Popular gourmet mash company Makars operates a chain of family restaurants located in Edinburgh’s vibrant Old Town. Open seven days a week, Makars has two eat-in locations, along with a third outlet dedicated to providing lighter takeaway options. Its client-base is made up of roughly 60% tourists and 40% locals.

Because of its prime locations, the fixed costs of running the business are high. As such, it’s imperative that its owners operate as efficiently as possible, and have clear fallbacks for busy periods in order to maximise every revenue opportunity.

The challenge

Prior to RotaCloud, Makars owner John Stamp relied on spreadsheets to plan his staff rotas. Unfortunately, this led to a number of headaches for him and his team.

“Schedules and staff change frequently during the week,” John told us. “We employ a lot of students, who require a certain degree of flexibility in return for loyalty.”

With flexibility, however, came complications that John’s spreadsheets couldn’t cope with.

“Regularly, staff did not turn up as they were unaware of a shift, or would turn up when not scheduled,” he explained. “There was no central point of reference except a printed sheet in office.”

The solution

“RotaCloud has a beautiful, elegant and simple interface,” John told us. “It easily handles split shifts, notifications, holidays, printing, reports and duplicating rotas to save time. I looked at quite a number of alternatives which were just simply irritating to use.”

John also uses RotaCloud to manage all of his bookings and tracking tour groups.

“It’s really flexible. I also use it to diary specific employees' work jobs for certain days such as clean lines or place drinks orders.”

“The primary advantage is that there is a central store for hourly staff hours,” he continued. “Prior to RotaCloud, these were continually being challenged as hours were not logged correctly. Now, I can validate the hours against the till logins as a secondary check — it allows me and my staff to be confident they are being paid correctly, and saves hours of reconciliation work each month.”