Shift notes
Shift notes are a place to record why a day looked the way it did — "slow night due to rain," "walk-in freezer tail light out," "big catering order Saturday." They're framed as data that explains the numbers, not a team chat: every note is tagged, timestamped to a business day, and feeds back into the numbers it explains — burn rate, inventory health, and demand forecasts all read them.
Two ways to log one
From the Home Log menu, any time. Tap Log (the same dropdown you use for Receive, Log waste, and Log prep) and choose Log a note. A quick sheet opens with tag selection, a note field, and a date picker defaulted to today.
From the count-complete celebration, right after finishing a count. Below the celebration is a collapsed prompt — "Anything to note about this shift?" Expanding it opens the same form (without the date field; the note is stamped to today) and links the note to the session you just completed.
Neither entry point blocks anything else — the count-complete prompt is optional and skippable, and the Log menu only shows Log a note if you have permission and the feature is enabled for your restaurant.
Tags
Every note needs at least one tag:
| Tag | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Demand | Unusual traffic — a rush, a slow night, weather |
| Equipment | Something broken or acting up |
| Staffing | Callouts, short-staffed shifts, new hires |
| Supply | A delivery issue, a substitution, a shortage |
| Other | Anything that doesn't fit the above |
Tags aren't just organizational — Demand-tagged notes are what the demand forecast prioritizes when explaining an anomalous sales day (see below), so tag accurately rather than defaulting to Other.
The note body itself is free text, up to 2,000 characters.
The note's business day
A note is stamped to a restaurant-local business day, not a timestamp. Logged from the Home menu, you can backdate it to an earlier day (useful for catching up on a note you forgot to log) — but never forward-date it; a note describes something that already happened, at least partly. Logged from the count-complete prompt, the day is always today and isn't editable.
Who can do what
- Logging a note requires the STAFF role or above (Owner, Manager, Staff). Viewers can't log notes.
- Deleting a note requires Owner or Manager.
- There's no editing. If a note has a typo or needs a correction, delete it and log a new one.
See roles and permissions for the full capability matrix.
Notifications
Logging a note pushes a Shift note notification to every Owner and Manager on the restaurant — except the person who logged it. Like every notification type, it's toggleable per user in Kitchen Settings → Notifications, under Team activity. See push notifications.
Where notes show up later
Notes appear in the dashboard's activity feed and on the full activity history page, behind a Notes filter chip. The feed sorts by when the note was logged, not the business day it describes — so a note you backdate to last Tuesday still shows up at the top of the feed today, right when you logged it.
Feeding the demand forecast
If you're on a plan with demand forecasting, notes overlapping the sales-history window the forecast is built from are read as context — especially Demand-tagged ones, which help the model tell the difference between "sales dipped because of a real trend" and "sales dipped because of a one-off snowstorm." See demand forecasting for the full list of inputs.
Common mistakes
Using shift notes as a chat tool
Notes are one-way and there's no reply thread. If you need a back-and-forth with a teammate, use whatever messaging tool your team already has — shift notes are for the record, not the conversation.
Tagging everything 'Other'
A vague tag makes a note harder to find later and skips it in the demand-forecast context entirely if it was actually demand-relevant. Take the extra second to pick the tag that fits.
Trying to edit a note
There's no edit — only delete and re-log. If you don't have delete permission (Staff role), ask an Owner or Manager to remove the old one before you log the corrected version.