Risteriet Coffee depends on Deputy to help manage their growing business

The origin story of Risteriet Coffee is quite simple: “15 or 16 years ago, me and two other guys started to roast and sell coffee beans”, explained Lars Morch, Co-founder. Now the team have 3 shops spread across Copenhagen city centre, where they sell freshly roasted coffee and organic breads. They also operate a facility just outside the city, roasting over a tonne of coffee beans a week, selling them to other coffee shops, and straight to customers online.

As the company has grown and changed, so too has the market. “16 years ago, we didn’t use the internet in the same way. It’s changed the way we meet our customers, and we needed to master social media. 16 years ago, you didn’t even think about it.”

With 30 employees spread across 4 locations, keeping everyone’s schedules in order was proving a challenge, especially with a workforce made up of baristas mostly drawn from the local student population. “It’s not a big problem to find people; there are a lot of young people in Copenhagen who want a job. Our biggest problem is staff flexibility.” With casual staff working on their own busy schedules, Risteriet needed a solution that could keep up.

“When we started out,” laughs Lars, “We had this fantastic solution called Microsoft Word”. The daily and weekly schedules were printed out and stuck onto the shop door, but this inflexible and unclear solution caused its own problems: “There were a lot of red lines across it during the week. It was also the master for salaries. It was quite a mess.”

As they got a little more advanced, Risteriet started to use an Excel spreadsheet, but when that didn’t work either, they knew they had to find a solution. They tried an online system: “it was okay from the backend, but access for staff was difficult. We needed a more modern solution with a better user interface for our baristas”, and so they chose Deputy.

The biggest challenge facing Risteriet is one faced by many small businesses: human resources. “There is a very high minimum salary in Denmark”, explains Lars, “So we need to know the hours people are working fairly precisely.” Before Deputy, Risteriet had no insight into how the numbers of hours they’d planned for in a week compared to the number of hours people actually worked, which made planning staff schedules very difficult.

The whole Risteriet team love Deputy. “The most important feature, for us, is that the employees can see their schedule, what they’re going to do for the week ahead”. The management team can also send out reminders, so no more missed shifts.

Before Deputy, Lars had no real visibility into the hours that his staff worked. “We didn’t know when people were arriving and leaving” but now that they use Deputy’s check in/check out feature, they have an accurate record of the hours worked by staff, and of the time when the baristas start and leave.

The check in/check out feature has really helped with planning for the future of the business. “Now we have a very strong reporting tool that can give us the hours delivered more exactly” says Lars, who adds that this has already delivered a huge saving: “The best thing is that we’ve reduced almost 10% on planned costs and hours delivered”.

Ultimately, Deputy makes life at Risteriet much more flexible. They’ve put the freed-up admin time to good use, and are currently planning an expansion of their online business, as well as more stores in Copenhagen.