Workforce tools for rota and time
Workforce management is a wide label. Shiftbrook covers the part a shift team actually uses each week: the rota, clock-in, leave, sickness and the approved timesheet. It is not an HR suite.
What is in the week
The rota is who is working, where, and between which times. You draft it in private and publish the shifts people should see. Open shifts show a gap. Leave and sickness sit on that grid. Clock-in records the punch against the site pin, default 100 metres, with no photo. The timesheet collects those hours for a manager to approve or decline. That is the operational record.
A sickness reason is private. There is no absence score. Time off in lieu is a balance you record, not statutory holiday, and it does not repair a week that fell below the minimum wage. Holiday for a regular pattern starts from 5.6 weeks. Irregular hours can accrue at 12.07% of approved hours. The product stores the time. It does not pay it.
What is not in the product
There is no recruitment, no performance review, no training record, and no payroll. Approved hours download as a CSV so something else can pay them. Sending approved hours to Xero Payroll UK is not available until that connection works end to end. There is no applicant tracking and no org chart beyond the roles that run the rota: owner, admin, manager, HR on a paid plan, staff, and a client approver on an agency.
An agency is the same product with clients, sites and approvers. Approvers are free and are not counted. Client sign-off is on the paid plan. It is not a second workforce product and not a different price. People who have joined, plus open invites, count towards the free limit of 5. Leavers do not.
The price, and the boundary
The free plan covers up to 5 staff and one location on the first organisation. Past that, the paid plan is £3 per active person per month, with a £15 minimum. A 14-day trial of the paid plan does not ask for a card. When the trial ends, the organisation returns to the free plan.
If you need a legal explanation of rest, night work, fit notes, the 2026 minimum wage or zero-hours contracts, the guides are the plain-English pages, and they are not legal advice. They describe the statute. They do not add a screen to the product. A sector page lower down is the same boundary, written for one kind of week. If you need a number, the calculators estimate holiday, holiday pay, rest breaks, sick pay and the length of a shift. Workforce management, on this site, means those records and those limits. It does not mean every HR task a larger system might advertise.
Questions
Is this an HR system?
No. It is the rota, the clock, the leave and the timesheet. Recruitment, reviews and payroll are outside it.
Does the paid plan add payroll?
No. The paid plan adds the rest of the product, such as further locations and the API. It does not calculate a wage. Approved hours still download as a CSV.