People & HR

How to track pto and time off as Restaurant and Hospitality Founders

People & HRFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your restaurant or hotel runs on variable schedules: a sous chef calls in sick the Friday before Valentine's Day, a front desk manager accrues two weeks of unused PTO that you didn't realize until they handed in notice, and your GM is texting you for approval at 11 PM because there's no system for it. You're tracking time off in a group chat, a shared Google Sheet that's three edits behind, or whatever 7shifts or Homebase exports if you remember to pull it. When payroll runs through ADP or Paylocity, nobody has reconciled who actually took what. You find out about the problem when the check bounces or the shift goes uncovered.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live PTO tracker that pulls from your payroll provider on a schedule and shows every employee's accrued, used, and remaining time off — no manual entry, no spreadsheet maintenance

An approval workflow your managers can trigger from their phone, with requests and decisions logged in one place instead of buried in DMs

A weekly digest that flags coverage conflicts before the week starts — so you know on Monday morning if your Saturday brunch crew is short-handed

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

Knowledge Management Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your ADP or Paylocity employee and payroll data on a schedule — roles, balances, pay periods, and time-off records land in Starch automatically. Google Calendar is also synced on a schedule for shift and coverage visibility. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live to send your Monday digest. 7shifts or Homebase, if your team uses them, are automatable through your browser — no API required.

Prompts to copy

Build me a PTO tracker for my restaurant team. Pull employee records and time-off balances from ADP on a schedule. Show me each employee's role (FOH, BOH, management), their accrued PTO, how many days they've used this year, and how many are remaining. Flag anyone with more than 10 days accrued — those are my liability.

Create a time-off request workflow. When a team member submits a request, check their available balance from our ADP sync, then check Google Calendar for existing shift coverage that week. If coverage looks thin, flag the request for my review with a suggested denial reason. If coverage is fine, auto-approve and update their balance.

Every Monday at 7 AM, send me a Slack message listing anyone who has a time-off day approved this week, which shift it affects, and whether we have coverage confirmed. Also include anyone whose PTO balance is expiring by the end of the quarter.

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 your employee roster, job roles (line cook, bartender, front desk, GM), and time-off balances automatically on a schedule — no export, no copy-paste.

2 Connect Google Calendar so Starch knows your existing shift structure and scheduled events. This is how the coverage check works — Starch can see when a Saturday dinner service is already short-staffed before approving a request.

3 Tell Starch: 'Build me a PTO dashboard. Show every employee by department — FOH, BOH, hotel ops — with their accrued days, days used this quarter, and remaining balance. Sort by accrued days descending so I can see my biggest liabilities first.'

4 Set accrual-flag rules. Tell Starch: 'Flag anyone with more than 10 days unused and highlight them in red. I want to know who I need to push to take time off before the holidays when I can't spare them.'

5 Build the request intake. Tell Starch: 'Create a simple form where employees can submit a time-off request — their name, the dates, and whether it's PTO, sick, or personal. Route it to me or the relevant manager based on their department.'

6 Add the coverage check step. Tell Starch: 'When a request comes in, look at Google Calendar for that week. If we have fewer than three confirmed FOH staff on that shift, flag it as a coverage risk and hold it for my review before approving.'

7 Wire up Slack notifications. Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog. Tell Starch: 'When a request is approved or denied, send the employee a Slack message with the decision and their updated balance. Send me a summary if I manually approved anything.'

8 Set up the Monday morning digest automation. Tell Starch: 'Every Monday at 7 AM, pull this week's approved time-off from ADP, cross-reference against Google Calendar, and Slack me a list of open shifts and any coverage gaps I need to fill before Saturday.'

9 Store your PTO policy in Knowledge Management. Upload your employee handbook PTO section — accrual rates, blackout dates (New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day weekend), and your seasonal freeze policy. Starch can reference it when answering employee questions or flagging violations.

10 Set a quarterly accrual-expiry alert. Tell Starch: 'Two weeks before the end of each quarter, send me a list of employees who will lose accrued PTO if they don't use it. Include their manager's name so I know who to loop in.'

11 Review and tune the coverage threshold. After the first few weeks, adjust the minimum-coverage number by shift type — brunch needs more FOH than a Tuesday dinner. Tell Starch: 'Update the coverage check so Saturday and Sunday brunch requires at least four FOH, and weekday dinner only requires two.'

12 Audit the tracker against your next payroll run. Tell Starch: 'Compare the time-off days approved in the last pay period against what ADP shows was paid out. Flag any discrepancies so I can catch payroll errors before they compound.'

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Spring 2026 — 18-person team, two locations

Sample numbers from a real run

FOH staff with 10+ days accrued	4
BOH staff with 10+ days accrued	3
Time-off requests submitted in March	11
Requests auto-approved (coverage OK)	7
Requests held for review (coverage risk)	4
Shifts that would have gone uncovered without the check	2

Going into spring, your 18-person team — 9 FOH, 6 BOH, 2 managers, 1 hotel front desk — had 7 employees sitting on more than 10 days of unused PTO. That's a financial liability you couldn't see clearly because it lived across two Paylocity accounts and a spreadsheet your office manager updated monthly. In March, 11 time-off requests came in. Starch auto-approved 7 of them — balances were fine, Google Calendar showed adequate coverage, and the employees got a Slack confirmation the same day. The other 4 were flagged: two were for the same Saturday brunch shift (you were already down one bartender), one was a BOH lead during a private event week you'd blocked in Calendar, and one was a front desk request during a conference block at the hotel. You reviewed those four manually, shifted one to the following week by messaging the employee directly, and denied two with a note explaining the blackout. The Monday digest caught all of this before Wednesday, which is when you used to find out — when the schedule was already posted and nobody wanted to change it. You also used the Knowledge Management app to store your blackout-date policy so managers can answer 'can I take off Mother's Day weekend?' without texting you at midnight.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

PTO liability per employee (days accrued × average daily wage, updated each payroll cycle)

Coverage-conflict rate — what percentage of time-off requests trigger a coverage flag before approval

Unplanned absence rate by department (FOH vs. BOH vs. hotel ops) per quarter

Time from request submission to approval or denial (target: under 24 hours, down from 3-5 days via text)

Blackout-date compliance — requests submitted during seasonal freezes, caught before approval

Comparison

What this replaces

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

7shifts or Homebase built-in PTO tracking

Works if your whole team is inside one of those platforms, but neither talks to ADP or Paylocity payroll sync automatically — you still reconcile manually at pay period close.

ADP or Paylocity native time-off module

Has the payroll data, but no coverage-check logic, no cross-location visibility without enterprise licenses, and no way to build the Monday digest you actually want without exporting a report.

Google Sheets + email approval chain

Free and familiar, but someone has to update it, approvals get lost in Gmail, and there's no automated coverage check — you find out about the conflict when a shift goes uncovered.

Gusto or Rippling (all-in-one HR)

Strong if you're starting fresh and willing to move payroll, but if you're already running ADP or Paylocity and a POS, adding a third payroll system creates more reconciliation problems than it solves.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, task manager 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

We use Paylocity for payroll and 7shifts for scheduling. Which one does Starch actually pull from?

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employee records, time-off balances, and pay periods. For 7shifts, Starch can automate through your browser to pull schedule data even though 7shifts doesn't have a formal integration in Starch's catalog. You end up with both in one place without exporting anything manually.

Can employees submit their own PTO requests, or is this just a manager-facing tool?

You can build either. Tell Starch to create a form with a shareable link that employees fill out directly. Requests route to the right manager based on department, Starch checks the balance and coverage automatically, and the employee gets a Slack or email notification with the decision. The employee never needs a Starch login if you don't want them to.

What if we have different PTO accrual rules for full-time versus part-time staff?

Starch pulls whatever Paylocity or ADP has on file, including part-time versus full-time designation. Tell Starch to apply different thresholds — for example, flag full-time employees at 10 days accrued and part-time at 5. The policy logic lives in the app you describe; the payroll data is the source of truth.

We have seasonal staff who come back every summer. Does the tracker handle rehires?

It follows whatever your payroll provider records. If ADP or Paylocity treats a returning seasonal employee as a rehire with a reset balance, Starch reflects that. You can also tell Starch to flag any employee with zero accrued days who's been active for more than 60 days — a useful sanity check that catches data errors before they cause a payroll dispute.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We're cautious about connecting payroll data to third-party tools.

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. That's an honest limit worth knowing before you connect payroll credentials. It's on the roadmap. If your hotel or restaurant group has strict compliance requirements, ask your Starch contact directly about the current security posture so you can make an informed call.

What happens if the ADP sync misses a pay period update? Will approvals be based on stale data?

Starch syncs ADP on a schedule, not in real time — so there's a window where the balance shown is slightly behind. For most restaurants approving requests a week out, that lag is fine. If you're approving same-day sick calls, tell Starch to add a note on any approval: 'Balance as of last sync — verify in ADP if decision is time-sensitive.' Honest is better than falsely precise.