Entering your rota

To enter a rota for an upcoming week, go to Staff & Roles > 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 on the Next Week button in the top right of the screen.

Prior to entering your rota, you will want to have entered your sales forecasts, so you can see your forecast wage percentage, for each day and for 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 any previous weeks you can copy the shifts from one of these to 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.

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

You can also drag & drop shifts to different days and/or different staff members. To do this click and hold on the shift you want to drag until you see the rota overlaid with arrows indicating where you can drag the shift to. Drag the shift to your chosen day and staff member and then release. 

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 to see if there are any notes saved against the staff member, which may be relatable to the rota.

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

The notes for the staff member will display over the blank rota.

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

You will then be able to enter the start and end time for the shift, as well as 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 will remain 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 on for (the hourly rate will reduce as hours are added). 

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

By default the overhead is set to 13.8%, but you can change this on the rota settings tab under Set Up.

The area for the shift will use the staff members default area, but you can override this on an individual shift if needed.

Pressing the tick button will display the entered shift. You can then add further shifts as needed.

You can also add mark a day as holiday, sickness or no show.

Holiday 

Cost attributed to days marked as holiday 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). This is only an estimate of holiday costs in order to produce a more accurate forecast and actual wage % and should not be used for payroll. As such, days marked as holiday will not translate to any hours on the payroll export.

Sickness 

No cost will be attributed to sickness absences.

No show

No cost will be attributed to no show 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.

The total hours for the week are displayed in the bottom right corner 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.

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.