Less paper. Less admin. Hours back every week.

From single sites to multi-brand groups, hospitality operators run on Zynthio to stay inspection-ready, keep teams compliant, and trade clipboards and spreadsheets for one system on a phone.

Our customers are never named here, and we do not publish quotes we have put words into. What follows is three operators described by shape rather than by name, then three worked examples of the same tools in use.

Operators running on Zynthio

Real customers, anonymised. The figures here are the ones these operators report themselves.

Four brands, 20+ sites, one platform

Paper checklists, spreadsheet HR and till data trapped at each site, replaced by one system with live visibility across the whole estate.

The challenge

Four brands and more than twenty sites, each one running its compliance on paper. Checklists were completed on a clipboard and stayed on that clipboard, in that building, which meant the only way to know whether a site had done its checks was to go and look.

HR was kept in spreadsheets, and the till data that told you how a site had actually traded was trapped at the site that produced it. Nothing joined up at group level, so building any view of the estate meant collecting it by hand, one venue at a time.

What changed

All four brands moved onto one platform. Checklists became digital and are completed on a phone at the site, HR moved out of spreadsheets into the same system, and the till data feeds it rather than sitting on a terminal.

Because the estate runs on one system, the group sees it live. What was done, what was missed and what a site actually looks like today is visible without ringing round or waiting for someone to send a spreadsheet.

The results

Hundreds of manager-hours a month are given back across the estate, because the admin a manager used to do on paper is now done once, on a phone, as the shift runs.

Audit preparation went from days to minutes. The records are already in the system and already complete, so preparing for an audit is producing what is there rather than reconstructing it.

From a paper trail to a phone

A bar group with everything - compliance and all of HR - on paper, moving to checklists, contracts, holiday and rotas on the phone, visible across every venue.

A bar and late-night group where everything was on paper. Not only the compliance side: all of HR too. Contracts, holiday and rotas were paper documents, filed at whichever venue produced them.

A paper trail is only as good as the person carrying it. Across several late-trading venues it meant every question about a contract, a holiday request or who was on tonight went back to a folder in a building.

Checklists, contracts, holiday and rotas all moved onto the phone. The team does the work where the work happens instead of filling in a book at the end of the night, and a contract is issued and signed in the system rather than printed.

The same records are visible across every venue, so the group is looking at one live picture instead of a set of folders that have to be visited.

A new starter is onboarded in minutes. Their details, contract and paperwork are handled in the system on the day they join, rather than being a stack of forms that follows them around for a fortnight.

Live multi-venue visibility: the group can see across all of its venues at once, which is the thing paper could never give it no matter how carefully the paper was kept.

A full team live in days - no holiday lost

Existing attendance and holiday imported and accrued per employee, leave-already-taken accounted for, with every staff member self-onboarding.

The risk in moving an existing team onto a new system is not the software, it is the history. A team already part-way through its holiday year has attendance behind it and leave already taken, and starting again from zero would cost people days they had earned.

Re-keying that history by hand for a whole team is exactly the kind of job that turns a move into a project measured in weeks.

The existing attendance and holiday records were imported rather than retyped, and holiday was accrued per employee so each person came across with their own entitlement rather than a blanket figure.

Leave already taken in the year was accounted for in the import, so balances were right on day one. Every staff member then self-onboarded, entering and confirming their own details instead of a manager doing it for all of them.

The team was live in days, not weeks - the import and the self-onboarding removed the manual work that normally sets the timetable.

One hundred per cent of the holiday history was preserved. Nobody lost a day they had accrued, and nobody was credited with leave they had already taken.

What this looks like in practice

Three worked examples of the platform doing the job it was built for. Every mechanism described below is live in the product today.

Illustrative, not measured. These three are worked examples, not client results. The venues are typical rather than specific, and the numbers are conservative round figures chosen to show the shape of the work. Where something is a real product behaviour - a threshold, a rule, a schedule - it is stated exactly.

A multi-site Italian restaurant group in Scotland

Around eighty people, three venues, live in a working day

An existing team brought across with roles, sites and pay intact, right-to-work evidence collected by the staff themselves, and Employment Rights Act records building from the first shift.

Three venues, around eighty people, all of them already employed and mid-contract. The risk in a move like this is never the software: it is the eighty records. Re-keying them by hand is what turns a switch-over into a project measured in weeks, and every retyped payroll number is a chance to get somebody's wages wrong.

Right-to-work paperwork sat in a folder at each venue - passports photocopied, share codes on a printout, visa expiry dates known only to whoever filed them. Nobody could answer "who needs re-checking next month?" without opening three cupboards.

The group's existing staff export was imported in one pass. Each person kept their site, job role, department, employment start date, payroll ID and pay rate, and the import runs as a dry run first, so the group sees exactly what it is about to do before anything is written. Holiday balances are loaded as a separate step - the import brings the entitlement and the accrual type, not the leave already taken.

Everyone then got their own links: one to set up their account and confirm their own details, and a no-login pre-boarding link to upload their own right-to-work evidence - passport, visa or biometric residence permit, or a gov.uk share code - before they even have a password. A manager records the check itself: which method was used, whether the right to work is continuous or time-limited, and, where it is time-limited, the date it has to be looked at again.

Shift records start at the same moment. Clock-ins and clock-outs, breaks, the notice a shift was given with, and any shift later cancelled or cut short, are all written as they happen.

Illustrative: a team of roughly eighty across three venues moves in a working day rather than a fortnight, because the import does the records and each person does their own details. The number is a realistic shape for a group this size, not a measured result.

Nobody can be put on a rota or clock in until their right-to-work check has been recorded and they have been approved. That gate is unconditional - it is the law, so it is not an option an organisation can turn off. Time-limited right to work is then tracked to its expiry, with reminders at thirty, fourteen, seven and one day.

From the first shift onwards the platform keeps a rolling twelve-week average of hours actually worked against contracted hours, alongside the notice staff were given and any cancellations inside forty-eight hours. That is the evidence a guaranteed-hours conversation needs, and it only exists if you started collecting it early - a reference period cannot be reconstructed after it has elapsed.

Worth knowing: the bulk import is a migration tool run for you during onboarding rather than a self-service upload, and it does not carry holiday already taken - balances are loaded separately.

A Fife gastropub

The morning read, before the doors open

Yesterday's trade, labour and compliance in one email before 7am, an assistant that answers the follow-up questions in plain English, and next week's rota drafted from the venue's own till history.

One site, one manager wearing every hat. Working out how yesterday had actually gone meant opening the till reports, then the rota, then the checklist folder, and doing the arithmetic in their head - usually around eleven, by which time the day had already started making its own decisions.

Labour percentage was a month-end discovery rather than a Monday decision, and the questions that mattered - are we up on last Tuesday, did we roster more than we needed, who was late twice this week - all needed somebody to go and look.

A Daily Brief email arrives before 7am covering the day before: net sales and how they compare with the same weekday last week, week to date against last week, rostered hours against hours actually worked with the labour cost and labour percentage, checklists completed and missed, any temperature breaches, lates and no-shows, who is on today, and holiday requests waiting for an answer. Where a figure genuinely is not available, the brief says so in plain English instead of printing a zero - "we cannot tell you" and "it was nothing" are different answers.

The follow-up questions go to the in-app assistant, which reads the same trade, labour, rota, stock and training data and answers in words rather than in a report. It reads; it does not change anything. The single exception is that it can save a purchase order as a draft when asked - a person still checks it and sends it.

For the rota, the venue's own till history is read back about eight weeks and turned into an hour-by-hour demand forecast for next week, each hour carrying a confidence grade so a quiet Tuesday with thin history is marked as a guess rather than presented as a fact. One tap builds a draft rota from it. The shifts arrive open and unnamed, and the manager assigns them - which is also what keeps the right-to-work and training checks in play, because they fire when a name goes on a shift.

Illustrative: the morning read becomes a few minutes on a phone before service rather than the best part of an hour of tab-switching after it. The saving is the same shape as the 30 to 45 minutes a day quoted above, arrived at a different way.

Labour becomes a decision made on a Monday with last week's real numbers in front of you, rather than a surprise found at month end when nothing can be done about it.

The rota starts from how the venue actually trades instead of from last week's rota copied forward, and the forecast is honest about the hours it does not have enough history to call.

Because the brief, the assistant and the stock reports all read the same sales figures, two screens cannot quietly disagree about what the venue took.

Worth knowing: trade and forecasting figures need a connected till. Without one the brief still covers compliance, people and rota, and says plainly which sections it cannot fill.

A hospitality group's procurement team

The price rise nobody sent an email about

Invoices photographed and checked line by line against what was ordered and what actually arrived, price creep over 2% flagged with the arithmetic shown, and a gross profit figure per stock period that reconciles with the till.

Supplier price increases do not announce themselves. They arrive a few pence at a time, on one line among sixty, on an invoice that gets glanced at and filed. Checking every line of every invoice against the price that was actually agreed is a job nobody in a busy kitchen has time to do, so it does not get done, and a 3 to 5% "price review" pays for itself long before anyone notices it.

The same is true of deliveries. A case short gets signed for in the rain at seven in the morning and invoiced in full, and by the time the invoice is queried the delivery is too far in the past to argue about.

Gross profit, meanwhile, was a month-end number assembled in a spreadsheet that nobody fully trusted, and which never quite matched what the till said.