For restaurant owners
Staff attendance app for restaurants
Front of house, kitchen, and dish — everyone clocks in the same simple way, and every punch is verified against the device and your restaurant's network. No hardware to mount, no biometrics to store.
Big, mixed teams
Servers, line cooks, hosts, all on different shifts. Different hours each day, plus came-in-late and slipped-out-early flags, keep the whole roster honest.
Buddy punching on busy nights
Friday rush is when covering for a late colleague happens. Device binding makes a punch only count for the person it belongs to.
Leave and time-off chaos
Your staff ask for the days they want, you approve in a tap, and an approved day stops attendance expecting them.
Verified clock-ins, made for restaurants
Every clock-in is tied to one phone and your shop's network — the same three checks behind stopping buddy punching. No biometrics, no face scans. Add shifts, leave and notifications when you need them.
Front of house and the kitchen keep different hours
A server's Friday and a prep cook's Friday are not the same day. Every employee is assigned a shift with its own start, end and grace window, so a 17:00 start with ten minutes of grace flags at 17:11 and not a moment before. On Espresso a shift carries different hours for each day of the week, and a day you leave blank is an off day for that shift rather than a fall-back to the default times, so a prep cook rostered Tuesday to Saturday is never counted absent on a Monday. A dinner service that finishes after midnight is handled as well: a shift whose end time is earlier than its start counts as one night, filed under the day it opened.
Time off, and the days you shut
Rotas come apart around leave. On Espresso your staff submit a request from their phone, for a full day or for part of one, and you approve or reject it with a note. An approved full day stops attendance expecting that person: no absent count, no late flag, nobody chasing. Closed days do the same for the whole restaurant and need no upgrade — mark a public holiday, a fumigation, a fortnight in low season, and attendance stops asking on those dates. Both work backwards as well as forwards, so marking a closed day after the event repairs the week rather than leaving a run of false absences behind it.
Fixing the record when service overran
Someone will forget to clock out. When they do, an owner or a manager holding the attendance permission opens the row, types the real time and gives a reason, and the correction is stamped with their name and the moment they made it. Whatever the record held before anyone touched it is kept and shown alongside, so a corrected timesheet is still evidence rather than an assertion. A day with no scan at all can be entered from scratch on the same terms, and a row that should never have existed is voided rather than erased, keeping its original punches and the reason it went. There is no silent edit anywhere in the system.
Managers who run the floor without seeing the billing
Promote a linked employee to manager and you hand over only the parts of the job you choose. The five permissions sit apart from one another — employees, shifts, closures, leave and attendance — so a head chef can approve leave and correct a timesheet without being able to restructure shifts, and nothing but the owner's account reaches Shop settings, billing or the QR code itself. Espresso includes two managers and Double Espresso lifts the ceiling. A manager has to be a linked user with their own login, which is rather the point: every approval and every correction arrives with a name attached.
What DailyBrew leaves to other tools
It is not payroll. No pay rates, no payslips, no tax or social-security filing, no bank export — DailyBrew produces verified hours and hands them on. On Espresso you can export a date range as XLSX, PDF or CSV, or pull the same data through the API, and give it to whoever does the wages. It is not a rota builder either: an employee holds one shift, so a roster that reshuffles person by person each week stays wherever you keep it today. Nor does it do split shifts. One start and one end per day is the rule, and an employee holds one shift, so a genuine 11:00 to 15:00 plus 18:00 to 23:00 pattern cannot be written down as two blocks. Record 11:00 to 23:00 and accept that the unpaid break sits inside it, or keep the split outside DailyBrew.
Frequently asked
Is it really free?+
Yes — free forever for up to 10 active staff, and we don't ask for a card. Paid plans add one phone per person (device verification), shop WiFi only (IP restriction), leave and more.
Do staff need to install an app?+
On the free plan, yes: staff scan the QR code in the free DailyBrew app. On Espresso, no: they point their phone camera at the code and check in from the page that opens, with nothing to download, and an NFC tag works the same way because it holds the same web link. The app keeps them signed in and remembers the phone, which is why we still suggest it.
How does it stop buddy punching?+
Each clock-in is tied to a verified device and your shop's network. A punch from somebody else's phone, or from off your network, won't count — and nothing biometric is collected.
What if someone forgets their phone?+
A manager clocks them in from Today. It's saved with the manager's name, the time and the reason, so the day still adds up and nothing changes quietly.
Can front of house and the kitchen be on different schedules?+
Yes. Create the shifts your restaurant actually runs — an early prep, a lunch, a dinner service — and assign each employee to one of them. Late and left-early flags are measured against that person's own shift and its grace minutes, in your restaurant's timezone. Different hours each day — a shift that runs different hours on a Tuesday than on a Saturday — is an Espresso feature.
Can I leave one person out of the absent count?+
Yes. An employee can be set to not tracked, which keeps their check-ins working and their times recorded but takes them out of the absent figure and stops late and left-early flags firing. It is meant for the office administrator or the flexible-hours consultant who should not read as missing because they did not come in on a Tuesday.
Does DailyBrew work out wages or overtime?+
No. It records when people arrived and left, flags late arrivals and early departures against their shift, and stops there. There is no pay rate, no overtime calculation and no payslip. Export the hours on Espresso as XLSX, PDF or CSV, or read them through the API, and let your payroll do the arithmetic.
Can a manager approve leave without being able to change shifts?+
Yes. Manager permissions are granted one at a time — employees, shifts, closures, leave, attendance — so a duty manager can get leave approval and attendance corrections and nothing else. Shop settings, billing, sub-QR codes and promoting managers stay with the owner in every case.
What happens when a member of staff leaves?+
Deactivate them rather than deleting them. Their attendance history stays intact and the record keeps their last day worked, so past months still read the way they happened. An inactive employee no longer counts towards your plan's seat limit, so a leaver frees a place for the next hire.
Honest hours for restaurants
Free for up to 10 active staff. No hardware, no biometrics, no contract.
Create your free account