In hospitality, organizing the team is part of delivering good service. Every shift needs the right coverage, and an absence or change in availability can force a manager to rebuild the rota halfway through the week. For Los Náufragos beach restaurant, moving from spreadsheets to TalentoHQ has made that work easier for both management and staff.
The challenge: leaving behind time records that took hours
Los Náufragos is a beach restaurant in Fuengirola, Málaga, known for fish cooked on skewers over an open fire and with a history dating back to 1968. As in any restaurant with a large team and varied working hours, keeping time records in spreadsheets demanded close attention: the information had to be collected, checked, and kept up to date.
Owner Paula Aste also had a common concern when introducing a new tool: that some members of the team might find the change difficult. Her experience was the opposite.
“On behalf of my company, I want to say how incredibly easy the change in time tracking has been: moving from spreadsheets, which took hours, into ‘the digital age’, thanks to you. I was worried that people would not know how to use it because there are many of them, but you have made the experience genuinely good. The staff understand it and learn it easily, and it saves me a great deal of work. Everyone is happy.”
Paula Aste, owner of Los Náufragos
Day-to-day management designed for the pace of a restaurant
Digitizing time records is the starting point. The value becomes clearer when clock-ins, working hours, shifts, vacation, and absences share the same information instead of being managed in separate documents.
Shifts and availability in one calendar
The weekly plan lets managers check who is available before assigning or changing a shift. If coverage in the dining room, bar, or kitchen changes, the person responsible can review the whole rota and communicate the adjustment from the same place, without rebuilding several versions of a spreadsheet.
Vacation, leave, and sickness absence with context
Vacation requests and other absences are connected to the team calendar. This helps managers spot overlaps, anticipate coverage needs, and retain a clear record of what was requested and approved. The decision remains with the responsible person, but the information needed to make it is available alongside the request.
Time tracking that the whole team can use
Each person can record and review their working time through a straightforward interface. For the business, the information stays together and is ready for managers to review issues without gathering data from different spreadsheets. The time management and shift planning features explain how these processes work in TalentoHQ.
Ease of use also reduces the cost of change
A tool does not simplify work if learning how to use it requires weeks of training. In a restaurant, that cost is not limited to a course or a manual: it also includes the hours that managers and staff have to take away from daily operations to resolve questions.
The adoption Paula describes shows why a clear experience matters. When staff quickly understand how to clock in, check their rota, or submit a request, the business needs less ongoing support to keep the system working. The team gains autonomy, and managers recover time without shifting the administrative burden onto employees.
AI for checking information and preparing changes with more context
Once schedules, absences, and activity are centralized, TalentoHQ’s integrated AI can make day-to-day management more direct in accounts where it is enabled. Managers can ask questions in natural language and work with the information they already have permission to access.
In practice, AI can help check team availability, absences, and planned shifts; prepare changes or swaps when circumstances change; and bring together the context needed to review time records, activity, and pending requests. Before an action is saved, the authorized person reviews the details and confirms the next step.
AI does not replace management judgment or approve employment decisions by itself. It preserves configured permissions and approval flows and provides a more direct route to information and repetitive administrative tasks.
The result: a digital transition that works for everyone
The experience at Los Náufragos highlights an essential condition for digitizing restaurant management: the system must be useful for the person organizing the work and easy for everyone who uses it each day. TalentoHQ has replaced a spreadsheet-based process, reduced administrative work, and enabled the team to adopt digital time tracking quickly.
Paula’s conclusion is straightforward and specific: less work for management, a tool the staff understand, and a transition everyone feels comfortable with.