Rotas and holiday requests without the spreadsheet
The rota spreadsheet that only one person understands, emailed round every Friday, is holding your week together with sticky tape. It works until that person's off.
Where it hurts
Building a rota in a spreadsheet is slow and easy to get wrong. A shift gets missed, someone's pencilled in on their day off, two people are down for the same slot and nobody spots it until the shift arrives short-handed.
Holiday makes it worse. Requests come in by text, email and a word in passing, get written on a bit of paper, and then someone books time off that clashes with two others because there was never one place to check.
And staff can never quite remember what they're working. So they message the manager to ask, or worse, they turn up on the wrong day, and the whole thing runs on the manager's memory rather than a system anyone can rely on.
What I'd build
I'd move your rota onto a tool made for it, something like Deputy or a setup that fits your size, so you build the week by dragging shifts around and staff see theirs on their phones. Holiday requests go in through the same app, land with the manager to approve, and once they're approved they show on the rota so nobody's scheduled when they're off. It flags clashes and understaffed shifts before you publish, keeps a running record of who's taken what holiday, and can nudge people before a shift so fewer get forgotten. If you need hours to feed into payroll, I'll set that up to export cleanly.
What changes
- Build the rota by dragging shifts, not fighting a spreadsheet
- Staff see their shifts on their phones, no more asking
- Holiday requested and approved in one place, clashes caught early
- A clear record of who's owed what holiday
Related fixes
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