An after hours answering service answers calls when your dining room is shut, and Skai Solutions puts the cheapest lawful human alternative in Australia at A$67.70 a night because the Restaurant Industry Award sets a two hour casual minimum engagement.
That one clause is why the arithmetic here looks nothing like the arithmetic for an office. A restaurant's after hours is also not the evening, it is the closed morning, the gap between services and the day you are shut. What follows is what each type of service actually does, what the human alternative costs in both countries, what these services handle badly, and the venues that should not buy one at all.
It answers the phone in the hours you are not on the floor. For a restaurant those hours are not the ones the phrase suggests. A law firm's after hours is the evening. A restaurant's after hours is the closed morning, the 3pm to 5pm gap between service periods, the day you are shut, and the hour after last orders when someone is trying to book for Saturday.
There are four categories of answer and they are genuinely different products, not tiers of the same one. A recorded message tells the caller to ring back. Call diversion sends the phone to a mobile, usually the owner's. A message-taking service has a person in a call centre write down a name and a number. An AI phone agent answers the question, checks the diary and completes the booking.
Our own telephone answering service explainer covers the middle two in detail, and the cheapest way to answer a restaurant phone ranks all four by cost. This page is about the specific question of covering the hours nobody is there.
Start with the alternative you are actually choosing against, which is paying a person. In Australia the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119 sets the floor, and it contains one clause that decides the whole argument: a casual has a minimum engagement of 2 consecutive hours per shift.
So the arithmetic, which is ours and built entirely from published inputs: the Fair Work Ombudsman pay guide published 24 June 2026 puts the Level 2 adult hourly rate at A$27.08 from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. Add the 25% casual loading and the ordinary casual rate is A$33.85. Two hours is A$67.70. That is the minimum you can lawfully pay someone to sit with the phone for a stretch, whether it rings forty times or not at all.
| Cover, six nights a week | Our arithmetic | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Casual minimum engagement, MA000119 Level 2 | A$33.85 x 2 hours x 6 nights | about A$21,122 |
| Same, one night a week | A$33.85 x 2 hours x 1 night | about A$3,520 |
Those totals are 52 weeks at the ordinary casual rate and they exclude superannuation, weekend penalties and the late night loading of A$2.95 an hour from 10pm to midnight. In other words they are the floor of the floor. Set them against a monthly software subscription and you can see why almost nobody staffs a phone after service.
Because it breaks the link between call volume and cost. Most venues assume a quiet phone is a cheap phone. Under a minimum engagement it is the most expensive phone you own, measured per call. Twelve calls across a two hour block costs A$5.64 a call. Two calls costs A$33.85 each.
That is the structural reason the market moved to shared services and then to software: both spread a fixed cost across a variable number of calls. It is also why the honest answer for a venue with three after hours calls a week is not to buy anything at all, which is covered below.
Yes, and materially. New Zealand has no statutory minimum shift length, so the two hour floor simply does not exist. What does exist is section 67D of the Employment Relations Act 2000: an availability provision, which is what you are creating when you ask someone to be reachable, is only valid where the employment agreement specifies guaranteed hours, the employer has genuine reasons on reasonable grounds, and reasonable compensation is paid for being available.
The practical effect is that a New Zealand operator can lawfully pay for a shorter block but cannot lawfully ask a staff member to keep a phone nearby for free. Our minimum shift hours page works through both countries, and hospitality wages in New Zealand has the current rates.
Fifteen minutes, your hours, your menu, and the calls nobody was there to take.
Book a Free DemoSome of those limits are inherent to the model rather than to after hours cover. Our page on how a virtual receptionist works goes through the handover step by step.
Three things, consistently, and any vendor who does not tell you is not being straight with you.
Recorded messages have a fourth failure that is worth naming separately: most callers do not ring back. A recorded message is not coverage, it is a polite way of declining the call.
Be clear about this, because the wrong purchase here is common. If your calls all arrive inside trading hours and the problem is that staff are carrying plates when the phone rings, you do not have an after hours problem. You have a during-service coverage problem, and an after hours product will not touch it. Changing who picks up during service is the cheaper fix.
If you take three or four calls a week outside service, the honest recommendation is a well-written voicemail message and nothing else. The cost of any service will exceed the value of what it recovers, and a page that will not say so is selling you something.
Where it does pay is a venue that is shut one or two days a week, a venue with a long afternoon gap, or a venue where the owner's mobile has quietly become the after hours line. That last one is the common case, and the cost of it is not money. A fuller comparison of the options sits on the AI receptionist page, including the number of calls it has to save to pay for itself.
How long does setup take? Five days for a Skai Solutions agent, including the menu, the hours and the diary connection.
Will it cover the middle of service as well as after hours? Yes. The same agent picks up whenever the line is not answered, which for most venues turns out to be the busiest hour of the night rather than the quiet ones.
Do I need a separate number? No. The usual setup diverts the existing restaurant number on no answer, so nothing changes for the caller.
What happens to the hold music? In Australia that is a separate OneMusic licence category priced from A$293.33 a year, which is covered on the music licence page. An agent that answers on the first ring does not use a hold queue.
Award rates change every 1 July, so the figures here are a snapshot dated 11 September 2026 and are general information, not employment advice. For a specific classification, use the Fair Work Pay and Conditions Tool.