Excel (.xlsx) · live headcount formulas · opens in Excel & Google Sheets · No signup required
A roster grid: one row per employee, Monday–Sunday columns, each cell an available window, ALL, or OFF
A live “Staff available” formula row that counts non-OFF entries per day
Sample restaurant roster showing the format, plus blank rows to extend
A rule-of-thumb note for reading the headcount against your required floor staff
Open the .xlsx in Excel or import into Google Sheets — the counting formulas survive both.
One row per employee with their role. Overwrite the sample names.
From your collected forms, enter each person’s window per day: a time range like 9a–5p, ALL for any time, or OFF.
The “Staff available” row updates as you type. Compare each day’s count to the minimum staff you need on the floor.
If Thursday shows 3 available and you need 4, resolve it now — ask for flexibility, hire, or adjust hours — instead of discovering it in the schedule. EpicShifts does this aggregation live from employee-maintained availability.
This is a manager’s sheet, not an employee intake form — pair it with an availability form (weekly or monthly) that staff actually fill in. It shines at the moment before scheduling: seeing coverage risk by day at a glance. Its cost is transcription — every form has to be copied in by hand, and every change re-copied, which is exactly the loop scheduling software closes by letting employees maintain their own availability that aggregates instantly.
Already filled it in? Upload the file to EpicShifts and we’ll import it into a live schedule — your team sees their shifts on mobile, swaps and picks up open shifts, and gets reminders automatically.
Collect availability per employee (a weekly or monthly form works), then aggregate it into one grid — rows for people, columns for days, each cell the person’s available window. This template adds a formula row that counts available staff per day so coverage gaps are visible before you build the schedule.
It’s a COUNTIFS formula per day-column that counts every cell that is filled in and not OFF. It works identically in Excel and Google Sheets, and it keeps counting as you add rows within the grid.
A common rule of thumb is having at least 1.5× your required floor staff available per day — so a day that needs 4 people wants 6+ available. At exactly 1× you have zero slack: one call-out and the day breaks. The tracker makes the thin days obvious.
Dustin Hanke, Founder, EpicShifts — Dustin builds EpicShifts and writes about scheduling, labor cost, and shift-work operations for restaurants and other hourly teams.
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