Entering your rota

To enter a rota for an upcoming week, go to Staff Scheduling > Staff Rotas from your Back Office dashboard.

You will see your rota for the current week and can switch to a future week's rota if needed by clicking anywhere on the Week commencing title.

If you have set up departments, you will see a separate rota for each department.

You can click the grey + and - icons at the end of each department row to expand or collapse that specific rota.

If you have staff members who are not included in any department, they will display under the No department section. See assigning staff to departments to assign them to the correct department. 

Before entering your rota, enter your sales forecasts so you can see your forecast wage percentage for each day and the week as a whole. 

You can enter your sales forecasts: 

• just for the week on the Forecast tab of the rota 
• one month at a time in the Forecasts module
• by uploading a spreadsheet containing your forecasts

Copying a rota from a previous week

If you have entered a rota for previous weeks, you can copy shifts from one of these into the rota you are entering. This can save you a lot of time if your shift patterns are fairly similar from week to week. To do this, click on the Copy from button at the top right of the rota.

Note: You can only copy from up to 6 weeks ago.

You can then edit or delete shifts by hovering your mouse over the shift, and add shifts as described below.

You can move a shift by hovering over the shift, clicking the drag icon, and dragging and dropping it to a different day or staff member.

You can copy a shift by hovering over a shift, clicking the copy icon, and dragging and dropping it to a different day or staff member.

Adding your shifts manually

If this is your first rota, or if your rota will not be similar to a previous week, you can enter the shifts manually.

Before entering a shift for a staff member, you can check whether any notes are saved against them, which may be relevant to the rota.

To view any notes for a staff member, click the Notepad icon underneath the staff member's name.

The notes will display in a modal.

To enter a shift for a staff member, click on the + button next to the staff member's name and the day you want to enter the shift for. 

Then enter the shift start and end time, and the type of shift. As you do so, you will see the following:

• Shift hours
• Base pay for the shift
• Overheads (calculated as a percentage of base pay - see below)
• Total cost of the shift

Note: You won't see the shift costs as you add a shift for a salaried staff member, but a cost will be attributed to the shift once it's added. As salaried staff members are a fixed cost, their weekly cost stays the same regardless of the number of hours they work. Instead, the hourly rate used will change based on the number of hours they are scheduled for (the hourly rate will reduce as hours are added). 

The overhead added to each shift is a configurable % of the base pay that you can set to represent any overheads you want included in your rota costs. A typical example in the UK is employees' National Insurance and/or pension contributions.

On the shift modal, you can also change the staff member's job role or department, for that specific shift.

Pressing the blue Add shift button will add the entered shift. You can then add further shifts as needed.

Note: If the shift overlaps with a shift for the same staff member in a different department, a red warning triangle will display to indicate this. Hovering over the triangle shows which shift and which department it overlaps with.

You can also record:

• ad hoc holiday shifts
• staff sickness 
• a no show
• Any days / times that a staff member is unavailable to work

Note: If you have disabled the setting to add holiday & sick shifts via the rota, these options will not display in the Shift type dropdown.

Viewing leave

If you have setup leave types, you'll see any approved leave requests on the rota. Hover over the leave request and click the Eye icon to view it.

The leave request will pop up, and you can see its details and a breakdown of the cost.

Click the blue View leave request button to view the full request and edit it if required.

Ad hoc holiday shifts

If you have enabled ad hoc holiday shifts to be added to the rota, these are not linked to any leave requests and won't track against any leave balances. The cost attributed to ad hoc holiday shifts will be estimated pro rata based on a staff members salary or hourly wage and contracted weekly hours (each days holiday will be costed at 1/7th of a staff members usual weekly wage). 

Sickness 

No cost will be attributed to sickness absences.

No show

No cost will be attributed to no show shifts.

Unavailable

No cost will be attributed to unavailable shifts.

Viewing hours

As you add shifts you will see the total hours for each staff member on the right hand side and the total for each day at the bottom of the rota.

For each department, the total hours will display in the bottom right of the department section, and for total hours across all departments, this will display in the All departments section, at the bottom of the rota.

Viewing costs and wage percentages

You can see the costs attributed to your rota as well as the resultant wage percentages by clicking on the Wages tab.

You can also add, edit and delete shifts while viewing the Wages tab and immediately see the impact to your costs and wage percentages for the day and week.

If you use departments, total wages for each department will display in the bottom right of the department section, and total wages across all departments will display in the All departments section, at the bottom of the rota.

After entering all of your shifts, press Save Changes.

You can also print your rota by pressing the print button in the top right corner (note the print out will not display any wage information).

Once you have entered all of your shifts, you can publish the rota. This will permanently save the shift and sales forecasts as your forecast figures for the week. Any changes made to the rota after publishing it will be saved against your actual figures for the week.