Staff scheduling in hospitality: centralized or per-location planning?

Puzzling over rosters, leave requests and last-minute calls about who can and can't work, every single week: sound familiar? It doesn't have to be this way. Horecaflix lets you choose whether staff scheduling runs centrally from head office, or gets handed to the local manager at each location, with availability and leave already built into the roster.

Key takeaways

• Hospitality rosters are time-consuming because shifts, availability and required staffing shift week to week, not because planners are doing it wrong.
• Horecaflix supports both centralized and per-location scheduling, and you can set this up differently per organization or even per location.
• Centralized planning works well with a uniform concept and tight labor costs; per-location planning works well when local knowledge of staff and guests makes the difference.
• Availability and leave are processed directly in the roster, so no one gets scheduled for a shift they can't work.
• Most multi-location operators end up choosing a hybrid: central policy, local execution.

Why staff scheduling in hospitality takes so much time

Scheduling in hospitality structurally takes more time than in sectors with fixed hours, simply because so little is fixed. You're working with students who can only work certain evenings, flex workers you mainly call in during busy periods, and permanent staff who request leave for exactly the weekend you need them most. Required staffing also varies by day, by part of the day, and sometimes by a local event nearby (staff.nl).

That happens against the backdrop of a sector under pressure. The Dutch hospitality industry now counts over 522,000 jobs, a record, yet roughly 30,000 vacancies remain open and nearly 4 in 10 operators report being held back by staff shortages (Felixworks). Fewer people on the team means less slack in the roster, and more time spent shuffling shifts, making calls and compensating whenever someone drops out.

At a single location, that's already a full-time job. Add multiple locations, and there's an extra layer on top: do you have visibility into who's working where, and should that visibility sit with one person at head office, or not?

What staff scheduling with Horecaflix gets you

With Horecaflix, that weekly puzzle becomes a system that handles most of the work itself. Availability, leave and staffing requirements live in one roster, whether you manage that roster centrally or let each location fill it in themselves.

In concrete terms, that gets you:

• Less time spent building and adjusting rosters, because availability and leave are already accounted for before you start planning.
• Fewer mistakes, such as scheduling someone who requested leave that very day or who's already rostered elsewhere.
• Visibility across all locations at once, even if day-to-day scheduling deliberately stays with the locations themselves.
• Fewer phone calls and messages about who's available when, because staff maintain their own availability in the system.

Which of these benefits matters most depends on how your organization is set up. A single-location business mainly benefits from less puzzling and fewer mistakes. A multi-location group also saves time at the owner or regional manager level, who would otherwise have to comb through separate rosters from every location each week just to check that everything adds up. That's why Horecaflix doesn't force one model, but offers a choice that grows with your organization.

Centralized planning: when it works best

Centralized scheduling works best when your locations resemble each other: the same concept, comparable opening hours, and labor costs you want to manage as a single whole. One planner, or a small planning team at head office, keeps the overall view, matches staffing to expected revenue per location, and makes sure labor costs don't run out of control across the group.

That matters most when margins are tight. When labor costs rise, businesses often respond by scheduling fewer hours and fewer staff, and in that situation you want those decisions made consistently rather than every location solving it differently on its own (staff.nl). Centralized planning also gives you an economy of scale: one person who really knows the scheduling tool can plan multiple locations more efficiently than every location reinventing the wheel.

The downside is that a central planner feels less of what's happening on the ground: a terrace that suddenly fills up on a sunny afternoon, a regular guest who misses their usual server, or a team that just works differently in practice than the plan on paper suggests.

A few signals tell you centralized planning is the right fit: your locations run the same menu and the same hours, you want to compare labor cost per hour across locations, and your location managers would rather spend less time on admin and more time on the floor.

Per-location planning: when to hand over that freedom

Per-location planning works best once locations genuinely differ from each other: a different customer base, a different weekly rhythm, or a local manager who knows the team and the regulars inside out. That manager is the first to notice that Thursday evenings are structurally getting busier, or that a staff member could use one more shift.

Horecaflix gives you that freedom without losing organization-wide visibility. Locations plan their own roster, while availability, leave and the key figures that matter stay visible centrally. That way local flexibility and organization-wide oversight work alongside each other, instead of against each other.

This model fits well for growing hospitality businesses that recently went from one location to several: the first location is used to full scheduling freedom, and that freedom doesn't have to disappear the moment a second one opens.

Signals that per-location planning fits better: each location has its own weekly rhythm, the location manager knows the team and regulars better than someone at a distance, and central decisions regularly need to be overruled locally because reality plays out differently than the plan on paper.

Availability and leave built directly into the roster

Whichever model you choose, availability and leave shouldn't live separately from the roster. In Horecaflix, every staff member submits their own availability, and leave requests automatically feed into the same system. The planner immediately sees who's available, who isn't, and who's already scheduled elsewhere, without a side chat thread or a separate spreadsheet.

That's not just convenient, it also reduces risk. For on-call workers, Dutch law (the Wet werk en zekerheid, a labor law aimed at giving flexible workers more certainty) requires employers to call them in at least four days in advance, unless the collective labor agreement shortens that to a minimum of 24 hours (Achmea Rechtsbijstand). Without collective agreement terms, employers must also announce the general work pattern at least 28 days ahead, with the specific working hours confirmed no later than 4 days in advance under the Arbeidstijdenwet (the Dutch Working Hours Act) (Timebutler). A roster that already accounts for availability and leave makes it a lot easier to hit those deadlines, instead of scrambling to fix them after the fact.

A real-world scenario: an operator with multiple locations

Take a hospitality operator running three locations: two comparable cafes in the same city, and one restaurant with a very different profile in a nearby town. The owner wants to manage labor costs across the whole group, so head office sets a weekly hours budget per location and keeps an eye on the reporting centrally.

Within that budget, each location plans its own roster. The two cafes rely heavily on flexible student staff and swap people between locations when someone calls in sick, so it helps that availability across both locations is visible to their planners. The restaurant runs a smaller, fixed team and plans mainly around a handful of recurring busy evenings.

The result: the owner has visibility into staffing and costs per location at any moment, without building every roster personally. Local planners keep the freedom to respond to what a given week actually brings, within the boundaries agreed centrally.

When one of the cafes suddenly lost two regular staff members last year, the planner at the other location spotted it immediately in the shared overview and had a colleague step in for a few shifts, without head office needing to make a single phone call. That kind of mutual flexibility happens naturally once availability is visible across locations, instead of locked into a single location's roster.

Getting started: setting up staff scheduling in Horecaflix

Setting up staff scheduling in Horecaflix starts with a choice at the organization level: centralized, per-location, or a combination like the scenario above. That choice isn't permanent, you can adjust it later as your organization grows or changes.

From there, you set up the basics per location: which shifts exist, who can work where, and how staff submit their availability. Leave requests then flow automatically into the roster from that point on, so no one gets accidentally scheduled on a day that's already been approved as time off.

Still unsure which model fits your locations best? Get in touch with Horecaflix, and we'll help you find the setup that matches your organization.