Aards saves a full day a month on hiring admin with Shiftbase HR Pro

Vic Gruntjes and sommelier Chrissy van Roessel run Aards Eetbar & Wijnwinkel in Berkel-Enschot, alongside Café Mout next door and the event location Hemels, which they took on recently. By adding HR Pro on top of Shiftbase, Vic got hiring into one system and won back a full day every month.

Anyone running a busy hospitality spot knows how hiring really goes. A dishwasher starts on Friday, the contract gets sorted “later”, and later becomes the week the salaries are due. By then the new starters are already on the floor while their contracts are still catching up, the Word template is full of details keyed in by hand, and a full day of the month disappears into fixing it all before payroll.

Vic Gruntjes runs Aards Eetbar & Wijnwinkel in Berkel-Enschot with his partner, sommelier Chrissy van Roessel, alongside Café Mout next door, and event location Hemels. By adding HR Pro on top of Shiftbase, Vic got the whole hiring cycle into one system. The result: a full day a month back, every new starter on a signed contract before their first shift, and the payroll-week dread gone.

The challenge: contracts always came last

Vic and Chrissy opened Aards in Berkel-Enschot in 2021, a village eatery paired with a wine shop of around 350 bottles. Vic trained in hotel management and never planned to run a kitchen, but good chefs are hard to find outside the big cities, so he picked up the pans himself. Five years on he runs three venues, Aards, Café Mout next door, and Hemels, a restaurant he took on recently, with around 13 full-time staff and some 70 part-timers between them. Most of the team is part-time, and the turnover is constant: dishwashers and seasonal hires come and go, and a new face starts most months.

For a long time, contracts were the last thing to get done. An admin office handled them, but the whole thing ran on email back and forth, and small errors kept slipping through. Vic worked from a Word template, keying in each new starter's details by hand. Hand-keying every contract under time pressure is how small errors creep in: a bank detail off by a digit, a start date a day out. In the Netherlands a contract has to run at least six months to carry a trial period, so a single mistyped date could quietly cost someone their probation terms. And because the paperwork kept getting pushed back until payroll forced it, new starters were often well onto the floor before their contracts caught up. Every month it piled into the same place: a full day in the run-up to payday spent getting it all back in line.

He was getting people onto shifts quickly enough, but the contracts trailed behind, and that sat badly with him.

“I'd put the contracts off until the salaries had to go out, and then I'd be filling everything in at once. It was always a hassle.” Vic Gruntjes, Head Chef and Co-Owner, Aards Eetbar & Wijnwinkel

The solution: an email about a beta he said yes to straight away

Vic was already running scheduling and time tracking in Shiftbase. When Camila from Shiftbase's product team reached out about an early version of HR Pro, the add-on built to take hiring and contract admin off his plate, he didn't need much convincing. He'd been looking for exactly this, a way to stop losing evenings to paperwork, and he could see straight away how much time it would give him back.

For Vic, the maths was simple.

“The most valuable thing for me is time, not money. Whenever I can save time, that really matters.”                                                      Vic Gruntjes, Head Chef and Co-Owner, Aards Eetbar & Wijnwinkel

He used to lean on an admin office, a Word template and a chain of emails for all of this. Now he barely has to touch it.

“Now it's just one click. I send an email and the system does the rest.”

Vic Gruntjes, Head Chef and Co-Owner, Aards Eetbar & Wijnwinkel

Results at a glance

The change shows up right across hiring at Aards:

The impact: now the contract comes first

These days Vic doesn't have to improvise to move fast. Getting someone started and getting their contract signed are now the same motion. After a trial shift and a short chat, he asks the new starter for one thing, an email address, and sends them into HR Pro. They fill in their own details, the contract is ready from his template, and they sign it before they pick up their first shift. The details are right, because nobody is keying them in at 11pm before payroll. And the full day Vic used to lose every month is simply back.

The bigger change is what Vic no longer carries.

What's next, for Aards and for Shiftbase

With hiring sorted, Vic is focused on steadying the three venues, getting turnover down and helping people stay longer. The admin headroom has already helped him grow: when he took over Hemels, which came with its own tangle of contracts and rostering, he moved it onto Shiftbase quickly, put the hiring on HR Pro, and ran it more smoothly almost from day one. Longer term, he wants to keep doing the thing he loves, building good hospitality concepts.

Shiftbase is building this in step with operators like Vic. HR Pro becomes generally available at the end of the month, and the new-joiner journey is where we are heading next: onboarding and training that happen on a phone, the way Vic's young team already expects to work. Solve the chaos today, grow into the next stage tomorrow.

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