Banquet staff schedule template

Why a banquet schedule is built per event

A restaurant schedule starts from a fixed shift: lunch, dinner, close. A banquet crew starts from the event order. A Friday night plated wedding for 180 needs a different team from a Friday breakfast for 25, and both can be on the same day in the same building. So the schedule is a list of events, each with its own roles and times, and a person's week is the sum of the events they are on.

That is also why a banquet schedule changes in the middle of the week. When the guarantee moves, the crew for that event moves with it.

Filling it in, in order

1. List the week's events. One group per event, in time order, with its room.
2. Work out the crew for each. Start from your ratios: servers, bartenders, bussers, captains and housemen. See the server-per-guest guide for starting points.
3. Set call and out times from the event times, role by role (below).
4. Put names against the rows. Leave a row blank where nobody is assigned yet.
5. Add hours and breaks and look at the totals.
6. Post it, then collect confirmations.

The step-by-step version, from event orders to a published schedule, is in Staff banquets from the BEO.

A filled example week

A fictional week at the Harborview Hotel with three events: a Tuesday sales meeting breakfast, a Friday plated wedding dinner and a Saturday buffet reception. Names are invented.

Call and out times by role

Call time can be set by role rather than one time for everyone. These are the defaults Hotelwright starts a new hotel with. Change them to match your house standard.

A coffee break is called 60 minutes before start by default. Housemen follow the room's setup and strike times instead of an offset, because one houseman can cover several events in a day.

Before you post it, check the hours

Read the week once for hours before it goes up on the wall. Look for:

• Someone over your overtime limit for the day or the week
• A meal break missing or too short for the length of the shift
• A person on two events at the same time, or on the clock without enough rest between days
• A shift shorter than your minimum

Treat these as flags to look at, not blocks. There can be a good reason to leave one, and when you do, write the reason down. In Hotelwright these are called Schedule checks (on the Team plan): the app raises a flag and never stops you. Rules differ by state, city and employer, so check what applies to you; this page is not legal advice.

Copy it to a spreadsheet

If you keep the schedule in Excel or Sheets, use the same column order as the printable: Day, Event, Room, Role, Name, Call, Out, Break, Confirmed. Sort by Name to see one person's week and by Day to see the floor.

On the Team plan, Hotelwright exports shifts as a 7shifts file, a When I Work file, or a generic CSV or Excel file. The 7shifts and When I Work files use those apps' documented field labels. This printable is for hand use.

Keeping it current mid-week

The schedule goes out of date the day a guarantee moves, a room changes or someone calls out. Mark the old copy, post the new one, and tell only the people on the event that changed. The routine is in the BEO change order guide. On the Team plan, shifts publish to each person's phone in English or Spanish, they confirm with a tap, and a change after publishing notifies the people on that event.