The whole system, taught the way you run it.
Not a feature list, a walkthrough. We follow the week the way an owner actually lives it: get set up, build the schedule, cover the sick call, read next week, keep cost in line, and watch the savings turn into real dollars. Along the way you'll see how each piece feeds the next, and what the AI is quietly doing behind the scenes. One login, alongside any POS. No app to install, no system to rip out.
Bring what you already have. Be running today.
Most tools make you reformat your life before they'll help. Helm Shift starts from your existing spreadsheets and a quick setup, so the first hour is useful, not admin.
Set up in minutes, from any spreadsheet.
Bring your staff, inventory, and supplier lists exactly as you keep them today. There's no rigid template to match, drop in whatever file you've got and the AI reads the columns from context, figures out which is a name, a wage, a par level, a supplier email, and lines it all up for you to confirm. If a column is ambiguous, it asks rather than guessing. Book a free 30-minute walkthrough or email Tyler and, while we're small, we'll load your lists together on the call, so you're running the same day. No card, no contract, and your first 30 days are free.
Instead of forcing your data into a fixed template, the AI reads each column in context, a mix of names and abbreviations still resolves into people, wages, and workdays. That same reader powers photo counts and receipts later, so the effort you skip here you skip everywhere.
A four-step checklist walks you the rest of the way.
Once your lists are in, Helm Shift asks four quick questions about your restaurant, then drops you on a dashboard with a short checklist that gets you to a real published schedule. Each step takes under a minute, and green ticks fill in as you go so you always know what's left.
Open the app, see what needs you, get the schedule out.
This is the daily loop: the dashboard surfaces anything urgent the moment you log in, then the builder turns availability into a full week you just review and publish. And when someone calls out, the same system finds the cover.
Your dashboard, and it pops what's urgent the moment you open it.
Every time you log in, the dashboard tells you what needs you today and nothing you don't. Up top, anything urgent, a critically low item, an open sick call, a time-off request to approve, sits in a Needs attention strip you can act on with one tap. If something is genuinely pressing when you open the app, a critical stock item or an open sick call, it surfaces right away so it can't be missed. Below the alerts, four numbers: active staff, shifts this week, this week's labour cost, and inventory items with how many are below par.
Build the week, AI drafts it, you decide.
This is the heart of it. Tap Build this week and Helm Shift drafts a full schedule from everyone's availability, time off, and target hours. The builder lays your team out as rows across the days of the week, tap a shift to change the hours, drag it to a different person or day, and the labour estimate updates live. Nothing is published until you say so. The AI suggests, you decide, it never commits a schedule on its own.
Two words to know: Schedule is the published roster everyone reads, and Build Week is where you make changes. So the read-only Schedule stays clean and no one edits it by accident, and all the drafting, dragging, and publishing happens in the builder.
The draft isn't random. The AI reads each person's available days, time off, and target hours, then spreads shifts to cover your open hours while keeping people near the hours they want. Change one shift and it recomputes the labour total instantly, so you're always editing against a live cost, not a guess.
Sick calls and cover, without the 6 AM scramble.
When someone calls in sick, Helm Shift flags the open shift and suggests the best replacement, someone who's available, qualified, and under their target hours. You approve with one tap and they're notified. Staff can also post and pick up shifts themselves in a shared pool, and no two people can ever claim the same slot.
How the call reaches you depends on how urgent it is. Someone giving you a day's notice is a normal heads-up. Someone calling out an hour before service is an alert, a prominent, hard-to-miss notification, so a last-second gap gets your attention while there's still time to fill it.
To rank a replacement, the AI checks who is available, qualified, and under their target hours for that week, so the person it suggests first won't tip into overtime or clash with time off. The pool uses a claim lock, the instant one person takes an open shift, it disappears for everyone else, so you never get two people showing up for one slot.
Stop scheduling by gut. Schedule for what's coming.
This week is handled. The forecast is where Helm Shift starts earning its keep, it looks ahead and tells you not just what sales to expect, but how many people to have on to meet them.
The forecast, next week first, with a staffing call.
Open the forecast and the first thing you see is next week, the week you can still do something about. It projects sales day by day from your own history and the shape of your typical week, then goes one step further than a revenue number: it gives you a plain staffing suggestion, roughly how many people to have on each day to match the expected volume. A quiet Saturday and a booked-out Friday shouldn't be staffed the same, and now they won't be.
The projection is built from your own daily numbers, the day-of-week pattern, recent trend, and how this stretch of the calendar usually behaves for you, not a generic industry average. The staffing suggestion translates that expected volume into people, which is what makes the forecast something you can act on when you build the following week, instead of a chart you nod at.
Where the margin actually lives.
Labour is half the picture. The other half is what you buy and what you charge for it. Inventory, suppliers, and menus work together here, so a low shelf becomes an order, a regular order becomes one click, and every plate carries its real food cost.
Inventory, counted by your team, and the order cart builds itself.
Helm Shift isn't a perpetual inventory system, it doesn't watch stock deplete as you sell, and it doesn't connect to your POS. It reflects the counts your team enters, three ways: tapping the steppers, running a quick weekly count, or snapping a photo of the shelf for the AI to read. Whenever your latest count lands below par, that item flags Low, and Critical at the critical line, and surfaces on your dashboard.
Here's the part owners feel right away: you don't approve items onto an order one by one. When things run low, Helm Shift builds the supplier order cart for you, grouping what's short under the right supplier. You open a cart that's already assembled, adjust quantities if you want, and send. The system does the gathering; you do the deciding.
The moment counts cross the line, the AI gathers every low and critical item, works out how much of each brings you back to par, and sorts them under the supplier you buy them from. So the dull part, remembering what's short and who sells it, is already done when you open the cart. Sending is a decision you make, never something the system does on its own.
Suppliers, recurring orders in one click, plus AI reorder nudges.
Your suppliers need almost nothing to get going, just a name, an email, a phone number, and how often you usually order. Import them from any list the same way you imported everything else. Then two things make the week easier. Recurring orders hold your normal weekly order so a standing produce run becomes a single click, editable any week you need to change it. And AI reorder suggestions watch how fast you go through things against your daily sales, and how often something spoils before you use it, and quietly flag what to buy more of and what to ease off, so you're not tying up cash in what sits or running out of what moves.
The reorder nudges line up two things you already generate, how quickly stock falls between counts and how your daily sales are trending, and compare them to how long an item lasts before it spoils. Fast-moving, quick-spoiling items get a "buy more" flag before you run out; slow movers get a "pull back" flag before they turn into waste. You keep every decision; the AI just does the watching.
Labour cost, see the week's number before you publish.
As you build the schedule, Helm Shift adds up the cost in real time, total for the week, and a breakdown by day, so an expensive week shows up before payroll, not after. Unassigned open shifts are kept separate so your totals stay honest. It's the kind of number the big platforms charge hundreds a month to show you; here it's just part of the page.
The savings, in dollars, not vibes.
A tool is easy to cancel when you can't see what it's doing for you. So Helm Shift does the opposite of hiding the value: it adds up what each covered sick call and each accurate forecast is actually worth, and shows you the number.
Analytics, where every save becomes a dollar figure.
Analytics is the scoreboard. At the top: saved this month, your all-time savings, and whether you're on track to save more. But the important move is that it shows its work. "Sick calls covered" isn't just a count, it's tied to the labour you'd have lost scrambling or closing a section. A close forecast isn't a vanity stat, it's the over-staffing you avoided and the sales you didn't miss. Each line explains, in plain dollars, how it got there. There's also a running revenue view: enter your daily profit and watch it compound week over week, so the build-up is something you can see, not something you have to imagine. And like everywhere else, you can print or export any of it to a spreadsheet.
Every time you accept a suggested cover, right-size a day off the forecast, or catch a critical item before it stops service, Helm Shift logs a small savings event with the dollar value attached. Analytics just totals those events. That's why the number is defensible: it's the sum of specific moments this month, each one traceable back to the decision that created it.
One assistant that has read the whole thing.
Every screen so far shares one set of data. Ask Helm is what happens when you can talk to that, an assistant that already knows your staff, stock, forecast, and menu, and can act on any of it.
Ask Helm, it already knows your restaurant.
Ask Helm is more than a chat box, it's an assistant that has read your whole system. Ask it in plain English, "who could cover Friday dinner?", "what should I reorder before the weekend?", "how should I think about this week's labour?", and it answers from your live staff, stock, forecast, and menu, then drafts the next step: a message to send, an order to review, a shift to assign. It lives in its own area of the app so it's always a click away. As everywhere else in Helm Shift, it suggests; you're the one who hits send.
Because everything lives in one system, the assistant isn't guessing from a generic model, it's reading your current availability, stock levels, forecast, and recipes when it answers. That's the difference between a chatbot and an assistant: it can pull a real name off this week's roster and draft the actual message, not a template.
Your team's phone, no app, no password.
Once you publish, your staff open a phone-friendly link and see exactly their week, colour-coded by shift type, with the hours and any notes. They request time off and pick up open shifts right there, so you stop fielding texts at midnight. No app store, no password to reset. (A dedicated mobile app is coming soon; anyone who prefers email can get the schedule that way instead.)
How it all connects, the loop that runs your week.
Here's the whole point, said once. Scheduling, coverage, forecast, inventory, suppliers, menus, labour cost, and analytics aren't eight apps bolted together, they're one system with one set of data, so each piece feeds the next. Your history shapes the forecast. The forecast shapes how you staff. Staffing sets your labour cost. Your counts drive the order cart, the order cart feeds your food cost, and food cost drives your pricing. And every good call along the way, a covered shift, a right-sized day, gets logged as a dollar in analytics. Ask Helm sits in the middle of all of it, because it can read the whole loop.
Your own history projects next week's sales and a staffing level per day.
feeds the scheduleStaff to the forecast, cover sick calls, and watch labour cost move live.
feeds labour costLow items build the order cart; suppliers and reorder nudges keep it lean.
feeds food costLive ingredient costs set each dish's margin; pricing intelligence flags the moves.
feeds your profitEvery covered shift and right-sized day is logged as real money saved.
feeds back into next weekBecause it's one set of data, the tool gets more useful the more you use it, this week's numbers sharpen next week's forecast, which sharpens the staffing, which sharpens the savings. It runs alongside any POS, Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed, or none, with nothing to rip out and nothing to integrate. One login, at a price an independent owner can actually justify.
The questions owners ask first.
Does Helm Shift work with my POS?
Do I have to reformat my spreadsheets to import them?
Is it really one tool for scheduling, inventory, forecasting, and cost?
Will my staff need to install an app?
How does the AI actually decide things?
Is my data safe, and who can see it?
Is it really free for 30 days?
What if it doesn't work for my restaurant?
Set it up this week.
Say hi, get set up the same day, and have a published schedule before the next shift. No card required, and the founder walks every new restaurant through it personally.
Start free for 30 days, no card requiredThe founder
Built by someone who worked the floor.
Helm Shift is built in Halifax by Tyler MacDougall, who worked restaurants as a line cook, dishwasher, and host before building the tool he wished those owners had. When you email support, you're emailing him, and he answers the same day.