Catering staff scheduling for events and off-site jobs
Rotahr schedules a catering company's casual and event staff around jobs rather than fixed shifts, with availability, swaps and HACCP holding records all in the same app.
Catering staffing isn't a weekly rota, it's a string of jobs with different crews, different venues and often different start times on the same day. Rotahr's availability feature lets staff declare when they can work, so building a job's crew starts from who's actually free rather than a round of phone calls.
Food safety for catering has its own pressure points — holding temperatures, transport time, and reheating at an off-site venue — and the same temperature-log and reheat/hot-holding templates used by restaurant kitchens cover those checks away from a fixed kitchen.
Casual and event staff often work for several employers, so clock-in and payroll hours need to be clean and exportable without assuming someone works the same job every week — Rotahr's hours summaries hand off cleanly to whatever payroll process the business already runs.
Team messaging keeps job-day logistics — call times, venue addresses, last-minute changes — out of a personal group chat and inside the same app as the rota.
Where this actually bites, for a catering
Every job has a different crew and venue
Availability declared by staff makes building a job's crew a filter, not a round of calls, and the rota reflects the actual job rather than a fixed weekly pattern.
Food safety doesn't stop at the kitchen door
Reheat and hot-holding records cover food that travels to an off-site venue, which a fixed-kitchen HACCP diary usually doesn't address directly.
Casual staff need clean hours, not a weekly contract
Clock-in and exportable payroll summaries work for people who pick up jobs rather than working a fixed weekly rota.
Job-day logistics get lost in group chats
Team messaging keeps call times, venue details and last-minute changes attached to the job itself, not a thread that gets harder to search every week.
Who this is for
Catering companies and event caterers staffing jobs from a pool of casual and part-time staff, where crew lists change job to job rather than following a fixed weekly rota.
The modules that matter most
Rota & scheduling
Rotahr's scheduling module lets you build a week's rota on one screen, publish it straight to your staff's phones, and absorb the swaps, sickness and last-minute cover that follow — without a single group-chat message.
HACCP & food safety
Rotahr replaces the paper food-safety diary with logged temperature checks, delivery records, cleaning checklists and a corrective action log, all exportable as a single PDF when an inspector walks in.
Clock-in & payroll
Staff clock in and out on their phone, breaks are tracked against the legal thresholds, and the resulting hours flow into a payroll summary — so nobody adds up a paper timesheet at midnight on the last day of the month.
Training & Certifications
Rotahr builds thirteen short training courses out of your venue's own data — your menu, your equipment register, your stock list, your HACCP units, your rota — so a new starter is tested on the actual allergens and the actual fridges they will work with, and every pass is recorded with an expiry date. This is in-house training, not an accredited qualification.
Free templates to start with
Reheat & hot holding record
This free reheat and hot holding record template — printable PDF or editable Excel — gives you one row per batch to log the core temperature it reached on reheating, the time it went into the hot hold unit, a temperature check every hour or two after that, and the time it came off or was discarded.
Weekly staff rota
This is a free weekly staff rota template you can download as a printable PDF for the staff room wall or as an Excel sheet that adds up each person's hours for you — Monday to Sunday, one line per team member.
Staff availability form
This free staff availability form template — printable PDF or editable Excel — collects when every team member can and can't work for the coming week or rota period, so the rota gets built from real availability instead of a round of individual messages.
Fridge & freezer temperature log
This is a free fridge and freezer temperature log template you can download as a printable PDF or an editable Excel sheet — one page per week, with a row for every named unit and space for a morning and evening reading.
Common questions
Can staff set which days or jobs they're available for?
Yes — the availability feature lets staff declare when they can work, so you build a job's crew from people who are actually free instead of guessing or ringing round.
Does the HACCP module cover food held or transported off-site?
The reheat and hot-holding template covers temperature checks for food that's reheated or held before service away from a fixed kitchen — the same principle as a restaurant's pass, applied to a job that travels.
Can I use this for a mix of regular and one-off casual staff?
Yes. Regular staff can sit on a standing rota while casual staff are added job by job, with the same clock-in and payroll-hours process for both.