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For cafés & restaurants

Know what every service is costing, as it happens

Split shifts, last-minute cover and a wage bill that swings with the weather. WagePilot gives you the rota, the clock-in and a live labour-cost board, so you staff the rush without over-paying the lull.

  • One site free forever
  • Never per head
  • From £29/site as you grow
  • No card to start
app.wagepilot.co.uk/app/live
Help Centre

Live board

Everyone on shift, costing in real time.

LIVE

Live labour cost now

3 on shift

£41.50 /hr

£312 spent today so far

22% labour of £1,420 takings today

Who's in

3 on shift · 1 on break · 1 late

PS Priya Shah OT 2× Harbour Café £76.50 05:06:18
SP Sam Pengelly Harbour Café £40.00 03:12:41
AK Ade Kowalski Wharf Kitchen £25.20 01:48:03
JM Jess Morgan Harbour Café on break
LM Leo Marsh Harbour Café late 12m

Today projected

£486

£312 so far + scheduled

This week

est. £2,140

£1,284

  • Live cost as the rush builds. Watch the £/hr climb and send someone home before 2pm, not regret it on payday.
  • On-site clock-in only. GPS confirms staff are actually in the café when they clock on. QR fallback by the till.
  • Split shifts in minutes. Copy last week, drop in the breakfast and dinner cover, publish to phones.

The bits that make shift work hard

The same leaks show up week after week — and most of them only surface on the payroll run, long after you could have done anything about it. Here's where the hours and the money usually slip.

01

Wage % creeps up unseen

You only find out the floor was over-staffed when payroll lands a week later.

02

Paper timesheets & guesswork

Hours scribbled on a pad, then keyed in by hand on a Sunday night.

03

Buddy-punching

Mates clocking each other in adds minutes that quietly become real money.

How WagePilot helps

The same building blocks — rota, clock-in, audited timesheets — tuned to the way Cafés & restaurants actually run.

  • Live cost as the rush builds

    Watch the £/hr climb and send someone home before 2pm, not regret it on payday.

  • On-site clock-in only

    GPS confirms staff are actually in the café when they clock on. QR fallback by the till.

  • Split shifts in minutes

    Copy last week, drop in the breakfast and dinner cover, publish to phones.

Hire anyone you like. The bill never moves

No per-head fees means you can grow the team without watching a meter: one site stays at £29 whether you're 3 people or 25. Open another venue and it's a flat £29 more, never per person.

What you'd pay as your team grows: a typical per-seat tool vs WagePilot's flat price
Your team Typical per-seat tool WagePilot
5 staff ~£20/mo Free · 1 site
25 staff ~£100/mo £29 · 1 site
50 staff ~£200/mo £29 · 1 site
80 staff ~£320/mo £58 · 2 sites
150 staff ~£600/mo £87 · 3 sites
200 staff ~£800/mo £145 · 5 sites

Per-seat figures assume a typical ~£4/user/month all-in rate (many tools sit £3–£6/user). Indicative, for illustration.

Cafés & restaurants: common questions

Can WagePilot handle split shifts and breaks for a restaurant?
Yes. Build a breakfast and a dinner block on the same day on the rota grid, set paid or unpaid breaks per shift, and staff clock in and out for each. Approved hours, breaks deducted correctly, export to payroll in a click.
Does it stop staff clocking in before they are actually in the café?
Geofenced clock-in checks the phone’s location once, at the moment they clock in, against the radius you set around the café. If they are not on-site it is flagged. There is a QR-code fallback by the till for weak signal. Location is never tracked continuously.
How does the live labour-cost board help a café?
It shows a running total of what everyone currently clocked in is costing, this minute. On a slow Tuesday you can see you are over-staffed by 2pm and act, instead of finding out on the payroll run a week later.
What does WagePilot cost for a single café?
One site with up to 5 staff is free forever on the Free plan, with the rota, all three ways to clock in (geofenced GPS, QR and a counter tablet), audited timesheets, UK holiday and the live cost board. One site with unlimited staff is a flat £29/month (Core), which also switches on tips and tronc, team messages and payroll-formatted export. Every site after that is another flat £29 with no limit on how many, so three cafés is £87 and five is £145. Adding people never costs more, and opening another café never changes your plan: the price simply steps up by one site charge.

Start running shifts on autopilot

Set up your first site this afternoon and watch the first shift tick up live. Free to start, never per head — flat per site as you grow.

Free forever on one site · no card to start · cancel anytime

From £29/mo · never per head

Free forever on one site · no card · cancel anytime

Start free