Big Ambitions: opening hours and staffing

Staffing only the posts you need, at the hours customers actually come

Community figures — the 50-hour week, the 9-hour weekday and the cleaning headcounts below come from a referenced community post's play experience. The calculator only raises a check warning; the real contract and patch rules have to be confirmed in game.

1. Start from the business's own timetable

Each business guide has a day × hour heatmap — read the high-demand bands off it. A competitor's opening hours are a fair starting point, but once you are open, correct them against your own record of customers by hour.

2. Work out the weekly hours first

Put the same employee on every day and weekly hours climb fast. The business calculator takes open/closed, start time and length per day, and flags a post whose weekly hours pass 50. That warning assumes one person covers the whole schedule, so split the shift across people in the input to compare the real wage bill.

3. Office services have their own weekend demand

Community cases report that office businesses — law, graphic design, web development — lose a lot of weekend custom. You can compare using the calculator's "office, 9 hours on weekdays" preset, but that business's own heatmap and your operating record come first.

4. Register capacity is not the same as the queue

Even with the building's capacity satisfied, a long register queue costs you sales. A general retail store may do better with a single high-throughput register, while a coffee shop or fast food place, where orders arrive in bursts, may do better with two lines. In the calculator, register and customer throughput is entered separately from building capacity.

The storage capacity of counters and cash registers is in the furniture & appliances list. Weigh the extra employee's hourly wage against the throughput you gain.

5. Match cleaning and security to the size

The community rule of thumb is one cleaner on shift for small and medium units and two from large upwards. Businesses with heavy mess or security needs — nightclubs and liquor stores — get more based on the actual cleanliness, satisfaction and theft you see. The calculator's size presets carry this as an estimate.

A checklist to run through

  1. Check customers and queues by hour.
  2. Look for unmanned workstations and hours with no cover.
  3. Check stock-outs and missing display fixtures.
  4. Check cleanliness and security.
  5. Cut hours or rearrange the shift, then compare another week.