The tour · stop 5 of 7 · labor
Staff the rush, not the average.
The demand curve that says how many croissants Saturday wants also says how many hands. Butter reads your floor fifteen minutes at a time — tickets and bodies in the same frame — and writes the staffing call in shifts a person can actually be asked to work.
The schedule is a bet.
Butter shows the odds.
Labor is the biggest number on the P&L you can still change this week. Butter puts demand and crew in the same unit, so “do we need a third person Saturday?” gets an answer with receipts instead of a feeling.
Shifts, not sawteeth
Demand crosses the third-person line at 9:15, dips at 9:30, crosses back at 10:00. Read literally, that's a fifteen-minute shift, twice — advice nobody can roster. Butter writes whole blocks, extends them toward the busier side, and lets the crew already on absorb the blips.
Your pace, never an industry average
How much one person clears in a quarter hour is learned from your own best runs — and quoted back as fact, not benchmark. A quiet Tuesday is evidence about the Tuesday, never a verdict that your crew is slow.
Schedule vs actual, judged fairly
The published roster against Toast's punches: early, late, lingered, or never came — with a five-minute grace before anything reads as late, and no verdict ever built on Toast's invented auto-clock-out times. The salaried manager who doesn't punch is not branded a no-show.
A page for every person on payroll
Hours, reliability, pay basis, hire date, milestones — and “sells more when they're on,” said only once 8+ days on the floor and 30+ matched sales have earned it. Three items, ever; a quiet tile is the tile working.
The percentage, before it's history
Labor cost sits next to the last seven days of sales — split into the fixed part you committed to and the variable part the schedule controls — so the number you're judged on isn't a month-end surprise.
The weekly staffing call
One short note, timed to land before the schedule is written — not after the week it describes. A week with nothing worth changing sends nothing: silence is the normal state of a well-run floor.
House rules · what this screen refuses to do
Some advice Butter refuses to give.
Butter will never tell you to cut below your minimum crew. An email is the worst possible place for advice an owner has to override on safety grounds — you can't argue with it, and the next one arrives whether or not you did. And it doesn't pad: no finding worth acting on means no message at all.
Privacy is structural, not polite: no member of your team ever sees a named person's hours, pay, or tips — enforced in the database, not just hidden from the menu. The café-wide labor-cost number is a management number like any other, and everyone with app access sees it; it's people's individual pay that stays owner-and-Manager only.
shifts someone can workyour own pacefive-minute gracesilence over padding
Invite-only beta · $99/mo per café when we open
Schedule the rush you're actually going to have.
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We write to every café on the list when it's their turn · no card, no contract