AI-built rotas, reusable templates and rotation presets, shift swaps and open shifts, holiday requests, live labour cost against budget and Working Time compliance checked as you build. Published to every phone in one tap.
An Excel sheet that breaks every Sunday. A WhatsApp group for shift swaps that nobody can audit. A holiday spreadsheet that drifts from the rota. Each one costs hours of unpaid manager time, cover gaps, compliance breaches and fines. Each disappears when the rota becomes a real-time, costed, compliance-checked draft you build in minutes.
Cost:Hours of unpaid manager time every Sunday - and by Tuesday it's already wrong because availability changed and nobody updated the master copy.
Fixed:An AI-built first draft from real demand, availability, qualifications and fairness - or a reusable five-tier template you copy forward in seconds. The blank-sheet Sunday disappears.
Cost:An unqualified person covers a skilled position, an insurance question nobody can answer, or a safety-critical role filled by someone who shouldn't be in it.
Fixed:Four swap modes - direct swap, drop to pool, request cover, manager-mediated - each eligibility-checked for training, availability and compliance, with manager approval where the rules require it. Every swap on the record, not in a chat that gets archived.
Cost:People turn up for shifts that moved, miss shifts that were added, and the manager spends the morning on the phone explaining the new version.
Fixed:Draft and published states are separate. Publishing pushes the rota to every phone; any later change notifies the affected staff in-app, by email or by SMS - so the version they're working to is always the current one.
Cost:A scheduled safety or compliance task gets missed because the rota and the checks were planned in two different places by two different people.
Fixed:Coverage requirements for critical checklist tasks tie to the positions that must be staffed to run them. Build the rota and the platform warns you, before you publish, that the 13:00 critical check has no qualified cover.
Cost:A compliance breach waiting to happen, an insurance question you can't easily answer, and a safety-critical role staffed by someone who shouldn't be in it.
Fixed:Positions carry their training and third-party certification requirements. The eligibility engine only offers shifts to staff who are qualified and current - and expired certificates drop people out automatically.
Cost:Two people approved off the same Saturday, leave booked over a shift already published, and an entitlement total nobody actually trusts.
Fixed:A holiday-year accrual engine that does the maths - pro-rata for part-time, bank-holiday top-ups, TOIL ledger, compulsory-shutdown deductions, carry-over with expiry. Leave requests are tracked, conflicts flagged, and entitlement balances exportable.
Cost:The wage budget is blown after the fact, with no chance to drop a shift or rebalance before the money is committed.
Fixed:Every shift carries a costed pay-rate snapshot - base, age band, weekend, night and overtime premiums - so the running cost ticks as you build, against a daily, weekly or monthly budget with traffic-light status and alerts.
Cost:Not enough rest between shifts, someone over 48 hours, two shifts that clash - discovered only when the rota has been published and worked.
Fixed:Rest periods between shifts, maximum weekly hours, and shift clashes are checked as you build, against the same Working Time rules the Time Clock enforces - with a soft warning or a hard block depending on how strict you set it.
An AI scheduler that builds a costed, compliant, training-aware first draft. Reusable 5-tier templates and rotation presets. Shift swaps, open shifts and shift offers that are eligibility-checked, not WhatsApp. Holiday and availability handled in one place. Live labour cost against budget and Working Time compliance checked as you build. Wired into Time Clock, Checklists, HR, the Bradford Factor and Training so the rota is the operation's plan, not a parallel spreadsheet.
| Position | Hrs | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Bar | 52 | £1,420 |
| Kitchen | 48 | £1,656 |
| Floor | 44 | £1,012 |
| Mgmt | 24 | £732 |
Let the AI build a costed, compliant first draft, apply a saved template or rotation preset, or copy last week forward.
Post open shifts for qualified staff to claim, send shift offers, and resolve swaps and holiday requests - all eligibility-checked.
Live labour cost against budget, coverage for critical checks, and rest, hours and clash warnings surface before you publish.
One tap publishes the rota; staff are notified by app, email or SMS, and any later change notifies the people it affects.
A costed, compliant first draft weighted for training, fairness, cost, coverage and absence risk.
Composable shift, day, week, fortnight and month patterns saved and reused.
4-on-4-off, 2-2-3, Continental, Panama and 5-over-7 generated with team stagger.
Grid by position or employee, week and month calendar views, across sites and zones.
See who's available, trained, certified and not already over hours as you build.
Direct swap, drop to pool, request cover and handover - each eligibility-checked.
Broadcast unfilled shifts; qualified staff claim or accept, with manager approval rules.
Recurring, one-off and date-range availability with soft or hard enforcement.
In-app requests with blackout dates, concurrent-leave limits and entitlement tracking.
Costed pay-rate snapshots and daily, weekly or monthly budgets with alerts.
Understaffing and uncovered critical-check positions flagged before you publish.
Rest periods, weekly-hour limits and shift clashes checked as you build.
Skim the themes on the left, or scroll the full set. Each capability surfaces the specific frustration it removes and a real-world use case.
Ask the scheduler to build the week and it produces a costed, compliant, training-aware draft you refine - not a finished rota imposed on you. The solver weighs training and certification coverage, fairness and rotation, employee preferences, health-and-safety coverage, absence risk drawn from the Bradford Factor, labour cost and punctuality, with presets for balanced, quality-focused, cost-focused or safety-first. Pin the shifts you want to keep, regenerate the rest, and see a confidence score with a breakdown of why each assignment was made.
Build reusable patterns at five tiers - shift, day, week, fortnight and month - and compose them: a "Weekend" day template inside a "Term-time" week template inside a "Summer" month template. Preview the expansion before you apply it. The rota you perfected once becomes the rota you apply in seconds from then on.
Continuous and shift-based operations get built-in rotation patterns - 4-on-4-off, 2-2-3, Continental, Panama, 5-over-7 - expanded into a day-by-day schedule with team stagger so cover never gaps at the changeover. Save a rotation as a template and run it indefinitely.
Copy a settled week forward as the starting point for the next, or create and update shifts in bulk - same position, times and break across a run of days in one action. The repetitive part of scheduling stops being done by hand.
Every position carries its own minimum staffing, criticality flag, default times and breaks, pay rates (age-banded, with weekend, night, holiday and overtime premiums), training and certification requirements, and the groups allowed to fill it. Configure the position once and every shift on it inherits the rules.
Every position has its own pool of assigned employees, each with a proficiency rating, so a skilled or safety-critical position can be restricted to the experienced people who are actually signed off for it. When you assign - or when the AI does - only staff who can genuinely work the shift are offered: in that position's pool, trained and certified for it (with third-party certificates checked for expiry), at the required proficiency, available, not on approved leave, and within their hours. Set it to warn or to hard-block. The "I didn't realise they weren't signed off for that" mistake stops being possible.
Building the rota, you see at a glance who's eligible for each shift before you place it - who's available, who's trained and certified for the position, and who's already working or would tip over their hours if you added them. The information you need to make the call is on the screen as you build, not in three other tabs or a manager's memory.
Staff set recurring weekly availability, one-off dates and date ranges, each marked preferred, available, unavailable or blocked. Run it soft, so the scheduler warns but lets you override, or hard, so a blocked time can't be scheduled at all. The student who can't work exam fortnight and the parent who can't do school runs are in the system, not in a manager's memory.
The scheduler tracks previous assignments and hours worked so the unpopular shifts and the good ones rotate instead of always landing on the same people, and an employee proficiency rating per position feeds smarter assignment. Fairness is a weight you can turn up, not a complaint you field afterwards.
Feed in sales and demand data and the AI scheduler optimises headcount to it - more cover when it's busy, leaner when it isn't - instead of staffing every day the same because that's how the spreadsheet was set up.
Real swaps aren't all the same, so there are four: a direct swap where two people trade, a drop to the open pool, a request for cover with no trade, and a straight handover. Every mode is eligibility-checked for training, availability, compliance and coverage impact before it can complete, with manager approval - or auto-approval where the position's rules allow it. The 11pm WhatsApp becomes an audited request.
Create a shift with nobody on it and let qualified staff claim it. Claims are eligibility-checked and either auto-approved or sent for manager approval. The gap fills itself from the people who can actually work it, instead of the manager ringing round.
Offer a shift to a group of eligible staff at once. First-to-accept auto-assigns, or interested staff go to the manager to approve. Optional daily digests and pre-shift reminders keep it moving without anyone chasing.
Time off is requested and approved in-app - holiday, sick or personal, full or partial day - with manager notes and a clear status. Approved leave blocks scheduling on those dates automatically and clashes are flagged. You control how much leave the rota can absorb: blackout dates for periods nobody can book off, limits on how many people can be off at once, and per-employee restrictions, so a popular bank-holiday weekend can't be over-approved. Holiday entitlement, including carry-over limits, is tracked and exportable so "how much have I got left" always has an answer.
Draft and published are separate states. Publishing pushes the rota to every phone; editing a published shift notifies the people it affects; pre-shift reminders go out before shifts are due. Delivery is in-app, email or SMS. Nobody turns up for a shift that moved because they were never told.
The builder warns when a position is below its minimum staffing for a day, and - through the Checklists integration - when a position that has to be staffed to cover a critical scheduled check has no qualified cover. You see the gap while you're building, not when the check is missed.
Rest period between shifts, maximum weekly hours and shift clashes are checked the moment you place a shift, against the same rules the Time Clock enforces, so the rota and the clock can't disagree about what's allowed. Set it to warn or to block.
The rota is the plan the Time Clock measures against. Each scheduled shift links to the clock so the platform knows who should be clocked in, in which position, and when: early clock-ins outside the scheduled window are caught, managers are alerted if someone isn't clocked in by their shift start, and adherence - on-time, late, early, no-show - is tracked against the rota automatically.
Critical scheduled checks are tied to the positions that must be staffed to perform them. When you build the rota, coverage requirements check that the position covering each scheduled critical check is filled at the right time of day - and warn you before you publish if it isn't. The rota and the compliance calendar are planned as one thing.
Time-off requests feed HR holiday entitlement, and the Bradford Factor - the platform's absence-risk score - feeds the AI scheduler as a tunable weight, so a quality- or safety-first rota can steer skilled, safety-critical shifts away from higher absence-risk patterns. Attendance and absence inform the rota instead of being reviewed long after it's worked.
Positions declare the training courses and third-party certifications they require. The eligibility engine reads completion and expiry straight from the Training module, so an out-of-date food-hygiene or first-aid certificate removes that person from the positions that need it - automatically, the moment it lapses.
Pending swaps and time-off requests, open and uncovered shifts, and Working Time breaches in the week ahead are pulled into the AI Assistant Manager's brief - so the leadership team starts the day knowing where the rota needs attention, and can action swap decisions from the brief itself.
Budget versus actual, cost per position, per employee and per date range, with the pay-rate snapshot captured on every shift so historical cost stays accurate even when rates change. Exportable to CSV or PDF for finance, board packs and budget reviews.
The rota against what actually happened on the clock - on-time arrivals, early and late, absences and overtime - rolled up per team and per employee, so the gap between the plan and the reality is a report, not an argument.
Every shift create, edit, publish, cancel and every swap and time-off approval or rejection is logged with who, when and the before-and-after values. Defensible for a pay query, a grievance or a working-time challenge.
Answers from our UK-based onboarding team. Need something not covered? Book a walkthrough →