HR software for hospitality, built for the staff holiday you cannot work out

The Tuesday problem

Your chef hands in their notice on a Tuesday. They have been with you fourteen months, mostly on the rota but with a stretch of quiet weeks in January and a fortnight covering someone else's shifts in August. Their last day is a week on Friday.

Payroll needs a final figure. Somebody has to say how much untaken holiday they are owed, and that figure goes on a payslip that a departing employee will read carefully.

So you open the rota spreadsheet. The hours are there, in a fashion - across three tabs, two of which were maintained by a supervisor who left in March. The holiday tab records days off, but your chef does not work fixed days, so a day off in February is not the same amount of holiday as a day off in August.

You end up doing what most operators do: you estimate, round up to be safe, and hope nobody checks. That works until somebody does check, and by then it is a grievance rather than a sum.

The problem is not that you are bad at spreadsheets. It is that hospitality holiday is genuinely harder than it looks, and the method the law expects is not one a rota tab can do by hand.

Why hospitality holiday is genuinely harder

Almost all UK workers get 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year. For someone on fixed days that is easy: five days a week means 28 days, and you book them off a calendar.

Hospitality staff are frequently not that person. They are irregular-hours or part-year workers, and since leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024 their holiday accrues differently: at 12.07% of the hours they actually work in each pay period.

That percentage is not arbitrary. It is 5.6 weeks of leave divided by the 46.4 working weeks left in the year once you take that leave out.

The important part is in each pay period. It is not a figure you work out once a year. It accrues as the hours are worked, which means a quiet January genuinely produces less holiday than a busy August, and the running total only stays right if something adds it up every time.

• A kitchen porter works 22 hours in the first pay period. 22 divided by 100, multiplied by 12.07, is 2.65 hours of holiday accrued.
• The next period they work 31 hours. 31 divided by 100, multiplied by 12.07, is 3.74 hours.
• The period after that is quiet and they work 14 hours. That is 1.69 hours.
• Across 67 hours worked they have accrued 8.08 hours of paid holiday. GOV.UK's method rounds to the nearest hour, rounding up at 30 minutes or more.
• Do that for eleven staff across twelve pay periods and you are doing 132 small calculations a year, by hand, in a spreadsheet, during service.

Sign in without a clocking machine

The 12.07% method only works if the hours are right, which means you need a record of who actually worked, not who was on the rota. In hospitality those are different numbers most weeks.

Sign-In Sally is HR Henry's attendance side. Staff tap to sign in on a tablet at the pass or behind the bar, with a photo and a timestamp. Breaks and lunches are logged with one tap and deducted from worked hours automatically, so the total is what they were actually paid for rather than the span from arrival to departure.

Staff who never pass a fixed point - a function supervisor, someone covering another site - clock in from their phone instead.

The part that matters for the holiday problem: every clock-in feeds straight into HR Henry timesheets, ready for approval. The hours that drive the accrual are the hours somebody signed in for, not a number retyped from a rota.

It also produces a fire register on any device, showing exactly who is on site including visitors and contractors. If you have ever had an alarm go off mid-service and counted heads in the car park from memory, that is the feature you did not know you wanted.

Right to work checks, at hospitality speed

High turnover means constant checks. A civil penalty for employing someone without a valid check is not a small number, and the defence is entirely documentary.

Two things the rules require, which a folder of photocopies rarely delivers. The copy must be one that cannot be changed, and it must be kept for the whole of the person's employment and for two years after they leave. And you must record the date the check was made - a document copy with no date attached is not the check the rules describe.

In HR Henry the check is stored against the person as a typed Right to Work document rather than in a shared drive, with an expiry date so a time-limited permission surfaces before it lapses rather than after.

The practical benefit in a business hiring six people a season is that the record leaves with nobody. When a manager moves on, the checks stay attached to the employees rather than to whoever happened to do the filing.

What changes in week one

Nothing glamorous, which is rather the point.

Staff request holiday themselves through the employee portal, on their phone or on a screen in the office, instead of asking you during service and hoping you remember. You or a manager approve or decline it, and the person gets told.

The balance updates itself. Because entitlement can be held in hours rather than days, a variable-hours worker has a running figure that means something, rather than a number of days that assumes every day is the same length.

Sickness gets logged when it happens, not reconstructed in April. Documents sit against the person. And when somebody hands in their notice on a Tuesday, the final holiday figure is a number you look up rather than an afternoon you lose.

On a spreadsheet versus in HR Henry

Honestly: a spreadsheet is fine for some of this. It is worth being clear about which parts.

Check your own numbers first

Before you look at software, work out what you are actually owed on. Our free holiday entitlement calculator does the 12.07% method for irregular-hours staff and shows its working, with no sign-up and no email gate.

If the figure it gives you matches your spreadsheet, your spreadsheet is doing its job. If it does not, you have found the thing this page is about.

Frequently asked questions

How do I work out holiday for staff on variable hours?

For leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024, irregular-hours and part-year workers accrue holiday at 12.07% of the hours they actually work in each pay period. Divide the hours worked by 100 and multiply by 12.07, then round to the nearest hour, rounding up at 30 minutes or more.

Do casual and zero-hours staff get holiday at all?

Yes. Almost all UK workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks' paid holiday. For casual and zero-hours staff it accrues with the hours they work rather than being set as a fixed number of days at the start of the year.

Do I need a clocking machine to track hours?

No. Sign-In Sally works on a tablet at the pass or behind the bar, and staff who never pass a fixed point can clock in from their phone. Breaks are logged with one tap and deducted from worked hours automatically.

How long do I have to keep right to work checks?

For the whole of the person's employment and for two years after they leave. The copy must be one that cannot be changed, and you must record the date the check was made.

Can staff book holiday themselves?

Yes. Staff submit holiday requests through the employee portal, on a phone or on a screen in the office. A manager approves or declines, and the balance updates without anyone retyping it.

Is this worth it for a team of twelve?

The question is how many of your team are on variable hours. If most of your staff work the same days every week, a spreadsheet copes. If the rota changes weekly and holiday accrues on hours worked, the arithmetic is where a system pays for itself.