What is a rota?
A rota is the plan of who is working, on which day, at which place, and between which times. It is the week before it happens. A timesheet is the hours after they have been worked.
What goes on it
A useful rota names the person, or marks the shift as open if the person is not chosen yet. It has a date, a start, an end and a place. A break can sit on the shift as the unpaid minutes you expect. Notes cover the thing that does not fit a column, such as who holds the keys.
In Shiftbrook that shift starts as a draft. Staff cannot see a draft. You publish the shifts you want the team to see, and you can leave the rest unpublished. Open shifts, once published, show the gap. Leave and sickness sit on the same week, so a shift is not quietly placed on a day that is already booked.
What it is not
It is not the pay. Publishing a shift does not calculate a wage, tax, or a rate after a certain hour. It is not a clock-in. The rota says who was expected. The clock says who punched, and whether the phone was at the site at that moment. The timesheet is where those hours are submitted and approved.
It is also not a message in a group chat. A chat can change underneath you. A published rota is a record of what the team was shown. If you need a blank file before you use the product, the staff rota template is a spreadsheet with the same fields, and it does not publish anything by itself.
Rotas · Shift patterns · Staff rota template · Free rota app