ScanRoster is AI-native workforce management built for hospitality and nothing else. Staff check in by scanning a rotating QR code inside your venue's geofence, so the hours that reach payroll are hours a person was genuinely in your building. When a shift goes uncovered, ScanRoster ranks and messages the qualified staff who can take it, instead of you working down a WhatsApp group at 6am.
Free trial · Published pricing · No contact-sales wall
Live check-in
01 / The problem
None of this shows up as a line item. It shows up as a payroll number that's slightly too high every month, a Saturday service run two people short, and a general manager doing admin instead of standing on the floor.
65–75%annual turnover
Accommodation and food services has the highest quit rate of any sector, and every leaver takes their trained hours with them. Rostering built around a stable team doesn't survive contact with a team that turns over completely inside twelve months.
US Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS: the sector has averaged roughly 75% annual turnover since 2001 and 65.5% in 2025, a quit rate close to double the private-sector average.1.5–5%of gross payroll
Time theft is rarely dramatic. It's a colleague punching a friend in ten minutes early, a shift that ends at 23:00 on the sheet and 22:30 in reality. On a hospitality payroll it compounds quietly, week after week, across every site you run.
American Payroll Association estimate for time theft as a share of gross payroll; roughly three in four employers report losses specifically from buddy punching.8–10 hrsper manager, per week
Building the rota, rebuilding it after two call-offs, chasing cover, then retyping the hours into payroll. That is most of a working day each week spent on a spreadsheet instead of on service, training and guests.
Industry survey of 1,200 frontline restaurant managers on scheduling and administrative load; under half of a manager's time reaches guests or revenue.Published figures vary by market and by how each study defines turnover and time theft. We quote ranges rather than a single number, and ScanRoster reports your own figures back to you from week one, so you can argue with our benchmarks using your data.
02 / How it works
Three steps, and your manager is only involved in the one that needs judgement. Everything here happens on the phones your staff already carry: no terminals, no biometric hardware, no fingerprint reader bolted to the back-of-house wall.
Step 01
You draw a geofence around each site once. Staff open the app, scan the QR code posted by the time clock, and the check-in only records if their registered phone is inside that boundary. The code rotates every few seconds, so a screenshot sent to a friend is useless.
Step 02
If nobody scans in by the cut-off you set, ScanRoster flags the shift and ranks every off-shift person who could take it: right skills and certifications, far enough from overtime, rested long enough to be legal, close enough to arrive. It messages the shortlist in order. The first to accept is on the roster, and you get told it's handled.
Step 03
Verified minutes become timesheets on their own. Overtime, break entitlements and premium hours are applied under the rules of the country the site is in, cover shifts are attributed to whoever actually worked them, and the run exports in your currency, including a WPS-ready file for the UAE.
03 / Features
Every feature here exists because of something that goes wrong at 6am or on payday. Nothing is in the product because a competitor's brochure had it.
A rotating code, a boundary you draw yourself, and a phone bound to one employee. A scan from the car park, from home, or from a colleague's handset is rejected and logged with the distance from your pin, so the exception is evidence, not an argument. Staff who forget their phone check in on a manager-approved override that leaves the same audit trail.
No terminals · No biometrics · No hardware budgetThe model ranks candidates on the things that decide whether a shift is really covered: station-level skill, certifications still in date, hours already worked this week, legal rest since the last shift, travel time, and who has actually said yes before. You approve a shortlist or let it run on its own, and it gets better at your venue as it watches who turns up.
Ranked shortlist · Auto-offer · First accept winsTag people by station, language, licence and seniority, then set what each shift needs. The roster refuses to publish a Friday service with no one barista-trained on the floor, and forecasts cover from your own trading history rather than a generic template.
Stations · Certifications · LanguagesRun Dubai and London sites in one account without pretending they're the same business. Each location keeps its own currency, pay calendar, overtime rules and public holidays, and exports in the format your accountant or payroll bureau already accepts.
AED · GBP · EUR · USDBreaches are caught while the roster is still a draft: a missing 20-minute break, a close-then-open turnaround that breaks rest rules, a visa or right-to-work document about to expire, a young worker rostered past their limit. You get the warning before you publish, not after an inspection.
Pre-publish warnings · Full audit trail04 / Why ScanRoster
That gap is the whole reason this product exists. If you run somewhere between two and forty venues, the market has been asking you to choose between an enterprise implementation project and a prettier spreadsheet.
| Compared on | Enterprise AI platforms | Basic scheduling apps | ScanRoster |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real AI, not filters | YesGenuine forecasting and labour optimisation, designed and validated on chains with a thousand-plus employees. | NoDrag-and-drop rotas, templates and reminders. The intelligence in the loop is you. | YesAI pointed at the two events that actually cost you money: a check-in that shouldn't count, and a shift with nobody in it. |
| What it costs to start | EnterpriseAnnual commitment, implementation fee, and a procurement cycle before anyone touches the product. | LowCheap per head, which is why the roadmap goes to more views, not to models. | Per locationPublished pricing, month to month. You can sign up with a card and cancel without a phone call. |
| Time to your first covered shift | Weeks to monthsScoping, integration workshops, a rollout plan and a change-management deck. | Same dayFast to start, but you are still building every rota and chasing every call-off by hand. | Same dayImport your staff list, draw the geofence, print the QR code. The first shift is live that afternoon. |
| Who it was built for | Large multi-verticalHospitality is one industry among several; a lot of the logic arrives from retail and healthcare. | Any shift businessGeneric shift patterns. Split shifts, service peaks and agency cover are edge cases. | Hospitality onlySplit shifts, station-level skills, seasonal peaks and the 6am call-off are the normal case here, not an exception to configure. |
| Attendance you can defend | Biometric terminalsTrustworthy, but that's hardware to buy, mount, maintain and replace in every venue. | Honour systemA tap in an app, from any location, on anyone's phone. Buddy punching survives intact. | Fraud-proof by designRotating code, geofence and device binding together, with a logged, disputable record of every rejection. |
| How you find out the price | Contact salesA form, a discovery call, then a quote shaped by how big you look. | On the websiteUsually published, per user, per month. | On the websiteEvery tier and every limit in public. Same price whether you run two venues or twenty. |
05 / Local by default
Payroll and labour rules are not a settings screen you fill in yourself. Each site carries the rules of the country it's in, and one account can hold both: different currencies, different pay calendars, different definitions of a legal shift.
Get started
Set up a site, draw its geofence and print the QR code in an afternoon. Run it on a single restaurant or one hotel department first, then decide whether the rest of the estate follows.
06 / Questions
Mostly about fraud, phones and payroll. If yours isn't here, it's a short email away; we answer these ourselves.
Three things have to agree at once. The code on the wall rotates every few seconds, so a photo of it sent to a friend has already expired. The phone doing the scanning has to be inside the geofence you drew around the venue. And that phone is bound to one employee account, so a colleague can't scan twice on their own handset.
A scan that fails any of the three is rejected and recorded with the distance from your pin and the device that tried it. That record is what turns an awkward conversation into a documented one.
A manager can check that person in manually from their own device. It takes a reason code and appears on the shift as a manager override rather than a verified scan, so the exception is visible in reporting instead of hidden inside the hours. Venues that see a lot of overrides usually put one shared, wall-mounted device on the pass and let staff scan there.
The ranking is instant: it runs the moment a shift is flagged as uncovered, or the moment you mark a call-off yourself. What takes time is a human saying yes. Offers go out to the shortlist in order with a short window on each, so the shift moves down the list on its own instead of waiting on someone who has their phone face down.
You can set it to ask you before offering anything, or let it run unattended overnight and tell you what it fixed.
No. It calculates and verifies the hours, premiums and overtime that feed your pay run, then exports them: as a WPS-ready file for the UAE, as CSV, or through the API for the provider or bureau you already use. Keep your accountant. Stop retyping timesheets.
Yes, and they stay properly separate. Each location holds its own currency, pay calendar, public holidays, overtime rules and compliance checks, while staff, skills and reporting are shared across the group. A manager sees their sites; you see the estate.
Pricing is per location and published on this site: every tier and every limit, with no "contact sales" wall in front of it. You can start a free trial, see the product, and cancel from the dashboard without booking a call with anybody.
An afternoon for a single site. Import or paste in your staff list, tag people by station and skill, draw the geofence on a map, print the QR code for the time clock, and publish the first roster. Bringing over historical hours for forecasting takes longer, but nothing waits on it.
They install one lightweight app that shows their roster, their hours, their breaks and any cover offered to them, in their own language. That app is also how they scan in, so it replaces the group chat and the printed rota rather than adding to them.
