Curry Leaf Cafe wants to grow to be the most well-known Indian restaurant in all of the UK, and with the help of Deputy, they have more time to focus on this task

Back in 2014, Euan Sey and Kanthi Thamma decided to do something about the lack of authentic South Indian food available in the UK, and so the Curry Leaf Café was born.

Its mission? To serve authentic traditional South Indian food, with a focus on making the most of high-quality ingredients from great suppliers. And right from the start, the local community in Brighton couldn’t get enough of it.

Today, the Curry Leaf Café serves delicious traditional Indian food and Craft Beer to 900 hungry customers every week, and the business has expanded to two other locations. The team now manage a South Indian street food kiosk at Brighton station, as well as their Kemptown Kitchen, which specialises in Indian tapas and small plates.

The Curry Leaf Café is famous not only for its buzzing atmosphere and amazing food, but also its high quality service: the team are known for being extremely friendly and attentive. But with 40 staff to manage, from waiters to chefs, the Curry Leaf Café discovered that their old way of organising shifts just wasn’t able to keep up with their expanding business.

As the Curry Leaf Café’s business grew, Head of Operations, Stewart Cumming, found that managing schedules and keeping accurate records was increasingly challenging – and time-consuming.

When the Curry Leaf Café started, “staff schedules were printed-out Excel sheets, written on by staff, then manually typed up at the end of the week and used to pay wages”, Stewart explains, “It was clunky, time-consuming, not very accurate and not secure”.

This system of organising led to all sorts of challenges – not least trying to decipher 40 different people’s handwriting! It left a lot of room for human error and inaccuracy, and mistakes were frequent. Most frustrating of all was how much time was being wasted. Sorting out payroll was extremely challenging, taking Stewart up to 2 days per month: time that would have been better spent on other aspects of the growing business.

In late 2017, Stewart selected Deputy to help manage schedules and generate accurate timesheets: and he hasn’t looked back since. The team started by using just a few of the features, like the scheduling software, but they’ve found that as their demands have changed, Deputy has been able to keep up.

Feedback from employees has been clear: Deputy makes everyone’s lives easier. Now the whole Curry Leaf Café team use Deputy to clock in and out from their shift. Many of the team have even downloaded the app themselves, allowing them to manage their schedules at their convenience and to easily keep correct personal records: meaning no more printed rotas, and highly accurate timesheets.

The Curry Leaf Café team have found Deputy’s most useful features are the ability to store employee information, as well as the ability to auto-fill shifts: it’s an incredibly efficient way to work, and Stewart has been thrilled by the results.

“It really does save us money”, explains Stewart, noting that when he implemented Deputy, the Curry Leaf Café immediately saved 5% on their wage bill. Most importantly, Stewart has slashed the time he was wasting doing payroll: “Payroll used to span two days, now I get it done in about 45 minutes.”

Deputy has also given Stewart a unique insight into how the business operates by making everyday operations more transparent: “it’s allowed us to run in a much more consistent way, which has been hugely beneficial”.