Case Study: Elbow Room cuts labor costs and simplifies scheduling with 7shifts

A place to gather and enjoy something new

Elbow Room is a 95‑seat neighborhood restaurant in Calgary that opened in 2017, serving brunch, lunch and dinner across a two‑level layout (downstairs kitchen, upstairs bar and patio). That split floorplan, combined with traditional scheduling by Excel, printed schedules and phone/texted shift swaps, made staff rostering, shift trades and labor forecasting time‑consuming and error‑prone.

They implemented 7shifts (integrated with their TouchBistro POS) to handle schedule creation, shift requests and in‑app messaging (including attachments) and to use the labor budget tool for forecasting. Managers now build the weekly schedule in about 1.5 hours, communication and approvals are streamlined, and labor costs dropped from a 25% target by 4–6% per week during the first month while forecasting and labor control improved.

Elbow Room

Josh Brennand

Director/Partner