Opening hours and operating shifts
What this is for
Two related things:
- Opening hours tell customers when you're open, and control when your online ordering site accepts orders.
- Operating shifts tell Restodesk where one trading day ends and the next begins.
The second one is the important one, and it's the setting most worth understanding before you look at a single report.
Why midnight is the wrong answer
If your kitchen closes at 2am, a calendar day splits your Friday night in two: everything before midnight lands on Friday, everything after lands on Saturday. Friday looks quiet, Saturday looks busy, and neither figure describes a night's trading.
Operating shifts fix that. An order belongs to the day its shift started on. A 1am order on a shift that opened at 6pm on Friday counts as Friday.
Every order list, the dashboard, and every report use this. It is what the word "today" means everywhere in Restodesk.
One night’s service, 18:00 to 02:00. Same orders on both rails — only the day they are counted on changes. The night is cut in two. Friday looks quiet, Saturday looks busy, and neither figure describes a night’s trading. One trading day. Every order belongs to Friday, because that is the day the shift opened on — including the 1 taken after midnight.If the day ended at midnight
With an operating shift 18:00 → 02:00
Before you start
Shifts are set per branch, so know which branch you're configuring.
Setting your shifts
- Go to Settings › Operational Shifts.
- Choose the branch.
- Select Add Shift.
- Fill in:
- Shift Name — optional, but "Dinner" beats an unnamed shift when you're reading a report.
- Start Time and End Time.
- Day of Week — leave empty to apply to every day, or pick one day to give (say) Sunday different hours.
- Sort Order — lower numbers appear first.
- Save, and repeat for each service.
A typical restaurant ends up with two: "Lunch, 11:00–15:00" and "Dinner, 18:00–02:00".
Overnight shifts
A shift whose end time is earlier than its start time — 18:00 to 02:00 — crosses midnight. Restodesk recognises this and flags it as an overnight shift when you save. Orders on it belong to the day it started.
When the day actually resets
The rule, exactly:
The business day resets at the previous day's last shift end time if that shift ran into today, and otherwise at midnight.
So with a dinner shift ending at 02:00, Saturday's trading day begins at 02:00 on Saturday morning — not at 18:00 when the shift opens, and not at midnight.
If you set no shifts at all
Restodesk falls back to plain calendar days, midnight to midnight. Nothing breaks. But if you trade past midnight, your reports will split your best nights in half, so it's worth the five minutes.
Opening hours for customers
Separately, Settings › Restaurant Open/Close controls whether you're shown as open and whether the customer ordering site is taking orders. That's a customer-facing switch — it doesn't affect how sales are counted.
Good to know
- Changing a shift doesn't rewrite history. Orders already recorded keep the business day they were given. Set your shifts up before you start trading if you can.
- Each branch has its own shifts. A branch that trades late needs its own overnight shift.
- If a report looks like it's out by a few hours, check shifts before you check anything else.