Caffè RomaThe project.

Every week the owner lost about twelve hours to the same job. Staff wrote their hours on scraps of paper and left them in a pile. He would sit down once a week, work through them and copy everything onto a sheet. At the end of the month he would go through four of those sheets, trying to read his own handwriting, cross-checking against WhatsApp messages where he had asked people to confirm what they had worked. It is the kind of problem that never feels urgent enough to fix, and it was eating a day and a half of his week.

We did not want to hand him a generic rota tool. The system had to match how the bar actually runs, so we built it around his routine rather than the other way round. Staff clock in and out, so hours are counted to the minute instead of remembered afterwards. He can see what anyone has worked and what the month will cost before it arrives. Shifts go out from him directly, with a note attached where it matters, and his staff see the month ahead, their own history and anything he needs them to know.

The hours system came first, under his own branding rather than someone else's. Then we built the rest around it: a website with location pages and walking guides for the city so locals and visitors can actually find the place, photography and videography organised and shot on site, custom graphics, a redesigned menu, a booking flow that pings him on WhatsApp the moment a table is requested, and a loyalty card scheme designed from scratch. The paperwork is gone and the bar looks like itself online.