Restaurant staff: five roles, five PINs, and one labour number.

Your roster may say steward, senior steward, floor in-charge and counter boy. The till only needs to know five things about a person: whether they own the place, whether they can approve someone else's mistake, whether they handle money, whether they take orders on the floor, and whether they cook. EasyKOT ships exactly those five roles: owner, manager, cashier, captain and chef.

Give each person their own PIN, not a shared one. A shared cashier PIN turns every question about a shift into "somebody". StudioMatrx's India security guide (studiomatrx.org, 25 Jul 2026) puts it as well as anyone: attribution is the control, not the approval popup. The manager typing a PIN matters less than the fact that a name is now attached to the event.

Two habits are worth fixing on day one. Change a PIN the day someone leaves, and never let a new joiner "use Rahul's for now". The whole value of the next two sections rests on a PIN meaning one person.

The common mistake is locking the till down so hard that service stops and the manager becomes a human approval button. The better shape is wide permission to sell and narrow permission to undo. A cashier can take the order, settle it, take part of the money now and the rest later, and give a discount without asking anyone. Money going back out, and cooked food being written off, need a second person.

One rule applies to everybody. A line that has not been fired can be removed freely: nobody cooked it, nothing was lost. A line the kitchen has already made is different. Voiding it always takes a reason, chosen from four: the customer changed their mind, the kitchen cannot make it, it was rung on the wrong table, or the wrong item was rung. The keypad appears only for a cashier; an owner or a manager confirms their own from that dialog. That is not distrust. It is so the reason exists.

Petpooja describes the skim this control exists for: the waiter takes the order, pockets the cash and cancels the ticket so the item never reaches the bill (blog.petpooja.com, KOT cancellation). One person must not be able to drop an order and bury it in the same tap. The button-by-button version of all of this is the discounts, voids and refunds guide.

A PIN does not stop a determined person. What it does is turn a suspicion into a pattern. Every sale, discount, void, refund and reprint is written to the order ledger against whoever was signed in, and the till. A PIN itself is never stored: it is shown once when set, then only replaced. A bill is never edited in place either, because a correction is a new event on top of the old one, which is what keeps your invoice series intact for GST.

Read patterns, not single bills. Voids clustered on one shift, refunds that always happen after the manager leaves, discounts that land on the same four tables: none of those is proof on its own, and all of them are worth a conversation. An audit trail of this kind is normal in the Indian market rather than a differentiator; Petpooja publishes reports on bill modifications, discounted and cancelled orders and cash-drawer operations (petpooja.com, reports).

The honest limit. Who applied a discount is on the ledger, not on a screen. EasyKOT records the person behind every discount, void, refund and reprint, and the dashboard shows the day's discount and refund totals, but there is no by-person view of them today. If that is the control you need this month, ask for it before you buy. The staff theft post covers the leaks a PIN cannot see at all, starting with a personal UPI QR on the counter.

A salary bill of ₹1,80,000 a month means nothing by itself. Against ₹6,00,000 of sales it is 30%; against ₹9,00,000 it is 20%. The percentage is the number that tells you whether the roster fits the room, and it moves without anyone deciding to move it: one quiet week and a roster nobody trimmed does it.

The published Indian ranges do not agree, so treat them as rough bands and name the source when you quote one. DineOpen puts labour at 20% to 30% of sales, including PF, ESI and overtime, and flags anything above 35% (dineopen.com, 12 Mar 2026). DineCard's benchmark post puts a QSR or café at 25% to 30%, casual dining at 30% to 35% and fine dining at 35% to 40% (dinecard.in). One Indian hospitality consultancy, HospiMinds, agrees with DineOpen on casual dining at 20% to 30% but puts fine dining and hotel food and beverage well below DineCard at 25% to 35%, and adds that food and labour together should stay under about 60% to 65% of revenue (hospiminds.com, undated). All three are vendor or consultant figures rather than survey data, which is exactly why your own last four weeks are the better comparison.

Sales per labour hour is the number that changes a decision. Total sales divided by total hours worked tells you whether the extra person on Friday paid for himself, and unlike the percentage it does not fall just because a good week happened. The dashboard's Labour report carries hours worked, labour cost, labour % of sales, sales per labour hour and cost by person, so the comparison is week against week rather than against somebody's benchmark.

Whatever you hand over on payday, the real cost includes the employer's statutory share, overtime, and any food and stay you provide. Two of those are legal thresholds rather than choices. Check the EPFO and ESIC thresholds with your CA before you budget a number; do not take a percentage off a POS blog, this one included.

• Minimum wage is a state notification, not a national figure. It is fixed per scheduled employment, skill category and zone, as basic plus a dearness allowance that is usually revised twice a year. The gazette notification for your state is the only authoritative source, so no page, including this one, should print a rupee figure.
• The four labour codes are in force since 21 November 2025 (PIB), replacing 29 older laws. Several provisions have not commenced and the central and state rules are still pending, so your state's Shops and Establishments Act remains the day-to-day reference for hours, leave and registers.
• A weekly holiday of at least 24 consecutive hours per worker is the shape most state Acts take. Maharashtra's 2017 Act is the clear worked example: the establishment may open every day of the week, but each worker still gets the day, with compensatory leave within two months if it is worked. Other states differ, so read your own.
• Monthly wages are due before the 7th of the following month under section 17 of the Code on Wages (indiankanoon.org), and a person who resigns or is dismissed must be paid within two working days. Weekly and fortnightly cycles have their own deadlines in the same section.

For a full cost per head, Petpooja publishes a free staff cost calculator that adds the statutory and overhead layers on top of salary. It is good, and there is no reason to rebuild it. For what a role pays in the market, Indeed India's own pages give a median of ₹13,389 a month for restaurant staff and ₹24,785 a month for a restaurant manager (in.indeed.com, read 2026-09-09). That is Indeed's own aggregate of self-reported pay rather than a survey with a stated sampling frame, so read it as a direction and not a rate for your street.

Wages are the second biggest number after food, and they arrive in one lump while sales arrive daily. That is why the weekly close carries a Staff paid line of its own alongside sales collected, expenses paid and the cash carried forward: an advance handed over on a Tuesday against a salary paid on the 5th is real money out of the drawer and belongs in that week.

Two practical notes. Record an advance as a paid-out from the cash box at the moment the note leaves, with the person's name in the note, or it will show up as a variance nobody can explain at closing. And keep the roster and the PIN list on the same page: someone who no longer works for you should not still have a working PIN a week later. Both screens are covered in the staff PINs and roles guide and the weekly accounts guide; the routine itself is in the weekly close post.

None of this needs a payroll department. It needs five PINs, one rule about voiding cooked food, and a labour percentage you read on Monday instead of at the end of the quarter. EasyKOT is ₹299 a month or ₹2,990 a year plus 18% GST, and the first three months are free with no card, if you want your own five names on the ledger by tomorrow's service.