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Zenchef
What is Zenchef?
Zenchef is a reservation and floor management platform designed for restaurants. It allows you to take online bookings commission-free, centralize reservations from various channels (website, Google, social media, etc.), manage your floor plan, and reduce no-shows through automated reminders and credit card guarantees. Zenchef also helps restaurateurs better understand their customers and build loyalty.
Why is the Zenchef integration important?
Your reservations are the best indicator of upcoming footfall, yet they often remain disconnected from your schedule. By connecting Zenchef to Shyfter, your booked covers become a staffing forecast:
- You plan your team hour by hour based on the actual number of covers expected, rather than a rough estimate.
- You immediately spot risks of understaffing or overstaffing in the schedule and AutoPlanning.
- You track your profitability by comparing booked covers, scheduled hours, and clocked hours, with a cost per cover that is both planned and actual.
What does the Zenchef integration involve?
- Automatic reservation import: every day at 5:00 AM for the period from the previous day to the next 14 days, then hourly between 10:00 AM and 11:00 PM for today and tomorrow. The last 12 months of reservations are imported upon installation.
- No personal customer data: Shyfter only imports operational information (date, time, number of covers, room, service, channel, status). Names, emails, phone numbers, comments, and allergies are never read.
- Staffing requirements by hour: each reservation is counted for every hour of the meal, based on the Zenchef table duration (or a default meal duration of 90 minutes). The requirement is displayed as "scheduled/needed" in the day, week, and service views of the schedule.
- AI-powered cover forecasting: every Monday, Shyfter forecasts your covers for the next 14 days based on your history. The schedule uses the higher value between booked covers and the forecast to anticipate reservations not yet made.
- Your Zenchef services: lunch, dinner, and your other Zenchef services can be imported as slots in the Shyfter schedule service view.
- Automatic calibration: Shyfter cross-references your past reservations and clock-ins to suggest staffing levels expressed in covers (e.g., up to 20 covers, 2 people).
- Analytics: covers, share of walk-ins, no-show rate, average booking lead time, people per table, covers per channel, and cost per cover, both globally and by Zenchef room associated with a Shyfter section.
- Dashboard: covers for the week (actual and forecast) and covers for the last 30 days, compared to the previous 30 days.
How do I set up the Zenchef integration?
Before you begin:
- On the Zenchef side: a Zenchef Grow subscription is required. Retrieve your authentication token and your restaurant ID in Zenchef under Settings → Partners.
- For Shyfter: this integration is available starting from the Standard plan. Installation is restricted to administrators and managers with productivity management permissions.
- Good to know: the Zenchef token will expire if the password of the account that generated it is changed. For a stable connection, ask Zenchef API support for a token dedicated to a technical user.
Step 1 – Install Zenchef in Shyfter
Go to Settings → Integrations, under the Productivity category. Open the Zenchef card, click Install, then paste your token and your restaurant ID. The import of your last 12 months of reservations will start immediately.
Step 2 – Manage your schedule based on your reservations
Shyfter then allows you to base your schedule on your covers. Choose "Configure everything automatically" to let Shyfter apply the right settings and calculate your staffing shifts, or "Do it myself" to set them manually in Settings → Performance.
Step 3 – Import your Zenchef services
Create your services based on your Zenchef ones, replace your existing services, or keep your own. Your shifts are never modified: only their grouping in the service view changes.
And that's it: your reservations will arrive in Shyfter automatically, and you can track your analytics in Settings → Performance → Table reservations.
