Staff Rota
Plan shifts, manage time & attendance, leave, pay and payroll, and forecast revenue — for the people you support.
Sections
Getting started
What the Staff Rota is, turning it on, and finding your way around.
My shifts (for staff)
See your rota, claim open shifts, swap, drop or cover, and subscribe in your calendar.
Clocking in & timesheets
Clock in and out, breaks, location check-in, and how timesheets are produced.
Leave & availability
Book leave, half-days and your annual allowance, and set the days you can work.
Building the rota (for managers)
Create and publish shifts, open and 2:1 shifts, copy weeks, templates and skill matching.
Approvals & requests (for managers)
Approve timesheets, leave and swap/drop/cover requests, and grant manager permissions.
Pay, payroll & cost
Pay rates, the live cost bar and budgets, payroll runs, overtime, sleep-ins and exports.
Funding & revenue
Funders and charge rates, per-person overrides, and the revenue/margin forecast.
Reports & exports
Coverage, attendance, Bradford Factor, working-time compliance, teams and branded PDFs.
Organisation settings
Organisation-wide rota defaults, per-person rota configuration, and staff roles.
All articles in Staff Rota
Approving timesheets
Review clocked hours, adjust worked minutes where needed, then approve or reject. Only approved timesheets feed payroll.
Booking leave
Request time off: pick your dates, choose full or half day, set the leave type and submit for approval.
Clocking in and out
Clock in and out of a shift on the web or mobile app, with the early-clock-in window and lateness grace explained.
Coverage and attendance reports
Compare funded vs delivered hours per person and track staff attendance over a date range, with CSV export.
Setting pay rates
Set each staff member's wage, salary, agency charge and overtime on the Pay rates page, plus per-role default rates.
The rota builder
Build each person's rota on the grid — switch between Week and Month views, read the legend and move between weeks.
Viewing your shifts
Open My shifts to see your published shifts in a list or calendar, with the time, who it's for and the duration.
What is the Staff Rota?
An overview of the Staff Rota: who works when for each supported person, plus time, leave, pay and reports.
Running payroll
Build a payroll run from approved timesheets and paid leave for a period, review the lines, then finalise to lock it.
Setting up the rota — a checklist
First-time setup order: roles, pay rates, each person's config, build and publish week one, then payroll.
Swapping, dropping or covering a shift
Can't make a shift? Swap it with a colleague, drop it back to the pool, or ask others to cover — from the Request a change box.
Publishing the rota
Drafts are manager-only; publish a week to share it and notify staff. Set a shift back to draft to unpublish it.
Skills & training
One tab for everything competency-related: the skill & certificate catalogue, who holds what, training courses and the mandatory-training matrix.
Funders and charge rates
Set up your commissioners (e.g. a local authority) with the hourly rate you invoice; changing it re-prices everyone on that funder.
Organisation rota settings
Realm-wide defaults: week start, shift times, approvals, rounding, working-time limits and swap/drop/cover.
Approving leave
Decide staff leave requests, see which shifts a request clashes with, and arrange cover where it would leave a gap.
Assigning a funder to a person
On a supported person's rota settings, choose their funder and optionally set a per-person charge-rate override. Admin only.
Claiming an open shift
Open shifts have no carer assigned. If you're eligible, claim one from the area's rota with the amber Claim button.
Creating a shift
Add a shift on the grid — set the times, role, break and note, assign a carer, and heed any conflict warnings.
Per-person rota settings
A supported person's rota config: hours, support ratio, budgets, geofence/photo clock-in, skills and funding.
Recording breaks
Log a break while you're clocked in, and see how paid versus unpaid breaks change your recorded hours.
The cost bar and budgets
The builder shows live hours and labour cost for the week, compares it to your budget, and flags unpriced shifts.
Turning on the Staff Rota
The Staff Rota is a paid add-on a realm admin switches on from Billing; until then the rota stays locked.
Working-time and Bradford reports
See Working Time Directive warnings for upcoming shifts and each staff member's Bradford Factor sickness score.
Your leave allowance
How your annual allowance, hours taken and remaining balance are worked out, and how the leave year is set.
Acknowledging a shift
Acknowledging a shift tells your manager you've seen it. Tap Acknowledge on My shifts or the area's rota.
Approving swap/drop/cover requests
Review staff swap, drop and cover requests from the queue and approve or deny them, with an optional reply.
Finding the rota — where everything lives
A map of the rota: My shifts for staff, a Staff Rota tab per person, the Overview for managers and the settings hub for admins.
Location check-in (geofence)
Some areas require you to be on site to clock in. Here's how the location check works and what to do if it fails.
Open (unfilled) shifts
Create a shift with no carer so eligible staff can claim it, and assign an open shift to someone when you're ready.
Setting your availability
Record the days and times you can or can't work, so your manager can see it as a hint when assigning shifts.
Staff roles
Create staff roles (e.g. Senior Carer) with a colour and optional default rate, used on shifts and costing.
Teams
Group staff into colour-tagged teams with leads to filter the rota and reports. Teams are separate from supported people.
The revenue forecast
Commissioned income (funded hours × rate) vs scheduled labour cost = margin, per person and per funder, with warnings.
Branded PDF exports
Download branded PDFs with your logo and colour: the weekly schedule, the coverage/attendance report, a payroll run summary and a CQC evidence pack.
Double-up (2:1) shifts
Schedule shifts that need two or more carers — how the linked slots work and how hours and cost count per carer.
Exporting payroll (CSV, Sage 50, PDF)
Export a finalised run as generic CSV or Sage 50 for your payroll system, plus a branded PDF summary for any run.
Leave blackout periods (embargoes)
Why some date ranges block new leave requests, how they appear, and who can set them.
Manager permissions
Set what a manager can do on a person's rota — edit shifts, publish, approve timesheets and requests, manage settings.
What happens to your timesheet
Clocking out creates a timesheet from your real times; your manager approves it and it then feeds payroll.
Overtime and sleep-ins
How weekly overtime thresholds and sleep-in shifts (flat or hourly) are priced into the right payroll buckets.
Tracking your requests
Your swap, drop and cover requests appear on My shifts, with a status badge and a Withdraw option while they're pending.
Add your rota to your calendar (iCal)
Subscribe once and your published shifts appear in Apple, Google or Outlook calendars — read-only and updating automatically.
Copying weeks and using templates
Roll a stable rota forward fast with Copy last week, or save a week as a reusable template — copies come in as drafts and clashes are skipped.
Documents & e-signing
Upload staff documents — contracts, policies, certificates — assign who must sign, and capture a typed e-signature with an audit trail.
Skill and certificate matching
Required skills and certificates restrict who can be scheduled for a person, plus preferred and excluded carers.
Suggest a new help article — or a brand-new feature. Every note lands in our inbox and we reply.