Sign-up sheets / Church
Sign-up sheet
Church Kitchen Volunteer Sign Up Sheet (free, online)
Cooks, servers and a dish crew for every meal the church kitchen puts out, from the Wednesday supper to the funeral lunch with two days' notice.
Free for one page. Pro is $79 a year for the whole church, and churches and nonprofits get 20% off every year with the code CHURCH20.
How to set it up
The church kitchen feeds more people than anyone realizes: a weekly supper, the men's breakfast, funeral lunches that come with no notice, the youth pizza night. A kitchen sheet lists each meal as its own list with the jobs that actually exist: a lead cook who plans the menu, two or three prep hands at 3:00, servers on the line, and a dish crew that stays until the pots are hung up. Three in the kitchen and two in the dish room is a comfortable evening for a hundred people.
The mistake is a sheet that only asks for cooks. The dish crew is what nobody signs up for and what sends the same deacon home at 9:30 every Wednesday, so give it its own row with a count. One tip: keep a standing on-call row for funeral meals with no date on it. When a family needs a lunch, email everyone on that row with the day and the head count.
Questions people ask
- Do our cooks need a food handler card?
- Depends on the county. Add a checkbox question at signup, 'I have a current food handler card', and make it required for the lead cook row. You'll see who has one in the dashboard without asking.
- Can the Wednesday supper repeat every week?
- Yes. Extend the page a month at a time, or turn on the rolling schedule and the next weeks add themselves with the same jobs. Volunteers sign up as far ahead as they like and get a reminder the day before.
- How do we handle a funeral meal with two days' notice?
- That is what the on-call row is for. Email everyone on it with the date, then put the dishes on the funeral meal sheet so the food itself is covered too.
Why not a paper sheet or a Google Form?
A paper sheet lives in one place and fills up with the first people who walk past it. A Google Form takes forty signups for a row that needed two, and you find out in the spreadsheet. An online sign-up sheet closes each row when it's covered, sends a reminder the day before, and gives every person a link to cancel so the spot reopens. See the side-by-side with Google Forms.
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