Shift rosters
Plan the week once. Pay from the same thing you planned.
Named shifts you reuse, per-employee patterns for days, hours, breaks and rate, and a change history that leaves last month payroll exactly where you left it.
Sound familiar?
- The roster is a WhatsApp photo of a whiteboard, redrawn every Sunday
- You retype 07:00 to 15:00 a hundred times a month
- Somebody rate changed in March and now February payslips are wrong too
- A night shift was typed as 09:00 to 07:30 and nobody noticed for a quarter
- The plan and the pay run are two different systems that disagree
What the roster gives you
A library of named shifts
Define Morning, Evening or Night once, with start, end and break. Then place them. You pick from a list you built instead of retyping times.
Per-employee patterns
Days of the week, hours, break, pay rate, and whether they are paid monthly, daily or hourly. Set per person, not per company.
Changes are versioned
A new time, rate, break or working day starts a new version from that date. The old one is kept, so finished payroll is never quietly rewritten.
Copy to a whole team
Move fifteen people onto a new shift in one action rather than opening fifteen records and hoping you got them all.
The roster is what pays people
The daily hours a pattern implies set the hourly rate a monthly salary divides into, and the point where overtime begins. Plan and payroll are one thing.
Typos caught at the door
A shift that implies an implausibly long day is flagged when you save it. That is nearly always an AM and PM slip, and it is expensive to find late.
Two decisions that sound boring and are not
The first is that editing a shift does not overwrite it.
Most scheduling tools treat a shift pattern as a setting. You change the finish time from six to seven, the row is updated, done. The trouble arrives the next time anybody looks at an old month, because the hours that month was calculated from have just silently become the new ones. Payslips you already issued no longer match the system that issued them, and you find out when an employee asks why.
So a change to the times, the rate, the working days, the break length or the pay frequency does not update the row. It closes the current version and opens a new one from the change date. Ask what somebody was on in March and you get March answer. Run payroll for a past period and it uses the terms that were actually in force. The history is not a log written alongside the truth, it is the truth.
The second is that the length check warns instead of blocking.
When we measured live data we found patterns implying days of twenty and twenty-two hours. They were not heroic shifts. One read 01:00 to 22:30 and belonged to people who clock in at around one in the afternoon; an evening shift whose end time had been typed as an AM. Another was a deliberately enormous window, invented so that nobody could ever be marked late, back before flexible hours existed as a setting.
Both are wrong in the same direction and they cost real money. A salary of thirty-five thousand a month divided by 21.5 hours a day instead of nine makes every hour worth less than half what it should be, and an overtime threshold of 21.5 hours can never be crossed by anyone.
The tempting fix is to refuse to save anything over sixteen hours. We did not, because some businesses genuinely do run long or unusual windows, and a tool that tells an owner their own operation is impossible is a tool they route around. It warns, clearly, at the moment of saving, and leaves the decision with the person who knows the site. Being right about the common case is not worth being unusable in the rare one.
Questions owners ask about rosters
Can I build a weekly roster and reuse it?
Yes. You define named shifts once, for example Morning 07:00 to 15:00 with a 30 minute break, and place them on the week. You are choosing from a list you built rather than retyping times, which is the difference between a roster that stays tidy and one that grows dozens of near-identical variants.
Can different employees have different working days and hours?
Yes. Each employee carries their own pattern: start, end, break, which days of the week they work, their pay rate and whether they are paid monthly, daily or hourly. Nobody is forced onto a company-wide default.
What happens to past payroll if I change somebody shift or rate?
Nothing. Changing the times, the pay rate, the working days, the break or the pay frequency creates a new version of that pattern from the change date, and the old version stays exactly as it was. Last month payroll continues to reflect last month terms.
Can I apply one pattern to a whole team at once?
Yes. A pattern can be copied to any number of employees, so putting fifteen people on a new shift is one action rather than fifteen.
Does the roster drive overtime and pay?
Yes. The daily hours a pattern implies are what divide a monthly salary into an hourly rate and set the point at which overtime starts. The roster is not a separate planning toy, it is the thing the money is calculated from.
What stops a typing mistake in a shift from wrecking payroll?
Shift lengths are sanity checked as you save. A pattern that implies an unusually long day, which is almost always an AM and PM slip, is flagged to you at the moment you save it rather than discovered at month end.
Does it handle night shifts that cross midnight?
Yes, a shift ending the following morning is understood as one shift. This is also exactly where mistyped times hide, which is why the length warning exists.
Can a manager edit rosters without full owner access?
Yes. Viewing and editing shifts are separate permissions you can grant to a role, so a floor manager can plan the week without being able to see payroll or employee bank details.
Rostering, attendance and payroll from 999 rupees a year.
All platform features ·Shift management guide ·Multi-site attendance ·Plans and pricing
Get started free