Customer story: The Cat's Whiskers

The Cat’s Whiskers is York’s much-loved (and only) cat café, just around the corner from the famous Minster. Since opening in 2019, The Cat’s Whiskers’ aim is for people to come and spend some time with the 19 rescue cats that call the café home – and ultimately adopt them. It helps the local rescue, the cats, and allows people to spend time with cats if they usually can’t. 

As a solo-owner, Lily Cole is the only one managing the rotas, holidays, and pay – all while juggling the ever-changing university schedules and availability of her team of students. 

The challenge

When Lily first set up her business, she knew she faced the tiresome admin of rotas, amongst everything else that comes with managing a team 

Aside from 20 total cats, Lily has 10 staff members to manage – staff who are part-time and mostly students, meaning staffing constantly fluctuates across the year, not just a week. Some students in her team only work when home from university, living in York, while others work when at university, living elsewhere. 

These varying schedules only make the challenge far more complex. Lily must plan her rota around her team’s irregular hours and availability over the year while ensuring flexibility alongside their ever-changing university schedule. 

Knowing what she faced, she searched for a digital solution.

(Enter RotaCloud…)

The solution

Lily briefly looked at other systems, but it was her HR team’s recommendation and RotaCloud being a fellow York business that cemented her decision to use RotaCloud from the very beginning.

By having everything in one place and so easily accessible, “It's just taken one big stress away and makes it so easy.”

With RotaCloud, Lily schedules shifts around staff’s availability and shares them a month in advance. 

“It's pretty, pretty instant to create the rotas… So long as I know that most people are kind of available and it's a standard, it can be done just within minutes. And then sent out to everybody, and the staff acknowledge a shift, and then you just say it's done and know the shifts are covered.”

Lily allocates these shifts out, already knowing whether staff are home from university or have leave booked in. “Then, I've got the facility to put out the open shifts, leave for people to claim them, which works brilliantly as well. And that's taken all the weight off my shoulders. Just being able to do that very easily.”

When it comes to payroll, Lily simply prepares the one-click reports at the end of each month and sends them to her freelance payroll administrator. “It's so easy and quick, and it's in a format that they accept and understand… It's very easy to amend it if needed as well.”

As for holiday management, staff submit their leave requests and accrual is managed automatically. ”Again, that will be one more thing for me to have to worry about calculating each month.”

The Cat’s Whiskers has grown as RotaCloud has. Those early days were RotaCloud’s early days, too. Lily even visited the local office for one-on-one training, meeting staff she and many other customers now message through the live chat. Since joining in 2019, “[RotaCloud has] evolved while we've used it. It's always coming out with improvements and different ways of using it. But it's been an absolute godsend.”

Since Lily started using RotaCloud in 2019, she has seen improvements and new features released, which have made her work even simpler. New features like:

• Rota templates for easier & quicker scheduling

• Holiday accrual to completely remove manual calculations (a feature Lily loves)

• Time off in lieu to give time back to staff instead of paying overtime

• Document signing & acknowledgement to keep everything in one place

• RotaCloud’s mobile app – Lily’s favourite feature.

“I use [RotaCloud] on my PC, on my laptop, but having the app as well – and all the staff have the same app. I know they use it differently to how I use it, managing it, but they can just apply for the leave through the app, they can send messages, add notes and things like that. When I put open shifts, it's just almost instant that they get claimed. It's all right in my pocket, and I can just access it anywhere, which is great. Even if I'm not here or away from the business on holiday, I've still got access to it all the time.”

The ease and time saved planning rotas and managing her team is Lily’s biggest benefit. But all in all? 

“I’d definitely recommend RotaCloud.” (Thank you, Lily!) “It just makes my life so much easier. It helps me, but I think the staff like it as well. You get really good feedback. Some places, the bigger companies that they might have worked at, they've not had a facility like it. So it just benefits everybody across the board and makes it much, much easier to manage for me.”

But has RotaCloud improved business, and made it easier to run on a day-to-day basis? Lily believes so. 

“It would just be one more thing to have to manage. I’m the sole director of the business, so everything comes back to me, really. And as well as the staff, we've got 20 cats, so there's an awful, awful lot to think about. And if anything makes my life easier, I'll take it.” 

What Lily said last says it all:

“Without a doubt, [RotaCloud] makes everything easier.”