Staff Scheduling & Operations Platform for a High-Volume Bar

The Cowboy Saloon & Dance Hall is a high-volume college bar in downtown Laramie, next to the University of Wyoming. Scheduling a bar like this breaks generic tools. Demand swings wildly by night: Thursdays run on a skeleton crew, Fridays and Saturdays are the biggest and least predictable nights of the year, and a University of Wyoming home football Saturday, concert, or banquet can turn an ordinary night into the busiest of the month. A flat weekly template never captures that.

On top of that, two roles (bartenders and security) each have their own posts, headcounts, and people, and last-minute change is constant. Staff need to give up shifts and pick up coverage without burying the owner in back-and-forth texts, and without shifts silently going uncovered. The owner was doing all of it by hand: rebuilding the schedule every period, tracking who could work, and chasing coverage manually. It was slow and easy to get wrong.

We built a custom scheduling and operations platform: an owner dashboard for planning and publishing schedules, and an employee portal where every staff member sees their shifts, swaps them, and requests time off, all sharing one database. The guiding idea was to take the owner's expertise and turn it into a system that gets the schedule most of the way there automatically, then makes the human editing fast and low-stress.

The owner opens a month and presses one button. The system researches local events by scanning the University of Wyoming calendar and searching for Laramie happenings, forecasts how busy each night will be, picks the right staffing shape from the owner's daily templates, drafts every shift, and pencils in staff balanced against each person's target hours. The result is a complete, roughly-right draft the owner reviews on a normal month calendar. Tapping any shift opens one popup to edit the venue, headcount, times, roster, and station placement. Nothing reaches employees until the owner explicitly activates the schedule, so a half-built draft is never visible to staff.

The swap model is the centerpiece. An employee who cannot make a shift gives it away but stays responsible until a replacement is confirmed. Eligible coworkers apply, the owner makes the final call, and confirming the handoff swaps the two people in one atomic step and declines the rest. A shift is never left silently uncovered. Shift handoffs, time-off requests, and new employee signups all collect in a single Confirmations inbox with a live count, so nothing falls through the cracks.