Task management for restaurants, cafés and small hotels

Every kitchen has a list pinned by the pass. Probes calibrated, fridge temperatures written in the diary, hot water on at the hand-wash sink, float counted. On a quiet Tuesday it all gets done. On the Saturday the sous chef calls in sick, nobody can say whether it did.

In Klusko you make ‘Opening checks’ and ‘Closing checks’ daily recurring tasks, with the list in the description and an owner for each shift. The next one only appears once today’s is ticked off, so a missed close shows up as overdue on the board the next morning, rather than as a surprise at your next inspection.

Your Safer Food, Better Business diary (or whatever food safety records you use) stays where it is. Klusko is the reminder and the record of who said they did it, not a replacement for those.

Lunch and dinner service often mean two crews who barely overlap. The handover happens on a scrap of paper or doesn’t happen. A #handover channel in team chat fixes most of it: the lunch team posts what’s low, what’s been 86’d and which table complained, and the evening chef reads it on the way in. Anything that needs doing becomes a task with a name on it.

Rota swaps work the same way. Klusko has no rota or shift scheduling of its own, so keep whatever app builds your rota. But the ‘can anyone swap Saturday?’ conversation is better in a channel than in forty private texts, and the online dots show who’s around to answer.

The glasswasher needs descaling every fortnight, the extraction filters monthly, and somebody has to remember the walk-in seal that’s been letting in warm air since August. Set these up as recurring tasks (every 2 weeks, monthly) on a Maintenance project, and attach the engineer’s report to the task when they’ve been.

One gap: recurring tasks go up to monthly. The six-monthly duct clean or the annual gas safety check needs a one-off task with a due date, which you then copy for next year. For a hotel, give each floor or each room its own tag, ‘Room 12’, and the housekeeping team can report a dripping shower tray from wherever they are. See how recurring work is set up in more detail.

Klusko is priced per person: Free for up to 10 people, then £5 a month each on Team billed yearly. For a café with six regulars that’s probably nothing. For a restaurant with twenty-five staff, several of them weekend students, it adds up, so we’d invite the people who run shifts and handle orders, and keep the rest on the rota app you already have. Right now every plan is free during early access; the pricing page has the details.

The bigger catch is phones. The iPhone app is in testing, there’s no Android app yet, and a lot of kitchen staff don’t sit at a computer. Klusko works best today with a tablet on the office wall or the manager’s laptop in the back.