Rota software
that obeys your rules.
RotaBot is staff rota software that generates the whole week around your staffing requirements, contracts, availability and approved leave — with a rota app your team opens on any phone.
- Availability
- Skills
- Contracts
- Demand
- Coverage
- Role requirements
- Break rules
- Opening hours
- Legal shifts
- Annual leave
- Labour hours
- Shift limits
- Minimum rest
- Contract balancing
- Recovery
- Time & attendance
- Training
- Staff preferences
- Fairness
- Leisure venues
- Multi-site
- Under-18 rules
- Golf venues
- Manager rules
- Hospitality
- Site closures
Everything RotaBot keeps in balance
Everything you need to build the week.
Staff rota software is only worth having if the week it produces is one you would actually publish. In the RotaBot rota app, the grid, coverage, contracted hours, availability and leave are all the same screen.
Every shift, every role, every day. Drag to adjust, click to edit — the same view the rota is generated into.
Coverage is measured against your staffing requirements, and when it falls short RotaBot tells you which requirement it could not fill.
Assigned hours against contracted hours for everyone on the rota, so nobody is quietly under or over their contract.
Staff availability and approved holiday are inputs to the solve, not a spreadsheet you check afterwards.
Nothing reaches staff until you publish, and each published week is kept on record: the shifts, the times and the people that went out.
Built for the people working the rota too.
Staff open the published week in a browser on any phone, with a login their manager sets up. They see the rota for their site the way it would look on the wall: their own shifts, and who else is on.
- Monday12:00 – 21:00Front of House
- Tuesday09:00 – 17:00Front of House
- Thursday13:00 – 21:00Kitchen
- Saturday08:00 – 17:00Front of House
Published shifts only
- You12:00 – 21:00Front of House
- Rory10:00 – 18:00Kitchen
- Kai16:00 – 23:00Supervisor
Who else is on
Swipe to see more
Read-only, on purpose: the rota stays one source of truth. Nothing appears until you publish, and a week you unpublish goes empty again. Availability and leave are held by a manager — staff do not submit them here.
Your rules.
Your staff.
Your rota.
Some operations call it a rota, others a roster, others just the schedule — and what Britain calls rota software is sold almost everywhere else as employee scheduling software. Same job, different vocabulary. It changes with the sector too — a restaurant or a hotel, a pub, a shop floor — and the hard part does not: every rule here is checked against every shift RotaBot builds, and anything it cannot satisfy is reported rather than quietly broken. That is the difference between rota software that draws a grid and staff rostering software that actually holds a constraint.
The setup is what makes the week trustworthy.
Most staff scheduling software can draw a grid. The work — in any kind of workforce scheduling — is holding what the week needs, who is trained for it and what each person's contract says, at the same time, on every decision.
Tell it when you are busy, once.
Staffing requirements per day, as blocks: from a start time to an end time, how many people, and of what. Saved as a template and reused when the same trading pattern comes round.
Every solve is trying to cover those blocks, and coverage is measured against them afterwards — so the score means something rather than being a number about itself.
Roles
- Supervisor
- Front of House
- Kitchen
- Kiosk
- Outside Ops
Areas
- Kitchenmin 1
- Kioskmin 0
An Area is a part of the business that needs covering rather than a particular job. Ask for one person from an Area and the solver picks the role.
Training is a constraint, not a note.
A role is a job somebody is trained for. An area is a part of the business that needs covering — ask for one person from it and the solver picks who, from whoever is qualified and free.
This is what stops a generated rota being a plausible-looking list of names. Somebody who is not trained for the kitchen is not a candidate for the kitchen, so no amount of pressure elsewhere in the week can put them there.
Contracted and casual are not the same problem.
A contracted person has hours you are committed to and a contractual availability baseline. A casual, zero-hours person has no hours guaranteed and is only ever scheduled where somebody has recorded that they can work. Employee scheduling software that treats the two identically is how a rota ends up legal on paper and wrong in practice.
Both live in the same team list, with their contract, their roles, their working windows and their maximum shift length.
- FelixSupervisor40hContracted
- NoraFront of House32hContracted
- ZoeFront of House / Kitchen30hContracted
- RoryKitchen24hContracted
- IrisKiosk16hCasual
What surrounds the rota.
- Availability
- Held per person and set by a manager, with a contracted person's baseline kept apart from a one-off exception.
- Holidays
- Leave recorded and approved by a manager, and protected when the week is built.
- Timesheets
- Worked hours against the published week, exportable as a spreadsheet.
- Staff view
- The published week in a browser on any phone, read-only: their shifts and who else is on. No group chat, no printed sheet.
The first solve is the start.
Some weeks do not come out 100% covered. How you fix it is the most valuable thing that happens all week — so RotaBot keeps it, and the fixes you keep making inform the weeks after.
- 01
RotaBot generates
A full week, solved against your staffing requirements, contracts, availability and approved leave.
- 02
You review the gaps
When coverage lands short, RotaBot names the requirement it could not fill and why — not a silent 94%.
- 03
You make it work
The practical fixes a manager already knows: extend a shift rather than fragment the day, move a duty onto someone already in, bring a contracted hand in when nobody on zero hours is available.
- 04
You publish
Nothing reaches staff until you say so, and the shifts, times and people you published are kept on record.
- 05
The difference is recorded
Every difference between what RotaBot generated and what you published is recorded — a shift added, moved, lengthened or given to somebody else — as the input to what RotaBot suggests next.
- 06
A repeated fix becomes a pattern
Each change is tested against the inputs that solve actually had. One RotaBot could legally have made itself is kept as a shape rather than a one-off — and the same shape across three published weeks is put to you as a pattern to confirm.
- 07
Confirmed, it informs the next solve
A confirmed pattern goes into the next solve — the ordinary weekly generate as much as a repair when a week comes up short — as a preference just large enough to choose between rotas the rules already allow, and never large enough to buy an extra change. You still review, and you still publish.
The gap it could not fill, the change you made instead, the state of the week when you made it — and the shape of that change: extended somebody already in, rather than added a person.
- Extending somebody already in, rather than adding a person
- Adding a person, rather than stretching somebody's day
- Moving somebody already on site onto another role or area
- Replacing a split arrangement with one longer shift
- Reaching for contracted staff when somebody has to be added
- Reaching for zero-hours staff instead
How you resolve a shortage — not who you happened to put on last Tuesday. A shape has to hold across three published weeks before RotaBot raises it with you at all.
- Availability
- Approved leave
- Qualifications
- Legal shift limits
- Pinned shifts
A confirmed pattern is a preference, and preferences enter the solve capped below coverage and contracts — enough to choose between two arrangements that change the same amount, never enough to buy an extra change. Nothing RotaBot picks up from you can put somebody on a shift they are not available or not qualified for. The worst a bad pattern can do is be outvoted — and nothing counts at all until you confirm it, which is why RotaBot asks rather than assumes.
How automatic rota generation works — generate, review, edit, learn, on the screens it happens on. Or see how to set RotaBot up — demand, roles, staff, availability and fixed shifts, in the order you would actually do them.
Scheduling is already on the payroll.
It just does not appear as a line item. Put your own numbers in.
8 manager hours a week, every week, spent producing a document that has to be produced again next week.
RotaBot gives that time back.
The other cost is the rota itself. We wrote up where labour hours leak out of a week — with one measured example, and the part the software did not do.
Three things we would rather you heard from us.
It is sold through a demonstration
There is no self-service sign-up. You see RotaBot working against a week shaped like yours, and an account is set up for you. Comparing first? We compared the UK rota apps, ours included, from each vendor's own pages.
The manager decides, always
RotaBot generates, measures and learns. It does not publish, and it does not overrule you. A change you make is the answer — and if you keep making it, it only counts once you have said it should.
Still on a spreadsheet? That is fine
For a small team a grid is a perfectly good rota. We give away a free Excel template that adds the hours up, no sign-up — and a plain guide to when a spreadsheet, rota software or automatic generation is the right tool.
Stop building rotas manually.
No spreadsheets. No rota puzzles. No Sunday-night scheduling sessions.