ExpoShift FAQ

One app for running the restaurant, built by people who run one. Scheduling with staff availability and time-off; shift hand-offs, partial swaps and open-shift pickups (with manager approval where you want it); a built-in time clock and timesheets; tip pools, pay periods and a payroll export; a nightly POS sync that feeds sales, kitchen, team and labor insights; team messaging, polls, recognition and a monthly newsletter; staff records, certifications and documents with acknowledgements; a food & supplies order guide (beta); and your equipment maintenance plan — instead of four apps, a group text, and three spreadsheets that never agree with each other.

Independent operators running roughly 20–100 staff who are still personally in the building. If you're the one fixing the schedule on your day off, this was built for you.

The patchwork: a paid scheduling app, a separate time clock, the tip-pool spreadsheet, the Monday morning POS export, a separate messaging tool, the availability spreadsheet, the "who's covering Saturday?" group text, the order-guide clipboard, the maintenance binder nobody opens, and the sticky notes on the office wall. One place your whole team actually opens.

Yes — it's on the App Store and Google Play, and it also runs in a web browser for managers and owners doing admin work at a desk. Staff get the same thing in their pocket.

One plan, everything included: $49/month per location, billed monthly. No feature tiers, no per-seat fees, no add-ons. It's month-to-month: cancel anytime, no contract. Questions? Email support@exposhift.com.

Yes — 30 days, no credit card. You can set up your restaurant, add your team, and run real schedules during the trial before you decide. No card games — if it's not saving you time, don't pay for it.

Yes. POS: connect your POS once and every night ExpoShift pulls the day's sales and tips — they fill your tip pools and feed the sales, kitchen, team and labor insights. You can backfill past days any time. Square is connected today; if you run something else, tell us what it is — new POS connections are built to order wherever the system offers an API, and manual entry works in the meantime. Payroll: ExpoShift builds each pay period from real hours (or from the published schedule if you don't use the time clock), locks the run once you've reviewed it, and exports a file your payroll provider imports — a Gusto-ready format today, plus a generic CSV, with new formats added as customers need them. Wages stay admin-only throughout.

Yes. Your restaurant's data belongs to your restaurant — it is never sold or used for marketing, full stop. ExpoShift stores what running a team requires: names, positions, schedules and availability, an email address (that's how staff get invited to the app), and whatever you choose to keep on file — phone numbers, emergency contacts, certifications, documents. Features you turn on add to that under the same rules: the time clock stores punches (if you enable the geofence, the app checks the phone's location at the moment of a punch on the device itself and doesn't store it — only whether the punch was inside the radius); pay rates are stored admin-only and each employee can see only their own; a POS connection stores the daily sales and tip figures it pulls. All of it is yours, not ours. See our Privacy Policy; data requests go to privacy@exposhift.com.

Create your account on any web browser — no download needed to start. Add your positions, import your roster (a CSV or Excel file — there's a one-tap template), and publish your first week. Most operators are running a real schedule the same day.

Open the Work tab, tap Availability, and tap any open date to mark yourself unavailable. Submit before the weekly deadline — once a week locks, it's set.

Each week locks at 11:59pm on its submission deadline (the Sunday before, by default) so managers can build the schedule on settled availability. Past the deadline you'll see lock icons. Got a real conflict after lock? Message your manager directly.

Work tab → Schedule → My Shifts. Notifications about a published schedule drop you straight there.

Yes — this is the part your group text has been failing at. Tap your shift and choose Hand Off Shift to send it to one qualified teammate, or Put Up for Grabs to open it to everyone qualified for that position. You can offer just part of a shift — say, the second half when your kid's game runs long. Qualified teammates get a notification when something's up for grabs; first to claim it takes it. Depending on how your managers set it up, swaps either complete instantly or wait for a manager's approval — either way, everyone involved gets notified, and nothing changes hands silently.

Chat tab. Search a name, open the conversation, type. There are group channels for the whole team, front of house, back of house, and each position — plus direct messages. Tapping a message notification opens that exact conversation.

Recognition & Rewards. Points add up automatically from the stuff that makes you a good teammate — hours worked, picking up shifts, submitting availability on time, shoutouts from coworkers, quizzes, completed tasks. Top performers get recognized and rewarded monthly, and there's a year-end recognition built from every month along the way. Send a teammate a shoutout from your Home screen — it counts.

The News tab — announcements, the team newsletter, and any active polls or quizzes your managers post. Respond right from the card.

Yes. On your Home/Dashboard, find the Text size card and pick Small, Medium, or Large. It's saved on your device.

Tap your initials/avatar in the top corner to open your info, edit, and save.

Make sure notifications are enabled for ExpoShift in your phone's Settings, that you're signed in, and that you haven't force-quit the app. Still nothing? Tell your manager and email support@exposhift.com.

If your restaurant uses the time clock, your shift shows on your Home screen with a Clock In button when it's time. Clocking out asks for a second tap so nobody punches out by accident — the button turns red and counts down until you confirm. Your weekly timecard lives on Home under My Timecard.

Open the app — your shift is still on the Home screen. Tap Missed clock-out? and pick "I left at my scheduled end" or enter the real time. That closes the punch so you can clock in to your next shift, and sends a correction to your manager to approve. If a punch is wrong for any other reason, tap Flag punch issue on your timecard.

Home → My Pay shows your own rates by position, and only you and the owner can see them. When you get a raise, a "You got a raise!" card tells you which position it's for and My Pay shows the new number.

Team tab → Import. Download the template, fill in one row per person (comma-separate multiple positions, e.g. "Server, Host"), and upload the CSV or Excel file. Review the list, then import. Hiring after that? Managers and owners can add anyone individually, anytime — Team tab → Add Team Member.

Invitation emails. Every person on your roster has an Invite action — it emails them a link, they sign up with that exact email, and they land in your restaurant connected to their own record automatically. No codes to read over the phone, no walking someone through an app store search. When you add a new hire, the app offers to send their invite on the spot.

Build the week in Work → Schedule, then publish. Your team gets a notification that taps straight to their shifts. And the part most tools skip: if a published shift later gets removed, reassigned, or opened up, the person who had it gets told — the schedule never just changes under someone.

Your call, per position group. Set a group to Instant and swaps complete as soon as a teammate accepts or claims — managers are still notified. Set it to Approval required and after the teammate accepts, a scheduling manager signs off before the shift changes hands. Run your servers loose and your kitchen tight, or the other way around.

You set them once in Admin → Settings: how far ahead staff submit, the weekly cutoff (each week locks at 11:59pm on its deadline), and blackout dates around holidays and big weekends. Staff get a reminder before the window closes; after the deadline the week is settled and you build on it. Managers see a 7-day grid for every person, split by lunch and dinner service — tap a blocked day to see the reason. If a new hire told you in the interview they can't do Sundays, you can put that on their calendar yourself.

Turn it on in Admin → Settings when you're ready; until then hours come from the published schedule. Staff clock in and out from their Home screen (with an optional geofence around the building). Timesheets open on Today and show only what needs a look — missing punches, correction requests, big variances. Managers approve corrections, add a timecard by hand, add hours on a second position, or split one timecard across positions by adding the moments someone switched roles — Server → Expo → Server is one pass.

Set up each pool once: which positions contribute or receive, and whether it's by station or by contribution. Pools split by the hours each person actually worked on the receiving position — not every hour they were in the building — so the person who ran the dessert case for four hours is paid for four hours on the dessert pool. Tips and sales come from your POS sync or manual entry. Owners never receive pool money; managers can be included position by position, and the app warns you when a pool setup could be a compliance problem.

The full story of any shift — when it was drafted and published, every edit and move, who put it up for grabs, who claimed or traded it, who approved it, and if it was deleted, by whom. Tap History on any shift, or open the Shift History card on the Manager Hub to scan recent activity and filter by person or position.

Your vendors, storage areas and items with pars and per-vendor prices, in walk-through order. Managers you've granted access walk the building counting on-hand (Enter saves and jumps to the next item), then shop or order one vendor at a time — check items off, mark something "out here" to carry it to the next stop, and close the run with a receipt total. Items route to the cheapest known price. Import your existing list from CSV or Excel. Works offline in the walk-in. It's in beta — the ordering loop is complete and we're still building around it.

Your equipment, off the sticky notes. An equipment registry (make, model, serial, warranty, condition, and a preferred service tech contact with tap-to-call), an example maintenance calendar built from editable templates — common intervals for hood cleanings, walk-in coils, grease traps and the rest — that you adjust to your equipment, your vendors, and your local requirements, and a service log. ExpoShift is the record and the reminder; the intervals and the compliance obligations stay yours. Owners can give individual managers view or edit access, so when the walk-in dies on a Saturday and the owner's on a plane, the closing manager can pull up the serial number and call the repair company instead of guessing.

Anytime. Billing lives on the web: sign in at exposhift.app in any browser → Account → Manage billing & invoices, then click Cancel subscription in the billing portal. (The mobile apps don't include billing controls.) Or email support@exposhift.com from the owner account. See the Billing Terms.