Restaurant Schedule Validation Guide: Catch Bad Times, Conflicts & Overtime Before Publishing

Use explicit times, conflict checks, availability, qualifications, overtime review, and safe save behavior before employees see the schedule.

Require unambiguous time entries

• Use explicit AM/PM times or the supported schedule format. A range such as 9-5 is ambiguous and should be corrected before the schedule is accepted.
• Reject impossible times such as 24:30 and flag unusually long shifts instead of silently calculating them.
• Handle overnight shifts deliberately so a closing shift that crosses midnight is not treated as a negative or same-day duration.

Check the employee, not just the clock

• Compare the shift with availability, existing assignments, station/section qualifications, opening and closing needs, and the restaurant's labor plan.
• A schedule can be mathematically valid and still be operationally impossible if the assigned person cannot work or is not prepared for the station.

Review labor and overtime before publish

• Use projected hours and labor cost to identify overtime risk and coverage problems while the schedule is still editable.
• Manager Pay Lock or similar privacy controls should keep wage information in manager workflows and out of employee-safe publishing.

Save safely before publishing

• A failed save should not mutate the prior saved week. Verify persistence, restore the prior state on failure, and stop publishing/printing if the required save did not succeed.
• Treat the published employee schedule as an output of a valid saved schedule—not as a separate uncontrolled copy.

Next step

Use this guide on its own, or move into Gravity Shift Lab when you need to build, record, verify, or maintain the work.