People & HR

How to plan headcount as Restaurant and Hospitality Founders

People & HRFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're staffing a 40-seat dining room and a bar with a gut feel and a group text. Your 7shifts schedule gets built Sunday night based on last week's sales and a prayer about the weather. When a big OpenTable block drops Friday afternoon you're scrambling to call in a second server. Payroll runs through Gusto or ADP but you never see labor-as-a-percent-of-covers until your bookkeeper sends a spreadsheet three weeks after the period closes. You don't know if you're overstaffed on Tuesday lunch or understaffed on Friday close until you're living it. Nobody warned you that headcount planning for a 12-person hourly team is harder than it sounds.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live labor dashboard that shows this week's scheduled hours, projected labor cost as a percent of expected revenue, and a variance flag when you're drifting past your target — updated before you open the door.

A scenario model that lets you test 'what if I add a prep cook at 32 hours' or 'what if covers drop 15% in January' before you commit to a hire or a cut.

A weekly headcount planning automation that pulls your revenue pace from Stripe or Square, your payroll actuals from ADP or Paylocity, and surfaces a one-screen view of whether your staffing matches your volume.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Scenario Analysis Runway Analysis Budgeting

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your ADP or Paylocity payroll data on a schedule — employee records, pay statements, and hours — so headcount costs are always current. Connect Square from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries your sales data live when your labor dashboard runs. Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule if you take online orders or gift cards. Starch syncs your Plaid bank feed on a schedule so cash projections in Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis reflect your actual account balance, not an estimate.

Prompts to copy

Build me a headcount planning view that shows scheduled labor hours by role this week, projected labor cost, and labor as a percent of projected sales — pull revenue from Square and payroll from ADP.

Create a scenario that models what happens to my cash runway and monthly labor cost if I hire a full-time sous chef at $58,000 versus keeping my current two part-time prep cooks.

Set a quarterly labor budget of $42,000 and show me week-by-week whether I'm pacing over or under, broken out by front-of-house and back-of-house.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect ADP or Paylocity as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch pulls employee records, pay rates, and payroll run history automatically — you don't export anything manually.

2 Connect Square from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query your daily and weekly sales totals live when your dashboard needs them. If you're on Toast, Starch automates it through your browser — no Toast API required.

3 Connect your Plaid bank feed so Starch syncs transaction data on a schedule. This is the cash baseline that feeds Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis.

4 Open Starch and describe the labor dashboard you actually want: 'Show me this week's scheduled hours by role — servers, bartenders, kitchen — alongside projected labor cost and labor as a percent of expected covers revenue.' Starch builds the app from that description.

5 Set your labor cost targets by role category. For a full-service restaurant, a common starting point is 28-32% of revenue for combined FOH and BOH. Tell Starch your target and it adds a pace indicator to each category.

6 Fork the Scenario Analysis template and model your next hire. Type: 'What happens to my monthly burn and cash runway if I bring on a full-time line cook at $19/hour, 40 hours a week, starting in 60 days?' Starch runs the projection against your Plaid and Stripe actuals.

7 Model a second scenario for the slow season. 'What if January covers drop 20% from December — how many hours do I need to cut to keep labor under 30% of revenue?' Compare both scenarios side by side.

8 Use the Budgeting app to set a quarterly labor budget broken out by FOH and BOH. Starch auto-suggests allocations from your ADP payroll history so you're not guessing from a blank cell.

9 Set up a weekly automation: 'Every Monday at 7am, pull this week's ADP scheduled hours and last week's Square sales, calculate labor percent, and send me a Slack message with the variance against my 30% target.' Starch runs this without you touching it.

10 Review the weekly variance. When labor percent is running hot — say, 34% through Wednesday — you see it in time to adjust Thursday and Friday's floor staffing before the week is over, not after payroll closes.

11 Before your next hire decision, run a full scenario in Scenario Analysis with your actual bank balance and revenue pace as the baseline. Share the output link with your business partner or accountant instead of a screenshot of a spreadsheet.

12 Publish your custom labor dashboard to your Starch workspace so your GM or floor manager can check it without calling you — they see the same live numbers, no login sharing required.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

October 2026 pre-holiday staffing decision — 42-seat neighborhood restaurant

Sample numbers from a real run

Current monthly payroll (ADP actuals, Sept)	38,400
Projected October revenue (Stripe + Square pace)	127,000
Current labor percent	30
Proposed hire: experienced line cook, $19/hr, 40 hrs/wk	3,040
Projected labor with new hire	41,440
Projected labor percent with new hire (assuming revenue holds)	33
Cash runway before hire (Plaid balance)	6
Cash runway after hire (Scenario Analysis, months)	5

It's late September and you're looking at holiday reservations filling up on OpenTable. You want to hire a line cook to cover the volume but you're not sure you can absorb the payroll hit if covers don't materialize. You open Starch's Scenario Analysis — connected to your Plaid bank feed and Stripe revenue — and type: 'Model what happens if I hire a line cook at $19/hour starting October 15, and October revenue comes in 10% below September.' The projection shows your labor percent climbing from 30% to 34% and your cash runway compressing from 6 months to 4.8 months. You run a second scenario: 'What if I bring them on part-time at 24 hours through November, then go full-time in December when holiday volume peaks?' That path keeps labor at 31.2% and runway at 5.6 months. You make the part-time call with a number behind it instead of a feeling. Your GM sees the same dashboard Monday morning.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Labor cost as a percent of revenue, broken out by FOH and BOH (target: 28-32% combined for full-service)

Scheduled hours versus actual hours worked per pay period — the gap tells you how often you're calling people in last-minute

Payroll run cost versus prior period, flagged when a single period is more than 5% over budget

Cash runway in months, updated daily from Plaid bank feed — because a slow February can erase a strong December

Revenue per labor hour — covers served divided by total hours on the floor, tracked weekly to catch overstaffed slow shifts

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

7shifts or Homebase alone

Great for building and communicating the schedule, but neither tool connects your labor cost to your actual bank balance or revenue pace — you still have to do the math in your head or a spreadsheet to know if you're overstaffed.

QuickBooks + spreadsheet model

QuickBooks shows you payroll after the fact; a spreadsheet model requires manual data entry every week to stay current, and neither one tells you what a new hire does to your runway before you commit.

Restaurant365 or MarginEdge

Solid purpose-built restaurant finance tools with deep POS integration, but they're priced for multi-unit operators and don't let you describe a custom report or scenario in plain language — you configure their fixed reporting structure instead.

Gusto workforce planning tools

Gusto handles payroll and headcount records cleanly, but its planning views don't connect to your revenue or bank data, so labor-as-a-percent-of-sales requires a manual step outside the tool.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scenario planning, runway analysis, quarterly budgeting all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My scheduling software is 7shifts. Does Starch connect to it?

7shifts is web-based, so Starch can automate it through your browser — no API required. You can pull scheduled hours and shift data into your Starch labor dashboard even though there's no direct integration. If you also use ADP or Paylocity for payroll, those connect as scheduled-sync providers and give you actual pay data alongside the scheduled hours.

We use Toast as our POS, not Square or Stripe. Can Starch still pull our sales data?

Yes. Toast doesn't have a direct API connector in Starch's integration catalog, but Starch automates Toast through your browser — no API needed. Your sales totals, check averages, and cover counts can be pulled into your labor dashboard the same way a person would log in and read the report.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We'd be connecting payroll data.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's an honest limit worth knowing before you connect ADP or Paylocity. If compliance certification is a hard requirement for your operation right now, flag that when you talk to the team.

My bookkeeper works in QuickBooks and closes the books three weeks late. Can Starch work with that?

Starch syncs QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, vendors, payments, journal entries — so your Starch dashboard reflects what's been entered in QuickBooks at the time of sync. If your bookkeeper is three weeks behind, your QuickBooks data will be too. The workaround most restaurant founders use is connecting Plaid directly, which gives Starch your bank transactions in near-real-time regardless of when the books are closed. Runway Analysis and Scenario Analysis both work off Plaid balances for exactly this reason.

Can I use this to plan staffing for a new location I'm opening, not just the one I'm running?

Yes. Describe the new location as a scenario in Scenario Analysis — 'Model a second location with a projected $85,000 monthly revenue, $24,000 monthly payroll, and $12,000 in additional fixed costs starting in March.' Starch runs the projection against your current cash position so you can see what the expansion does to your runway before you sign the lease.

What if I want a report that's different from anything in the App Store templates?

Describe it. The App Store templates — Runway Analysis, Scenario Analysis, Budgeting — are starting points, not limits. If you want a single dashboard that shows labor percent, food cost variance, and this week's OpenTable reservation count side by side, tell Starch that's what you want and it builds the app. You're not configuring a template; you're authoring a surface in plain language.