Case study: shifts and time tracking at a Lisbon hotel group

A hotel with a single front desk already has plenty of work in its rotas. Now picture several houses in the same city, with front desk and housekeeping moving people from one house to another as occupancy changes. The person who opens reception in the morning at one house may close the afternoon at another. And all of it lived in one Excel sheet per department.

This is the story of a boutique accommodation group in Lisbon that runs TeamYo in production. We don’t name them, but everything here happened: these are the features they use and, in several cases, the ones we built with them.

The starting point: one Excel sheet per department

The group had the classic problem of hospitality with more than one house. Rotas were built in Excel, each department with its own. Holiday balances were in a separate sheet, kept by hand. And there was one question none of the sheets answered well: who is rostered where, today, across every house at once?

When someone works the morning at one house and the afternoon at another, two different sheets have to agree. When they don’t, you only find out on the day, with an empty front desk or two people on the same shift.

Getting started: imported balances, calculated by the law

The first step was bringing their holiday balances from Excel into TeamYo, person by person. A detail many people get wrong showed up straight away: someone hired mid-year is not entitled to 22 days that year. Portuguese law gives 2 working days for each full month of contract, up to 20 days.

The import had cases of January hires whose balances didn’t match that rule. We changed the rule in TeamYo so that the hiring year follows the law alone, and balances came out right for everyone, not only this customer.

Rotas: one manager per department, across every house

The group is organised by department, not by house. Whoever runs housekeeping rosters their team in every house, and the same goes for front desk. So TeamYo now lets each shift manager roster the people in their department, in any house where that department works, and only them.

There’s a second rule Excel never guaranteed: the same person cannot have two overlapping shifts in different houses. In TeamYo a rota with a clash like that isn’t published until it’s resolved. It’s the kind of mistake that on paper you only see when the person is already on the way to the wrong house.

Time tracking with a perimeter at each house

With several addresses, clocking in “from anywhere” won’t do. Each house has its own perimeter, and a clock-in from the phone is only accepted inside it. For the group, this answers where the person actually was, without a time clock at every front desk.

Some people don’t work at a house: office roles, for example. For them TeamYo lets the company choose, person by person, who may clock in while working from home or travelling. Anyone not on that list stays bound by the perimeter.

Automatic clock-ins and missed clock-in alerts

Not everyone has a changing schedule. For people with fixed hours, the group asked for clock-ins to happen automatically: in at the start of the shift, out at the end, and nothing on days off or absence. Automatic punches are marked as such, so nobody mistakes them for one the person made.

For everyone else, the risk is forgetting. At the group’s request, TeamYo now alerts on the same day anyone with a shift who hasn’t clocked in or out after a few minutes, and can also alert whoever approves that person’s hours. The company chooses whether the alert is on, how many minutes it waits, and the channel: email, in the app, or both.

Month end

At month end the hours go to payroll. The group exports them to Excel for payroll processing. The working-time record stays in TeamYo, which is what Article 202 of the Portuguese Labour Code requires.

What this case shows

The most interesting part of this customer isn’t any one feature. It’s that almost everything above was asked for by them and shipped in TeamYo in days, not months: the per-department shift manager rule, remote work only for the people the company picks, automatic punches and the alerts. A small team, in Portugal, talking directly to the people who use the product.

If you run shifts in more than one location, whether hotels, restaurants or clinics, the question to ask any software is simple: can it roster the same person in two places on the same day without putting them on two shifts at once? See how TeamYo handles rotas for hotels.