Hospitality
A free rota planner for pubs, restaurants and hotels: two shifts on one day handled as two shifts, a job role and a rate per shift rather than per person, and a week you can change on Thursday without losing track of who agreed to what.
Bookings land after the rota is written. A function on Tuesday needs two more behind the bar, a quiet Wednesday needs one fewer in the kitchen, and the person down for a double asks to give half of it up.
Half the team do two jobs. Somebody runs the bar on Friday and preps on Saturday, and they are not paid the same for both. Somebody else works a lunch and comes back for service, which is one day and two shifts, not one long shift with a hole in it.
And all of it has to reach people who are never at a desk — on a phone, usually between shifts.
Write a lunch and an evening on the same person on the same day and Rotaaa keeps them apart: each has its own times, its own break and its own job role, and the day adds up to what was actually worked. A shift finishing at 17:00 and one starting at 17:00 are not treated as a clash, so the split goes in while a real double-booking is still refused outright.
A job role belongs to the shift rather than to the person. Pay resolves from the rate agreed for that person in that role, then from their own base rate, then from the role’s default, so one unusual arrangement never means keeping a second set of records. A shift also keeps the rate it was written with — putting somebody’s pay up today does not rewrite what last month cost.
Drag a shift to move it and the rows that cannot take it dim before you let go. Approved leave, declared unavailability, rest gaps and weekly hours caps are all checked as you write, so an impossible placement is refused while you are still holding it rather than explained to you afterwards.
A draft rota is invisible to your staff until you publish it, and the publish control tells you how many shifts are waiting to go out before you send them. After that your staff raise swaps and drops in the app, the other person answers and a manager decides — so a change of cover leaves a record instead of a message somebody has since deleted.
Staff clock in and out from the browser, with breaks recorded as their own events rather than one guessed gap at the end of the night. Every timesheet line sets the clocked hours beside the scheduled ones, and the paid figure is clamped to the scheduled shift, so arriving twenty minutes early does not quietly inflate the wage bill.
Rotaaa does not read your bookings. There is no link to a table or room booking system and no forecast that suggests how many people a Friday needs — you decide the cover, and Rotaaa holds the plan to what is possible.
There is no till or EPOS integration, and nothing here touches tips, tronc or service charge. A timesheet line carries hours and no money.
It does not run payroll. What leaves the product is a spreadsheet of hours, or a printed sheet for the file, for whatever pays your people.
Rotaaa is free — the whole product, with no paid tier, no card at sign-up and no trial clock. Accounts open by invitation while it is in development, and the waitlist is how to ask for one; public sign-up opens on 1 December 2026.
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