Software that knows a cafe opens at six, not eleven.
Most restaurant software assumes a lunch service and a dinner rush. A cafe has neither. Helm Shift ships with cafe shifts, cafe categories and cafe units out of the box, so the first schedule you build already looks like your week.
Your day is over when theirs starts.
Open the average scheduling tool and it offers you Lunch, Dinner and Closing. You are pulling shots at 6am and cleaning down by three. Every shift you create is a fight with a dropdown built for somebody else’s trade, and every inventory category is a list of proteins and produce that has nothing to do with beans, milk and cups.
It is a small thing that never stops being annoying, and it is the reason most owner-operators give up on the tool in week two.
Set up as a cafe, not as a restaurant with the labels changed.
Shifts that match the trade
Open, Mid-day, Afternoon and Close, not Lunch and Dinner. The Open shift starts at 6am and the day is done by six in the evening, because that is when a cafe is done.
Categories you actually stock
Coffee, Tea, Dairy, Bakery, Syrups, Packaging and Retail. Not Protein, Produce and Frozen with everything crammed into “other”.
Units you actually count in
Espresso beans by the kilo, milk by the litre, oat milk by the case, 12oz cups by the sleeve, pastries each. Counting is faster when the unit is the one already in your head.
The schedule, the stock and the cost of a week.
Run it against your own week.
Helm Shift was built in Halifax and is open to independent cafes and bakeries across Nova Scotia and Ontario. The 30 days are free and there is no card, so build next week’s rota in it and count a real morning’s stock. That will tell you more than anything on this page.
Try it on next week’s schedule.
Plans start at $49 CAD a month. Works alongside whatever POS you already use, and we never need access to it.