seasonal. HR is a £2 add-on per user per month.

Planday. Starter is £2.99 a user a month with a minimum of five users, so 5 people cost £14.95, 10 cost £29.90, 20 cost £59.80 and 30 cost £89.70. Plus is £3.99 a user plus a £30.00 monthly subscription fee, with a minimum of ten users, so 10 people cost £69.90, 20 cost £109.80 and 30 cost £149.70 a month. The page does not state these as excluding VAT or including it. The page states Plus is the tier with leave and absence management, payroll reporting and integrations.

Findmyshift. Starter is £21 a month per team, for up to 20 team members and one manager. A team of 30 does not fit that tier; the next published tier, Business, is £31 a month for 100 team members. The free plan covers 5 team members, 1 manager and 1 week of forward planning. This is a rota-only price: it does not include a website, bookings, guest records or search set-up, and a one-week planning horizon on the free plan does not give staff the notice a published rota should.

Rotaready Evo. The page says pricing starts from £103 a month and includes 15 employees, with additional employees from £7 each a month, and notes that the set-up fee is not included. For 5 and 10 people, the £103 entry figure applies. For 20 people the arithmetic is £103 plus five extra employees at £7, which is £138 a month as a minimum, and for 30 it is £103 plus fifteen at £7, which is £208 a month as a minimum, before the set-up fee.

TableSpark. The rota is part of Growth, which is £39 a month excluding VAT, or £390 a year excluding VAT on the ten-months-for-twelve offer. The page publishes the rota as "four roles, no per-seat charges, every teammate sees their own shifts", and the tutorial says team members come with the Growth and Full plans, however many are added. So the cost is £39 a month excluding VAT at 5, 10, 20 and 30 people. Over a year that is £468 excluding VAT, or £390 excluding VAT on the yearly offer.

At 30 people, a per-user plan at £4.75 a head costs £142.50 a month, or £1,710 a year, and the TableSpark plan costs £39 a month excluding VAT, which is £468 a year excluding VAT. The gap grows with every hire. At 5 people it is small, at 30 it is £103.50 a month. Because the TableSpark price also covers the website, bookings against real tables, guest records and the rest of the Growth plan, the comparison understates the difference: the per-user rota tool is one subscription among several, and the TableSpark plan is the whole stack.

The full cost of a restaurant website in the UK is worth reading beside this one, because the rota is one more bill that a bundled plan removes.

Clock-in and payroll export sit in a different tier. RotaCloud lists payroll report and export inside its Time and Attendance add-on. Deputy lists basic time clocking in Lite, and forecasting and auto-scheduling from Core. Planday lists payroll reporting in Starter and payroll integrations in Plus. A restaurant that needs hours in a payroll file should find the tier that includes it before it compares prices.

Minimums and fees. Deputy's monthly minimum is £20 per invoice. Planday's Plus plan has a £30.00 monthly fee and a ten-user minimum, so a small team pays its floor before the first user. Rotaready's page excludes its set-up fee from the quoted price.

Free plans have a catch. Findmyshift's free plan carries its limit on the page: 5 team members, 1 manager and one week of forward planning. Deputy and RotaCloud offer 30-day trials rather than free plans. Third-party lists copy stale figures: this research found one article describing a free tier for 20 employees where the provider's own page now says free up to 10 employees, in US dollars.

Pricing is the easy part. A rota that works needs these things in place, whichever tool is chosen.

• Availability and days off. Each person can mark days they are unavailable, and the manager sees it while building the week.
• Holiday. Annual leave is booked against the rota, so a week is not built around someone who is away.
• Publishing with notice. The team sees the rota when it is published, not while it is a draft, and is asked to confirm.
• Rest checks. Whoever builds the rota can see finish and start times, so the late close and early open is caught before publishing.
• Hours and breaks per person. Worked time, breaks and paid time are visible weekly, with a running average.
• A payroll file. Hours export to a CSV or spreadsheet the bookkeeper can use.
• A tip-sharing record. If tips are split by hours, the hours behind each share can be shown, and the tips policy is written down.
• Roles. Access differs by person. Owner, admin, editor and server permissions differ.
• A dated history. What was published, when, and what changed.

If the rota is also where service happens, there is one more item: the people on the rota are the people the floor assigns to sections on the night. A rota in a separate app means retyping that list at 5pm.

This is where TableSpark enters the picture, and why its rota is built differently from a standalone rota app. The rota is not a separate product with its own login. It sits in the Service console, in the Servers view, beside Tonight, Hours and Performance, and the Rota tab is where the week is built. The tutorial states the point directly: the people being rostered are the same people the live floor assigns to sections at service time.

The rota itself is a drag-and-drop grid. A Day and Week switch picks the canvas. Tapping an empty cell opens the New shift form for that person and date, with Lunch, Dinner, Double and Close presets that fill the times, and Start, End, Break, Job title and Notes fields to adjust. A shift moves by drag, to another day or to another person. Copy last week brings a standing pattern across as drafts, and an Open shifts lane holds work nobody has taken yet. Drafts are hatched on the grid and invisible to staff, and the guide says nobody on the team is notified until Publish drafts is pressed. When the week is published, each person is asked to confirm their shift or decline it, and a tick appears on the chip.

Four roles decide what someone can open: Server, Editor, Admin and Owner. The job title, such as Head Waiter, Sommelier or Runner, is separate free text and is what shows on the rota. The Team card states the pricing: no per-seat charges, team members come with Growth and Full however many are added.

The Hours tab sits next to Rota. It adds the week up per person: shifts and days worked, worked time, breaks, the paid total that payroll needs, and a weekly average alongside. A weekly average running high is flagged in red; the tutorial's example is a 58.2-hour week standing out before it becomes a problem. The page states its own rules: published shifts only, no-shows and declined shifts pay nothing, breaks are unpaid, and open shifts sit outside any person's totals. That matches what the Working Time Regulations ask a record to show: hours per person, per week, with the breaks that were taken.

The second mockup is also a real TableSpark product screen, the Hours tab with per-person worked, breaks and paid totals and the Payroll CSV and Export Excel buttons. The range chips are This week, Last week, Fortnight, 4 weeks, This month and Last month, with the exact dates printed beside them. Payroll CSV is for the bookkeeper's import and Export Excel gives a spreadsheet with the same totals. What is exported is what the Hours tab shows, so there is one set of numbers rather than a rota figure and a payroll figure that disagree.

Every team member gets My rota, made for a phone. It lists the published week by day with times, role labels and breaks, marks the person's own shifts, and shows Please confirm with Confirm and Can't work it buttons. My hours, Days off and Today sit in the same tab bar.

Tips under the Tips Act are in the same plan. In the Day settings panel the tips policy is written and published: tips can be shared by hours worked, equally between all staff on shift, or directly to whoever earned them, with an option for a service charge that is shared too, and the wording is editable so it describes what the restaurant actually does. The team reads the published policy on their My hours page, and publishing again creates a new version. At close of day, the owner enters card tips from the card machine report and cash tips, and clicks Preview the split. The tutorial's example is a pool of £228.40, made up of £186.40 of card tips and £42.00 of cash tips, shared between the seven people on the published rota. Shares follow the published rota for the business day, with paid minutes after unpaid breaks counting. A saved tips day has its own CSV button.

That means the rota, the hours record and the tips split all come from one place. The legal duties in the earlier section still belong to the restaurant, including the three-year tipping record and distribution by the end of the following month, but the evidence for each person's share is the same rota the team confirmed.

The rota, the Hours tab with payroll export and the tips feature are on TableSpark Growth and Full. Growth is £39 a month excluding VAT and Full is £69 a month excluding VAT. Starter, at £19 a month excluding VAT, is the website plan. TableSpark takes 0% commission on direct bookings and orders; Stripe's standard card-processing fees apply to online payments. The pricing page has the full plan table.

Use this checklist before signing for any route.

This is the merchant side, from the Run Your Team and Rota guide. The guide takes about eight minutes, and the rota and the Hours tab need Growth, at £39 a month excluding VAT. Shifts stay as drafts until Publish drafts is pressed, so a first run will not disturb the team. The full walkthrough with every click is in the team and rota tutorial.

• Use Copy last week for the standing pattern, then change only the exceptions.
• Hold Alt while dragging a shift to copy it instead of moving it.
• Write the tips policy in Day settings before the first split, and republish it when the method changes.
• Open My rota yourself as the owner to see exactly what the team sees.

For an independent UK restaurant, café or pub, the strongest way to run a rota is inside the same system that runs the floor, the hours and the tips, and TableSpark is the best-value and best overall choice for it. A standalone rota app charges per user or per employee band, puts clock-in and payroll in a higher tier or an add-on, and leaves the floor list and the tips split to other tools. TableSpark Growth starts at £39 a month excluding VAT, or £390 a year excluding VAT on the ten-months-for-twelve offer, and includes team roles and the drag-and-drop rota with no per-seat charges, the Hours tab with Payroll CSV and Export Excel, tips shared by rota hours, the website, bookings against real tables and guest records with CSV export under the restaurant's own account. TableSpark starts at £19 a month excluding VAT for the website itself, and Full is £69 a month excluding VAT when online ordering is added.

TableSpark takes 0% commission on direct bookings and orders; Stripe's standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.