From 2 Hours to 30 Minutes: How Bounce Sheffield Plans Its Staff Rota with SynqOS Staff Manager

Ask any small venue manager what eats their week and the staff rota will be near the top of the list. It looks simple on paper — who's working, and when — but in a leisure venue it rarely is. Every shift needs the right number of people, in the right places, with the right skills, and with enough cover for the birthday parties already in the diary.

Bounce Sheffield, a trampoline park in Sheffield that takes its bookings through Roller, was spending more than 2 hours every week getting that right. After 8 weeks on SynqOS Staff Manager, the same job takes about 30 minutes.

At a glance

• Location: Sheffield, England
• Venue type: Trampoline park
• Booking system: Roller
• SynqOS tool: Staff Manager
• Time live: 8 weeks
• Weekly rota planning time before: over 2 hours
• Weekly rota planning time now: about 30 minutes

The challenge: rota planning in a small team

Bounce Sheffield is a small trampoline park with one party room and usually no more than three staff on duty each day. With a team that small, there's no slack — every shift has to be planned carefully, because one person in the wrong place leaves a gap on the floor.

Building the weekly rota meant answering several questions at once: who is available, which area of the park each person should cover, whether the skills on every shift are balanced, and whether every booked birthday party has the right cover. Doing that by hand took more than 2 hours every week — a large share of the management team's time, spent on admin rather than on running the venue.

The solution: SynqOS Staff Manager

Staff Manager takes the week's demands and turns them into a rota, balancing availability, skills, floor positions and birthday party cover in a single step. Instead of juggling a spreadsheet, a calendar and a list of who can do what, the manager reviews a rota that already accounts for all of it.

Bookings still come through Roller, so nothing changes for guests. Behind the scenes, managers can also see at a glance who is on annual leave, who works part time and what each person is paid. When the rota is final, it is exported and shared with the team, so everyone knows their shifts in advance.

The results after 8 weeks

• Weekly rota planning time fell from more than 2 hours to about 30 minutes — a saving of at least 1.5 hours every week.
• Across a year, that returns more than 75 hours to the management team.
• Skills balance and birthday party cover are now handled in the same step as the rota, instead of being checked separately.

What that time saving is worth

Using the same assumption as the free SynqOS ROI calculator — £25 an hour for a manager's time — saving 1.5 hours a week is worth around £37 a week, or roughly £1,950 a year. Staff Manager costs £30 a month (£360 a year), so the time saved on rota planning alone covers its cost more than five times over, before counting the value of fewer staffing gaps and better-covered parties.

Who is Staff Manager for?

Staff Manager is built for leisure venues where small teams cover several roles: trampoline parks, soft play centres, family entertainment centres, escape rooms, bars and cafés. If your rota has to account for skills, positions and bookings — not just names and hours — it's designed for you.

Try Staff Manager for your venue

SynqOS is a venue operations platform that analyses, automates and optimises day-to-day running across staffing, marketing, customer support, cafés and operations. You can explore Staff Manager and every other tool with sample data before connecting anything, and use the ROI calculator to see what SynqOS could save your own venue.