The whole system, taught the way you run it.
Not a feature list, a walkthrough. We follow the week the way an owner actually lives it: get set up, build the schedule, cover the sick call, read next week, keep cost in line, and watch the savings turn into real dollars. Along the way you'll see how each piece feeds the next, and what the AI is quietly doing behind the scenes. One login, alongside any POS. No app to install, no system to rip out.
Prefer the whole series? Watch all the Helm Shift Tutorials, hosted by Helm.
Bring what you already have. Be running today.
Most tools make you reformat your life before they'll help. Helm Shift starts from your existing spreadsheets and a quick setup, so the first hour is useful, not admin.
Setup is two spreadsheets.
Bring your staff list and your menu exactly as you keep them today. There's no rigid template to match, paste your list straight from any spreadsheet. For your team, the AI reads the columns from context, figures out which is a name, a wage or the days someone can work, and lines it all up for you to confirm before anything is saved. Book a free 30-minute walkthrough or email Tyler and, while we're small, we'll load your lists together on the call, so you're running the same day. No card, no contract, and your first 30 days are free.
Two pastes and you are running. Here is every column that actually matters, so you can see the whole job before you start:
- Your team: name is the only one we need. Role, email, wage, weekly hours and the days each person can work all help, and you can add them later.
- Your menu: the dish name is the only one we need. Add what each ingredient costs you and every dish carries a plate cost.
Any column order, any headings, extra columns ignored. If your team list does not line up, the AI reads it and shows you the match to confirm before anything saves.
Instead of forcing your data into a fixed template, the AI reads each column in context, a mix of names and abbreviations still resolves into people, wages, and workdays. You see its reading as a preview first, so nothing saves until you have checked it.
A four-step checklist walks you the rest of the way.
Once your lists are in, Helm Shift asks four quick questions about your restaurant, then drops you on a dashboard with a short checklist that gets you to a real published schedule. Each step takes under a minute, and green ticks fill in as you go so you always know what's left.
Open the app, see what needs you, get the schedule out.
This is the daily loop: the dashboard surfaces anything urgent the moment you log in, then the builder turns availability into a full week you just review and publish. And when someone calls out, the same system finds the cover.
Your dashboard, and it pops what's urgent the moment you open it.
Every time you log in, the dashboard tells you what needs you today and nothing you don't. Up top, anything urgent, an open sick call, a time-off request to approve, sits in a Needs attention strip you can act on with one tap. If something is genuinely pressing when you open the app, like an open sick call, it surfaces right away so it can't be missed. Below the alerts, four numbers: active staff, shifts this week, this week's labour cost, and the average recipe cost across your menu.
Build the week, AI drafts it, you decide.
This is the heart of it. Tap Build this week and Helm Shift drafts a full schedule from everyone's availability, time off, and target hours. The builder lays your team out as rows across the days of the week, tap a shift to change the hours, drag it to a different person or day, and the labour estimate updates live. Nothing is published until you say so. The AI suggests, you decide, it never commits a schedule on its own.
Two words to know: Schedule is the published roster everyone reads, and Build Week is where you make changes. So the read-only Schedule stays clean and no one edits it by accident, and all the drafting, dragging, and publishing happens in the builder.
The draft isn't random. The AI reads each person's available days, time off, and target hours, then spreads shifts to cover your open hours while keeping people near the hours they want. Change one shift and it recomputes the labour total instantly, so you're always editing against a live cost, not a guess.
Sick calls and cover, without the 6 AM scramble.
When someone calls in sick, Helm Shift flags the open shift and suggests the best replacement, someone who's available, qualified, and under their target hours. You approve with one tap and they're notified. Staff can post a shift they can’t make for someone else to pick up, and grab a coworker’s. Nothing changes hands until you approve, and no two people can ever claim the same slot.
How the call reaches you depends on how urgent it is. Someone giving you a day's notice is a normal heads-up. Someone calling out an hour before service is an alert, a prominent, hard-to-miss notification, so a last-second gap gets your attention while there's still time to fill it.
To rank a replacement, the AI checks who is available, qualified, and under their target hours for that week, so the person it suggests first won't tip into overtime or clash with time off. The pool uses a claim lock, the instant one person takes an open shift, it disappears for everyone else, so you never get two people showing up for one slot.
Stop scheduling by gut. Schedule for what's coming.
This week is handled. The forecast is where Helm Shift starts earning its keep, it looks ahead and tells you not just what sales to expect, but how many people to have on to meet them.
The forecast, next week first, with a staffing call.
Open the forecast and the first thing you see is next week, the week you can still do something about. It projects sales day by day from your own history and the shape of your typical week, then goes one step further than a revenue number: it gives you a plain staffing suggestion, roughly how many people to have on each day to match the expected volume. A quiet Saturday and a booked-out Friday shouldn't be staffed the same, and now they won't be.
The projection is built from your own daily numbers and your day-of-week pattern, not a generic industry average. The staffing suggestion translates that expected volume into people, which is what makes the forecast something you can act on when you build the following week, instead of a chart you nod at.
Where the margin actually lives.
Labour is half the picture. The other half is what each plate costs you to make and what you charge for it. Your menu and recipes live here, so every plate carries its food cost against its price.
Labour cost, see the week's number before you publish.
As you build the schedule, Helm Shift adds up the cost in real time, total for the week, and a breakdown by day, so an expensive week shows up before payroll, not after. Unassigned open shifts are kept separate so your totals stay honest. It's the kind of number the big platforms charge hundreds a month to show you; here it's just part of the page.
The savings, in dollars, not vibes.
A tool is easy to cancel when you can't see what it's doing for you. So Helm Shift does the opposite of hiding the value: it adds up what each covered sick call and each accurate forecast is actually worth, and shows you the number.
Analytics, where every save becomes a dollar figure.
Analytics is the scoreboard. At the top: saved this month, your all-time savings, and whether you're on track to save more. But the important move is that it shows its work. "Sick calls covered" isn't just a count, it's costed at the hours the cover actually worked, at that person's wage. A close forecast isn't a vanity stat, it's the over-staffing you avoided and the sales you didn't miss. Each line explains, in plain dollars, how it got there. There's also a running revenue view: enter your daily sales and watch the picture build week over week, so the build-up is something you can see, not something you have to imagine. And like everywhere else, you can print or export any of it to a spreadsheet.
Every time you accept a suggested cover or right-size a day off the forecast, Helm Shift logs a small savings event with the dollar value attached. Analytics just totals those events. That's why the number is defensible: it's the sum of specific moments this month, each one traceable back to the decision that created it.
One assistant that has read the whole thing.
Every screen so far shares one set of data. Ask Helm is what happens when you can talk to that, an assistant that already knows your staff, schedule, forecast, and menu, and can act on any of it.
Ask Helm, it already knows your restaurant.
Ask Helm is more than a chat box, it's an assistant that has read your whole system. Ask it in plain English, "who could cover Friday dinner?", "who is close to overtime this week?", "how should I think about this week's labour?", and it answers from your live staff, schedule, forecast, and menu, then points you at the exact screen to act on it. It lives in its own area of the app so it's always a click away. As everywhere else in Helm Shift, it suggests; you're the one who hits send.
Because everything lives in one system, the assistant isn't guessing from a generic model, it's reading your current availability, schedule, forecast, and recipes when it answers. That's the difference between a chatbot and an assistant: it can pull a real name off this week's roster and draft the actual message, not a template.
Your team's phone, no app to install.
Once you publish, your staff open a phone-friendly link and see exactly their week, colour-coded by shift type, with the hours and any notes. They request time off and pick up open shifts right there, so you stop fielding texts at midnight. No app store. (A dedicated mobile app is coming soon; anyone who prefers email can get the schedule that way instead.)
How it all connects, the loop that runs your week.
Here's the whole point, said once. Scheduling, coverage, forecast, menus, labour cost, and analytics aren't six apps bolted together, they're one system with one set of data, so each piece feeds the next. Your history shapes the forecast. The forecast shapes how you staff. Staffing sets your labour cost. Your recipes carry your food cost, and food cost drives your pricing. And every good call along the way, a covered shift, a right-sized day, gets logged as a dollar in analytics. Ask Helm sits in the middle of all of it, because it can read the whole loop.
Your own history projects next week's sales and a staffing level per day.
feeds the scheduleStaff to the forecast, cover sick calls, and watch labour cost move live.
feeds labour costEnter what each ingredient costs you; every recipe that uses it carries that cost.
feeds food costIngredient costs set each dish's margin; pricing intelligence flags the moves.
feeds your profitEvery covered shift and right-sized day is logged as real money saved.
feeds back into next weekBecause it's one set of data, the tool gets more useful the more you use it, this week's numbers sharpen next week's forecast, which sharpens the staffing, which sharpens the savings. It runs alongside any POS, Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed, or none, with nothing to rip out and nothing to integrate. One login, at a price an independent owner can actually justify.
The questions owners ask first.
Does Helm Shift work with my POS?
Do I have to reformat my spreadsheets to import them?
Is it really one tool for scheduling, forecasting, and cost?
Will my staff need to install an app?
How does the AI actually decide things?
Is my data safe, and who can see it?
Is it really free for 30 days?
What if it doesn't work for my restaurant?
Set it up this week.
Say hi, get set up the same day, and have a published schedule before the next shift. No card required, and the founder walks every new restaurant through it personally.
Book your free setup callThe founder
Built by someone who worked the floor.
Helm Shift is built in Halifax by Tyler MacDougall, who worked restaurants as a line cook, dishwasher, and host before building the tool he wished those owners had. When you email support, you're emailing him, and he answers the same day.