The restaurant that moves every Saturday
Catering is a restaurant with one thing taken away: the building. Everything an attendance system leans on — the network staff connect to, the circle drawn on the map, the roster of who is expected — is pinned to an address. A caterer's address changes on Saturday.
That single difference is what makes the usual advice ("put a QR code by the till") not quite work. Here is how the pieces actually fit when the dining room moves.
One code per venue, not one per company
A single company-wide QR code sounds simpler until you use it. It cannot tell the wedding at the riverside from the conference across town, so a geofence drawn around one is wrong for the other — and you end up switching it off, which means it protects nothing.
So a venue gets its own code. Each one carries its own GPS perimeter, its own network rules and its own list of who is allowed to use it, and can have its own supervisor. Draw the fence around Saturday's marquee; Sunday's code is a different fence entirely.
The list of assigned staff is the part people underestimate. Somebody rostered to the wedding cannot punch in at the conference, because that code does not know them. On a weekend with two jobs running at once, that is the difference between a headcount and a guess.
Half your crew has never worked for you before
Casual staff are the norm in catering, and they arrive without any of the things a check-in usually assumes: no account, sometimes no phone in reach, and no time on a Saturday afternoon to be talked through an app.
There are three doors, and they matter in this order. Most people scan the venue's QR code from their own phone. A tap on an NFC sticker — on the van door, on the crate by the service entrance — is the same punch with the phone unlocked and nothing else. And when someone's phone is genuinely in a locker, a named supervisor can clock them in from theirs, with the location check moved onto the supervisor so it still has to happen on site.
A card tapped at a reader covers the people with no phone and no account at all. That side of it ships on Espresso — it is the reader by the door that is still being worked through, so talk to us before you plan a season around it.
If the rota is different every week, don't fight it
Late is a comparison, and the thing it compares against is a shift. Restaurants have stable ones. A caterer often does not — this weekend is a 14:00 call for a wedding, next weekend is a 06:00 load-out for a corporate breakfast.
You can set a shift per day of the week when your work does have a pattern, and the days you leave blank are treated as off — nobody is marked absent on a day they were never expected.
And when there is no pattern at all, leave the shift off. Someone with no shift is never late and never absent; the times still record, the hours still export. An attendance system that invents a standard to judge people against is worse than one that just writes down what happened.
The job that ends at two in the morning
Service finishes, the vans get loaded, and the last person clocks out at 02:10 on Sunday. The obvious way to store that is wrong: it splits one night's work across two dates and hands payroll a shift that appears to have negative hours.
So it stays one record, filed under the day the work started, and the check-out carries a small +1 to say it landed the next morning. Saturday's job reads as Saturday's job, however late it ran.
What the person doing payroll actually gets
A month of hours as a spreadsheet or a PDF, per person, with late and left-early marked. Nothing invisible: if a supervisor corrected a time, the row shows who changed it, when, and the reason they typed, alongside the original punch.
That audit trail is not bureaucracy — it is what ends the argument. Catering hours get disputed more than restaurant hours, because the crew is casual, the night ran long, and nobody has a fixed rota to point at. A record that shows its own corrections settles it in about ten seconds.
It's free for up to ten active staff. The location and network checks, NFC, per-day shifts and leave live on Espresso; a separate code per venue is the Double Espresso tier, which is the one that matters if you run more than one job at a time.