Carlos has been running the Golden Fork restaurant for eight years. Every Thursday, after the kitchen closes, he sits down with a coffee and opens the same spreadsheet he always uses to sort out the week. What looks like half an hour turns into four: Martha can't do Tuesdays, Jake asked for the weekend off, August is two pairs of hands short. By two in the morning he's still moving cells around.

The Thursday Carlos came down with flu, the restaurant discovered the real problem. Nobody else knew how to build that rota. The sous chef tried, but the spreadsheet was a colour-coded puzzle only Carlos understood, and it ended with two waitstaff doubling up on the busiest Saturday of the month. That knowledge wasn't written down anywhere — it lived in one person's head.

With Emplyx, the rota stops being Carlos's secret. Shifts get dragged across the week, built from a template that already worked, and the previous week duplicated with a click. Everyone's rules — Martha's Tuesdays, rest days, preferences — are saved inside the system. Carlos goes from four hours to ten minutes, and the next time he's ill, anyone on the team can put the week together without it showing.

The last-minute sick call that breaks the service

Marina called the Harbour Bar at eleven on a Friday morning in August, in the voice of someone who really didn't want to make that call. Her two-year-old daughter had woken up with a fever and her childminder couldn't take her. There was no way she was making the lunch shift. The manager hung up, looked at the clock, and knew he had three hours to sort out a full dining room.

What followed was the usual round: eight messages to the WhatsApp group and one-by-one phone calls. Two people replied at half past one, by which point the restaurant was already filling up. What turns a sick day into a crisis isn't the absence — it's not knowing instantly who's free, who's had enough rest and who'd actually want those hours.

With Emplyx, that gap gets posted to a shift pool and the notification goes only to people who can genuinely take it: available, with their legal rest period covered and the right profile. The first person to accept from their phone walks in. Marina still has to look after her daughter, but by quarter past eleven the shift is covered and the manager is back on the floor instead of on the phone all morning.

Paying people to stand around in the quiet hours

Lucy opened the Sun & Grill with her brother and, like almost everyone, built the rota by copying the week before. Four people on the floor every weekday afternoon, because that's how it had always been done. Until a slow month made her sit down and cross the sales data by time slot against the shifts being paid.

The numbers were uncomfortable: between four and seven in the evening barely two tables came in, and she was paying three full shifts to cover them. Saturday evenings, on the other hand, the kitchen was drowning at peak time with the same headcount. Labour costs in hospitality run around 30–35% of revenue; every hour in the wrong place is margin walking out the door, and every gap at peak time is a table that leaves without ordering.

With Emplyx, Lucy plans by time slot based on forecast demand for each period. She sees how many people she needs hour by hour and compares the rota cost against expected sales before she publishes it. She didn't let anyone go — she moved the hours to where the customers were. No empty seat costing money, no table waiting, and a margin that was already looking better the following month.

The most-inspected sector in the country

An inspector walked into the Old Quarter Tavern on a Saturday at half past nine in the evening, with the dining room full. He asked for the time records from the previous month. The owner went to get the notebook kept next to the till and, leafing through it in front of the inspector, realised two pages were missing and the hours didn't match the contracts.

The penalty notice was written up on the spot, with no chance to correct anything. And it wasn't bad luck: time recording has been mandatory since RDL 8/2019 (Spain's working time decree), and hospitality accounts for around 20% of all Labour Inspectorate violations, with routine surprise visits at weekends. Under the 2026 rules, fines are applied per affected employee.

With Emplyx, clock-ins are digital — from a phone, a tablet or a QR code at the entrance — and leave a timestamped record that can't be altered after the fact. Records are kept for the four years the law requires and can be exported in seconds. The next time an inspector walks in on a Saturday night, showing the records takes thirty seconds.

Overtime nobody writes down and the payslip doesn't reflect

At the Two Lanterns bar, the waitstaff stayed fifteen or twenty minutes after closing to count the till and tidy up. It was normal, everyone did it, nobody recorded it. Until Amy, who had left months earlier, claimed those hours: adding up the scraps from each evening came to more than sixty unpaid hours.

The business had nothing to dispute it with, because none of it had ever been logged. The 'just stay a little longer' request repeats every service and almost never gets written down. In 2023, roughly 450,000 hospitality workers had unpaid overtime, and under the 2026 rules the fines for failing to record it properly are applied per affected employee.

With Emplyx, the actual hours clocked are automatically compared against what each contract says, so those fifteen minutes after closing stop being invisible. The system flags when someone is accumulating extra hours and keeps an auditable record that feeds directly into payroll. Every hour worked gets counted and paid — no resentment in the team and no liability sitting in wait for the next inspection.

The turnover that forces you to train people from scratch again and again

The owner of The Harbour Kitchen published the rota Sunday evening for the week starting Monday. Over six months, five kitchen assistants came and went — none lasted more than a season. He blamed the pay, but the last one to leave, David, was direct about it: he couldn't make plans with anyone without knowing his shifts until Sunday.

Turnover in hospitality runs above 60% annually, and filling each vacancy costs between a thousand and fifteen hundred euros in recruitment and training. The most common reason isn't pay — it's unpredictable hours and chaotic planning.

With Emplyx, the rota is published in advance, it's consistent, it respects preferences and distributes the good and bad shifts fairly. The team gains something they value more than it might seem: knowing when they work and being able to plan their lives. People don't leave because of money — they leave because of the chaos, and a reliable schedule is the cheapest way David could have been kept on.

Breaching the rest period between shifts without realising it

At the Old Gate Inn, Robert closed on Fridays at half past one in the morning and came back for the midday shift on Saturdays. He'd been doing this for months with no alarm going off, until he mentioned it in passing at a team meeting. Between closing and the next start there wasn't even twelve hours: the rota was breaking the law without anyone having intended it.

The rules require twelve hours of rest between shifts, which collective agreements can reduce to ten during peak season. With split shifts this gets breached often and in good faith, and the mistake isn't visible when you're building the rota — it surfaces in a payslip, a claim or an inspection, always when there's no way to fix it.

With Emplyx, the scheduler itself flags or blocks any shift that would break the minimum rest period, weekly rest or maximum hours. The problem gets cut before it exists. That's the difference between a rota that protects Robert and the business while it's being planned, and one where the mistake only shows up when the penalty letter arrives.

Not knowing what the team is costing until the payslip arrives

Steve, manager of a mid-size neighbourhood restaurant, closed the rota every week without any idea what it was going to cost. The number appeared at the end of the month, in payroll, when nothing could be changed anymore. Some months the staffing cost ran above 35% of revenue and he didn't even know which shifts had caused it to slip.

Planning blind against your biggest variable cost means gambling your margin every single week. Without seeing the cost while the rota is being built, Steve made decisions without information and the surprises always came late, when they were already paid.

With Emplyx, the rota shows its estimated cost in real time as it's built, with the percentage against forecast sales and an alert when the budget is being exceeded. Steve makes decisions with the numbers in front of him, when he can still change a shift. The margin stops being an end-of-month surprise and becomes something he controls week by week.

Shift changes that don't reach the people they need to reach

The Costa Blanca Hotel moved Nuria from the evening shift to the morning and let her know via the WhatsApp group. That day the group was full of photos from a colleague's birthday, and the message about the change got buried under twenty images. Nuria showed up at her usual time, in the evening, and the front desk went unstaffed for the first hour of the morning.

While the rota lives on a whiteboard or in a WhatsApp group, this is going to keep happening. The whiteboard goes out of date, messages get lost among a hundred others and 'I wasn't told' is impossible to disprove.

With Emplyx, every employee has the rota on their phone, updated in real time. Any change arrives immediately with a notification, and there's a record of who has read it. The 'nobody told me' excuse disappears: Nuria would have seen the change the moment it was made, and the front desk would never have been left empty.

The hospitality agreement is a minefield

The Golden Fork chain opened a second site in another region, excited about the growth. What they didn't see coming was that the new location fell under a different regional collective agreement. For months they applied the same rules out of habit, until their advisors, in a routine review, found holidays that had been paid wrong and working time limits that didn't apply.

The hospitality collective agreement has its own annual maximum hours, irregular distribution rules, public holidays, night work and category classifications. There are a lot of rules, they change frequently and applying them by hand on every rota is slow and easy to get wrong. The result is constant back-and-forth with advisors and compliance gaps from missing a single detail.

With Emplyx, those rules — working time limits, public holidays, night work, rest periods — are built into the engine that generates the rota. The manager plans and the rules apply underneath, including when a new site brings its own agreement. The collective agreement stops being a PDF nobody rereads and becomes part of the rota itself.

Everything living in a different place

When Patricia took over managing a group of three bars, she found the information scattered across four worlds that didn't talk to each other: shifts in a spreadsheet, clock-ins on paper sheets, holiday agreements by WhatsApp and each employee's availability in the memory of the previous manager, who was no longer there.

With information that fragmented, the data never adds up, work gets duplicated and nothing is ever current. Patricia was making decisions looking at the spreadsheet without knowing that the paper records told a completely different story.

With Emplyx, rotas, clock-ins, absences, holidays and availability all live on one platform, in real time. You look in one place and what you see is what's real. Double-entry and mismatches are gone, and the manager stops being the human glue holding four tools together that were never designed to work with each other.

The split shift and the impossible work-life balance

The Sun & Grill took two months to fill a front-of-house vacancy. Three candidates turned it down the moment they heard the hours: split shift, noon to four and eight until midnight. One of them said it plainly: nine hours of work but thirteen hours tied to the restaurant, with no real time for anything else.

This isn't an isolated case. 60% of candidates turn down hospitality offers because of the split shift, ranking it above salary. That leaves positions open for weeks and people who stick it out for a season and then leave, worn out by having no life between services.

The split shift isn't going anywhere, but with Emplyx you can see how the splits are distributed across the whole team, share them fairly, rotate them and publish them in advance. When the split is predictable and nobody always draws the short straw, it stops being the reason people decline the job or quit after three months.

Peak season is won in May, not in August

Last summer caught a beachside bar flat-footed. In August, with the place packed, they discovered two waitstaff had overlapping holidays, nobody had accounted for a foreseeable absence and they were short-staffed precisely in their highest-revenue weeks. They had to bring in expensive last-minute temps who didn't have time to learn the place.

Arriving at peak season improvising means paying more and delivering worse service exactly when you're billing the most. That extra cost and the strain on the team could have been avoided months earlier.

With Emplyx, holiday management flags overlaps the moment they're approved, and the season gets planned well in advance on data rather than under pressure. Fast onboarding of seasonal staff handles the rest when reinforcement is genuinely needed. Summer arrives sorted, because peak season is won in May, when the decisions actually get made.

Managing multiple sites in the dark

The Golden Fork chain had a city-centre location swamped at weekends and a neighbourhood site with staff twiddling their thumbs. Each manager planned their own site like an island, with no visibility of what was happening at the other, so across the whole season nobody moved a single person from one place to another.

Without cross-visibility, one site burns its team out while the other pays people with nothing to do. Costs can't be compared, what works well at one site never reaches the other, and reporting to head office gets done by hand, late and inaccurately.

With Emplyx, head office sees all sites on one screen, with employees who can work across multiple locations and a side-by-side labour cost comparison. Staffing gets balanced where it's actually needed, and managing five sites stops being five separate problems and becomes one operation under control.

Guaranteed legal compliance

Everything you need to stay up to date with regulations

✓Time records with geolocation
✓Full audit trail of shifts and changes
✓Exportable reports for labour inspections
✓Compliance with hospitality sector regulations

What our customers say

“Los turnos partidos de sala y cocina ya no son un rompecabezas. Emplyx avisa del descanso mínimo y planificamos la semana en una tarde.”

Laura Méndez

Responsable de sala · Grupo Restaurador del Mediterráneo

“Implantamos Emplyx en tres hoteles en menos de un mes. La Inspección ya nos pidió un exportable y lo generamos en dos minutos.”

Javier Soto

Director de RRHH · Cadena hotelera costa este

“El kiosco del office elimina los olvidos de fichaje del personal de cocina. Antes perdíamos dos horas cada cierre ajustando cuadros.”

Marta Ruiz

Gerente · Restaurante Casa Antoni

Frequently asked questions

¿Cómo gestiona Emplyx los turnos partidos de hostelería?+

Los turnos partidos se modelan como dos segmentos en el mismo día con descanso intermedio. El sistema calcula horas trabajadas, pausas y complementos automáticamente, respetando el convenio de hostelería y los descansos mínimos entre jornadas.

¿Puedo fichar desde la barra sin que el empleado tenga su móvil?+

Sí. Puedes habilitar un kiosco con tablet compartida en la barra o en el office, con fichaje por PIN, QR personal o NFC. Sin biometría de alto riesgo y cumpliendo la Guía de la AEPD sobre control de presencia.

¿Emplyx sirve para cadenas con varios restaurantes o hoteles?+

Sí. Gestiona registro horario multicentro con consolidación de informes, reglas por centro y permisos granulares para gerentes locales y dirección. La Inspección de Trabajo ve un registro digital único por empresa.

¿Cómo controlo las horas extra reales en días de alta ocupación?+

Emplyx compara fichaje real con cuadrante planificado y genera alertas de horas extra en tiempo real. Puedes aprobar su compensación (pago o descanso) y dejar evidencia completa ante una auditoría o inspección.

¿Cumple Emplyx con el registro horario obligatorio y la futura reforma digital?+

Sí. Los registros son digitales, inmutables, con audit trail completo y exportables en formatos estándar. Cumplen el RDL 8/2019 y los ocho requisitos técnicos que el borrador del Real Decreto de registro horario digital 2026 plantea.

¿Se adapta a convenios de hostelería autonómicos?+

Sí. Puedes configurar complementos de nocturnidad, plus por festivos, partidos, manutención y descansos específicos del convenio provincial o estatal de hostelería. Las bolsas de horas y la jornada anual también están contempladas.

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