Free café & coffee shop rota maker — no signup, no spreadsheet formulas

A rota that opens on time, every day

A café week is shaped by two things: an early open and a sharp morning rush. Miss the opener and you lose the most profitable two hours of the day. ShiftCraft is a working weekly shift schedule maker — type each barista’s hours and it totals their week while the coverage row shows how many people are on each day, so you can build the rush mornings up before anything else.

It handles the messy reality of café staffing: short shifts, half hours, students who can only do certain mornings, and a weekend crew that doesn’t touch the weekday rota. Everything saves in your browser — build it once, print it for behind the bar, export a CSV when you need to.

The shifts a café rota has to cover

Most independent coffee shops run on these blocks. Slot your baristas against them, heaviest on the morning peak.

Make your café rota in five steps

1. Add every barista, kitchen hand and weekend assistant available next week.
2. Put an opener on every day first — the open is non-negotiable.
3. Double up through the 8–10am rush so no one is solo on bar at peak.
4. Type short shifts as decimals like 4.5; leave cells blank where people aren’t available.
5. Print a sheet for the bar or export a CSV — and check no part-timer has crept over their hours.

What a good café rota gets right

• An opener on every single day — the most common rota failure in coffee.
• Two on bar through the rush so service stays fast when the queue is out the door.
• Student and part-time hours respected — blanks where they’re unavailable, totals under their cap.
• Weekend crew kept separate from the weekday team without distorting anyone’s weekly hours.

One grinder, two hands and a queue

A café’s bottleneck is rarely the till — it’s the bar. With a single grinder and one machine, two baristas can dial-in, pull and steam in parallel; one barista alone means the queue stalls the moment someone orders a round of flat whites. Roster with that physical limit in mind: through the morning peak you want a dedicated person on milk and a second calling and pulling, with someone free to clear cups and run the pastry case. Quieter spells drop to a single hand who also batch-brews the filter and handles the loyalty app. Decaf swaps, oat-milk runs and a mid-morning grinder purge all eat minutes, so don’t roster the peak as though every drink were a black americano — staff the bar for the slowest order, not the fastest.