Building your first rota

Draft a week, copy last week forward, and save a template you can reuse.

2 min readUpdated Today
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The rota lives under Rota in the admin panel. It shows one week at a time for one site, with a row per person and a column per day.

Draft, then publish

Every shift you create starts as a draft. Nobody is told about it and nothing appears in the app until you publish the week, so you can move things around all afternoon without anyone's phone buzzing.

Adding a shift

  1. Click an empty cell on the row for the person and the day you want.

  2. Set the start and end time, and the unpaid break if there is one.

  3. Pick an area and a team if you use them. These drive the default candidate list and, later, the pay rate.

  4. Save. It appears greyed, because it is still a draft.

Leave the person blank and you get an open shift: a slot on the rota with nobody on it. Open shifts count in the week's totals and get their own alert when one is still empty 48 hours out.

Copying last week

Most weeks look like the week before. Copy last week brings every shift forward as a draft, keeping the people, times and breaks. Change what has moved and publish.

Templates

If your week has a shape that repeats regardless of who is in, save it under Rota > Templates. A template holds the days, times, breaks and teams but not the people, so applying one gives you a skeleton to fill in. A new template starts from your site's trading hours rather than an empty grid.

Shifts outside trading hours

A shift that starts before you open or ends after you close is flagged in the grid rather than refused. Deep cleans and deliveries are real, and the flag is there so an accidental 03:00 start does not slip through.

Only employees appear on the rota. Contractors are booked through contractor events instead, so one person never has two competing records of when they are on site.

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