Slota

CASE STUDY · SINGAPORE F&B & CLINIC

The spreadsheet was eating two hours of every week. Slota got it back.

One roster. No screenshot ping-pong. Build the week in minutes, publish once, and let clock-ins fill the timesheet — for Singapore F&B teams and clinic staff.

“We went from chasing confirmations in WhatsApp to publishing one roster the whole team could see. That alone is back a couple of hours every single week.”
— Composite voice of a Singapore F&B operator (representative, not a named customer)

The challenge — a spreadsheet, and a WhatsApp group

Ask how a Singapore restaurant or small clinic builds its week and you will usually hear the same answer: a spreadsheet, and a WhatsApp group.

It is easy to see why. A spreadsheet is free, familiar, and flexible, which is why for a 10-to-15-person Singapore F&B team, it is still the default rostering tool. The owner builds the week in Excel — typically about two hours of manager time every week, which comes to roughly 104 hours a year of pure admin [2]. Then they screenshot it into the group chat and hope.

The hope is where it falls apart.

Messages get buried. A shift goes unconfirmed, and at 5pm on Friday someone discovers the dinner-service cover called in sick and nobody picked it up [1]. Full-timers live in one sheet, part-timers in another, gig cover is booked through a third channel, and nothing reconciles into a single roster [1]. Overtime and public-holiday multipliers under MOM rules, and CPF, are running on manual formulas, so every payroll cycle is another chance to mis-calculate and start a dispute [5]. And because the sheet gets overwritten each week, there is no record of who worked when — the kind of audit trail regulators and MOM record-keeping expectations reward keeping [2].

The clinic version runs slower but hurts the same way. A monthly schedule spanning providers, nurses, and front-desk staff has too many moving parts — availability, on-call, leave, coverage minimums, part-time contract hours — for a grid of cells. Industry estimates put a manual clinic schedule at 5 to 10 hours of build time per month [3]. The manager holds the rules in their head and the month starts from scratch. A spreadsheet cannot flag a coverage gap, send a shift notification, or handle a swap. It can only hold the numbers you already decided.

The solution — one roster, published once

Slota replaces the spreadsheet-and-WA flow with one source of truth. You drag shifts onto a grid, reuse a saved template or copy last week in one click, and publish — the team gets notified on their phones from the same roster, no screenshots [10].

Availability and leave requests live in the system, so the owner stops asking "who can cover Tuesday?" in a group chat. Clock-in works by face, PIN, or QR with GPS geofencing, which fills the timesheet as the shift is actually worked, and the labour-cost panel updates live while the week is being built [10]. Set-up is around ten minutes and needs no training [10].

None of this solves patient appointment booking — if you run a clinic, Slota handles your staff rota, not your patients' appointments; those are two different problems and it is worth keeping them separate [9]. What Slota takes on is the part that eats the receptionist's Tuesday: who works when, who is covering, whether anyone is over their contracted hours, and whether the cost of the week matches what was planned.

Results — the hours are the honest headline

Because Slota is pre-launch, there are no customer outcome figures to cite, and we are not going to invent them. What follows is a clearly-labelled modelled estimate of the value of moving off spreadsheets, built from publicly documented industry numbers.

The time saving is the honest headline. Spreadsheet rostering for a 10-to-15-staff F&B team runs about two hours a week of manager time — roughly 104 hours a year — which at a loaded rate of about S$25 an hour works out to near S$200 a month of admin cost before a single pay dispute [2]. Dedicated rota tools report cutting rota-management time by an average of two-thirds [4]. For a clinic, the manual monthly build is 5 to 10 hours, a figure the industry itself puts on the spreadsheet approach [3].

On cost, a modelled Slota exemplar for a two-outlet café lands near S$2,300 a month of labour-planning value from moving off spreadsheets, and a retail example near S$1,600, both with sub-one-month payback — MODELLED [est], a worked illustration of the value, not a customer result [pack].

The structural wins are harder to price and matter more. One roster instead of three channels of truth. Covering gaps caught before Friday afternoon rather than after. A clock-in log that builds the timesheet honestly and keeps the audit trail a spreadsheet overwrite erases. Hours back to the operator is where the cheaper, more reliable saving sits.

All Slota figures above are MODELLED [est] — a worked illustration of the value of moving off spreadsheets, not customer results. The quotes on this page are representative composites, not real testimonials. Real customer measurements will replace them as they come in.

See it in action — request your 90-second demo

No spreadsheet required. See a real roster built, published, and filled in under two minutes.

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