AI-DRIVEN ROSTERING
The Hospitality Rostering Platform That Knows What Every Shift Actually Costs.
Most hospitality rosters are built on gut feel — and built without knowing what each shift actually costs under the award. Viability transforms scheduling into a data-driven strategy by anchoring every shift to a 95% accurate revenue forecast and real award rates. Align your team to the actual heartbeat of your venue.
The End of Over-Staffing
Fairness for Managers
Optimised Service Coverage
You're Managing Activity. Not Productivity.
Traditional scheduling tools show you activity (who is working), but they don’t show you productivity (is the labor generating profit?). In the today’s world, a daily labor percentage is a dangerous metric:
- The Resolution Gap: A daily total can hide the fact that you were over-staffed at 10 AM and under-staffed at 1 PM. Profit leaks in the gaps.
- The “Bad Plan” Excuse: Without a revenue-anchored starting point, it’s impossible to tell if high labor was caused by poor management or a slow day.
- The Fatigue of Manual Entry: Managers spend hours “playing Tetris” with shifts instead of leading their teams on the floor.
- The Award Rate Blindspot: A Saturday dinner shift at penalty rates costs 50–75% more than a Monday lunch. If your hospitality rostering tool can’t see that, your labour budget is wrong before the week has even started.
Hospitality runs in services. Your rostering Should Too.
Viability is the only platform that governs labor at the resolution of the Service Period. We move beyond hourly increments to focus on the 28 “Service Anchors” that define your week.
- The Heat Map: Visualise exactly where EBITDA is being created or eroded. Our Heat Map provides a clear staffing signal—Green for healthy, Red for over-staffed—so you can adjust before the cost is locked in.
- Productivity as the Governing Truth: We move beyond “Labour %” to focus on revenue-per-hour. If your productivity is within benchmark, your roster is optimised for profit.
- Genuine Roster Automation (2026): Viability retrieves shift structures from your highest-productivity days and applies them to future forecasts, creating an optimised schedule template in seconds.
- Built-In Award Interpretation: Viability’s Hospitality Rostering engine calculates the true cost of every shift — penalty rates, overtime, and weekend loadings included — so your “Allowed Labour” figure reflects what will actually hit your payroll run.
From Forecast to Floor in 4 steps
Anchor
Viability sets the “Allowed Labour” based on your 95% accurate revenue forecast.
Build
The Roster Builder translates allowed labour dollars into actual hours and shifts.
Visualise
The Heat Map exposes any service-period distortion before the roster is published.
Govern
Productivity recalculates live, ensuring that as your plan changes, your profit remains protected.
Your burning questions Answered
How do I reduce restaurant labor costs without cutting staff?
Reducing labor costs isn’t about having fewer people; it’s about having them at the right time. Industry data shows only around a third of restaurants consistently hit their labour cost targets, while 44% spend more than planned.Viability uses Productivity-Based Rostering to align your team to 95% accurate revenue forecasts. By isolating your “Service Periods” (Morning, Brunch, Lunch, Dinner), the system identifies specific hours where you are over-staffed, allowing you to trim waste while maintaining elite service during peak hours.
What is the best way to schedule staff for multiple hospitality venues?
The best way to manage at scale is to move from “Activity Data” to “Service-Period Governance.” Viability provides an Operations Heat Map that shows you exactly which venues are protecting profit and which are over-staffing in real-time. This allows Area Managers to support venues by exception, focusing only on the sites where labor is drifting from the revenue anchor.The best way to manage at scale is to move from “Activity Data” to “Service-Period Governance.” Viability provides an Operations Heat Map that shows you exactly which venues are protecting profit and which are over-staffing in real-time. This allows Area Managers to support venues by exception, focusing only on the sites where labor is drifting from the revenue anchor.
How can I tell if my restaurant roster is actually profitable?
The data is clear: full-service operators who reported a loss in 2024 had labour costs running more than 8 percentage points higher than those who turned a profit National Restaurant Association — a gap almost entirely driven by poor scheduling discipline. Viability’s Daily Roster Builder calculates your “Allowed Labour” and “Live Productivity” as you build. If your productivity matches your venue’s benchmark at the time of publishing, the roster is financially sound. This creates Roster Fairness, ensuring managers aren’t blamed for labor spikes caused by revenue shortfalls.
How can I automate hospitality rostering?
Viability’s Genuine Roster Automation uses machine learning to retrieve shift structures from your most productive historical days. It applies these proven templates to your future revenue forecasts, automatically creating an optimized roster that respects your labor benchmarks and service-period anchors.
How do I stop my managers from over-scheduling staff?
Over-scheduling is usually a symptom of data anxiety. When managers don’t trust the forecast, they add “safety-net” shifts. Viability replaces that anxiety with Calm Authority by providing a 95% accurate roadmap. With a clear “Staffing Signal” on the dashboard, managers can see exactly when they are over-staffed, giving them the confidence to send people home early and protect the venue’s EBITDA.
How do I make sure my hospitality roster is compliant with award rates?
Award compliance in hospitality rostering isn’t just a legal obligation — it’s a financial one. A Saturday dinner service at penalty rates can cost 50–75% more per labour hour than a weekday lunch, and most scheduling tools don’t account for this when calculating your labour budget. Viability’s Hospitality Rostering platform incorporates award interpretation directly into the Roster Builder, so your “Allowed Labour” figure is calculated against actual award costs — not a flat rate. The result: a roster that is both compliant and financially sound before a single shift is published.