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It is the rota your employer plans on. The invitation gives you your own sign-in, and from it you see the shifts you are down for, ask for time off, say when you can and cannot work, and — if your employer clocks people in and out — start and finish your shifts.

An invitation lasts seven days and works once. If yours has expired, ask whoever sent it for a new one; an old link found in an inbox two years later is deliberately not a way in.

One sign-in covers every business you work for on Rotaaa, and you can hold a different role in each of them. Two jobs do not mean two accounts.

Everything that is part of employing you. The record they created — your name, your contact details, your job roles and sites, your contracted hours and your pay rate — and then your shifts, the availability you declare, your leave requests including any reason you typed on one, and, where clocking is used, when you started and finished each shift and how that compared with the plan.

Where you were is not on that list. Starting or ending a shift records the time, the shift it belongs to and any note you chose to type. Rotaaa never asks your browser or your phone for your position, never stores one, and takes no photograph. If that ever changes it will be announced before it is switched on, with its own controls.

Your sign-in is not theirs either. Your password is held by our authentication provider and Rotaaa never sees it, and the list of devices you are currently signed in on is shown to you and to nobody else.

Read the privacy policy

On your availability screen, a day at a time, up to twelve weeks ahead. Say you are available or unavailable, all day or between particular hours, and add a note where the reason matters.

Whoever writes the rota sees it while they are writing it, so a shift landing on a day you said you could not work is flagged at that moment rather than discovered afterwards. It is not a veto — a manager can still write the shift — but they write it knowing.

You can change today or any day still to come. Days that have already passed cannot be edited, because they are the record of what the planner was told at the time.

From your own leave screen: the dates, the type of leave, and a reason if you want to give one. It goes to whoever can approve for your site and team, and you see the decision on the same screen when it is made.

Your balance shows what has been approved and what is still waiting separately, so you make a second request with the first one in view rather than guessing. A request can start or end on a half day, and what it costs is worked out against your own working week — a Monday-to-Friday person loses five days for a week off, not seven.

Raise it in the app rather than settling it in a group chat. You can offer the shift up for somebody else to pick up, or ask a particular colleague to swap with you; they answer first, and then a manager decides.

Three refusals worth knowing before you need them. Nobody decides their own request, so an agreement between the two of you is not the last step. A request cannot be raised against a shift that has not been published yet or one that has already happened. And a request nobody has decided has not changed anything — until it is approved, the shift is still on the rota against you.

The whole point of doing it here is that the outcome is on the rota rather than in a message somebody deleted.

Your shifts screen lists what you are down for, and your leave screen carries your requests and your balance. Where your employer uses clocking, the clock screen is where you start and finish a shift, and your breaks are recorded as their own events rather than guessed as one gap at the end.

Each day is reconciled into a single timesheet line: what was rostered beside what you actually clocked, the breaks, and the minutes that count as paid. A manager approves that line, or overrides the paid minutes with a note saying why. Your clock-ins themselves are never edited — a correction sits beside the original, so the evidence survives it.

You will not see money anywhere, including the cost of your own shifts. A timesheet in Rotaaa carries hours and no pay; what you are actually paid is worked out wherever your employer runs payroll.

Those are two different things, and you control one of them.

When you leave, your employer archives your record with your leaving date. You are marked as a leaver, your future shifts are released for somebody else to pick up, and your history stays on the rota where it happened — a rota should not lose a month because somebody moved on.

Deleting your sign-in is yours and needs nobody’s approval. It removes your name, your email address, your sign-in and your membership of every business on Rotaaa. It deliberately does not remove your employment record, your past shifts or the hours you worked: those belong to your employer, who has their own obligations to keep them. The link between your sign-in and that record is cut and the record stays with the business. If you want it gone as well, ask them, because it is theirs to decide.

What goes and what stays

An email address. You create an account, name your business, and Rotaaa gives it an address on the site derived from that name — you can see it as you type. From there you add the places you work, the teams and job roles you schedule, and the people who do the work.

No card, no sales call, no trial clock counting down.

From the People list. Create a staff record on its own, or select the people you want on the list and send them an invitation by email so they get their own sign-in.

An email address is genuinely optional. Somebody who will never sign in still gets a full record, appears on the rota and has their hours recorded.

Seven days. Long enough to survive a holiday weekend and an ignored inbox, short enough that a forwarded email found in an archive two years later is not a live door into your staff records.

An expired invitation cannot be used. Send a new one, or withdraw the old one, from the same screen.

An owner can do everything, including things that would leave the business without an owner. An admin runs the business day to day. A manager runs the rota, and can be narrowed to particular sites and teams so they see only their own patch. Staff see their own shifts, their own hours and their own leave.

A person can hold a different role in each business they belong to.

No — Rotaaa runs in the browser, on a phone as well as a laptop, and there is nothing to install or update.

On the grid: one row per person, one column per day. Add a shift, drag it to move it, drop it onto somebody else to reassign, and swap two shifts by dragging one onto the other.

When a week is a pattern you repeat, copy it forward or save it as a template and apply it. There is a month view for the wider shape of a period.

It makes the rota real. Until a shift is published nobody has seen it, so editing or removing a draft notifies nobody — which is the point of drafts.

Once published, the people affected are notified. A correction made within a few minutes cancels the notification before it goes out, so a mistake you fix immediately never reaches anyone.

A genuine double-booking is refused. Other clashes are warnings you can override with your eyes open: somebody rostered outside their stated availability, on a day they do not normally work, in a job role they do not hold, or over their maximum weekly hours.

Approved leave is checked too. Approving leave that clashes with a rostered shift asks you what to do with the shift rather than silently leaving two records that disagree.

Yes. A shift with nobody on it can be offered as an open shift, and anybody eligible can claim it. Depending on your settings a claim is granted straight away or waits for a decision.

When a decision is made, eligibility is worked out again from how things stand at that moment rather than from how they stood when the claim was made — somebody may have booked leave, or another claim may have taken the last position, since.

Try it free

No. A deleted shift is hidden rather than removed, and there is a log of deletions you can restore it from.

Both. Somebody can offer one of their own published shifts to a named colleague as a swap, or give it up as a drop for a manager to reassign. A swap goes to the colleague first and only reaches an approver once they have accepted; a drop goes straight to an approver.

Nobody decides their own request. A manager who asks to drop their own shift does not wave it through — it goes to another approver — and the colleague gaining a shift cannot approve the swap that gives it to them. An approver cannot decide a swap before the colleague has answered either, because approving early would put a shift on somebody who has not agreed to work it.

A request can only be raised against your own shift, and only while it is published and still to come. Two requests cannot be pending on the same shift — the second is refused when it is raised rather than left to lose later. Once a swap is approved it is not reversed by the request; changing it back is an ordinary edit on the rota.

Yes. Clearing a week removes every shift in it in one action, instead of deleting them one at a time, and the confirmation tells you exactly how many shifts across how many people you are about to remove.

A week that contains published shifts is refused outright rather than partly cleared. A published shift is a promise already made — it is on somebody’s phone and they may have arranged childcare around it — and quietly skipping those would leave you believing the week was empty when the only shifts left are the ones people are relying on. Clearing published shifts as well is a second, deliberate request, and it needs permission to publish rather than just permission to edit.

If somebody else has added or removed a shift since the confirmation was drawn, the clear is refused and you are asked again with the new count, because the sentence you agreed to is no longer true. Nothing a clear removes is destroyed: every shift lands in the deleted-shifts log and can be restored.

Yes. The hours and rostered cost report totals any range you choose, broken down by person, by department and by site, with unpaid breaks already deducted and each shift priced at the rate that was in force when it was written. Shifts nobody is on get their own row rather than disappearing from the total.

Every column says rostered, and that word is doing real work. These are planned hours from published shifts. They are not clocked hours, and they are not what payroll will pay — if somebody stayed an hour late, this report does not know. Cost is stripped out entirely for anybody without permission to see pay, before it reaches their browser.

How access is controlled

From their own leave screen: dates, type, and a reason if they want to give one. It goes to whoever can approve for their site and team, and they see the decision when it is made.

Their balance shows both what has been approved and what is still awaiting a decision, so a second request is made with the first one in view.

An entitlement for the leave year, plus anything carried over from last year with its own expiry date, plus any manual adjustment somebody has made, minus what has been taken.

The leave year runs from 1 January, so a balance is always read against the current calendar year.

Approving the leave asks what should happen to the shift — release it for somebody else to pick up, or remove it — rather than leaving the rota and the time off contradicting each other.

Yes, as one report over a range you choose. Leave is counted by day, absence by spell, and lateness by shift. A day of leave is measured against each person’s own contracted pattern, so the same hours are a full day for a part-timer and part of one for somebody on a longer day — a total that divided everything by one standard day would misprice every part-timer in the business.

The three do not add up to anything, and the report does not pretend otherwise: four days off, two spells and thirty-one minutes late is not a number. The Bradford factor is shown per person and is never totalled or sorted on, because two people scoring eight do not make a team scoring sixteen.

If your business does not clock in and out there is no lateness section at all, rather than a lateness table full of zeros telling you nobody is ever late.

They sign in and use the clock screen — in or out, and breaks in between. The time comes from the server, never from the device, so a phone with the wrong clock cannot record a shift that did not happen.

Somebody with nothing rostered that day can clock in anyway, and the hours stand as their own record. Somebody who is rostered later on is asked to come back at the time rather than open a second one, and a shift can be started up to fifteen minutes before it is due.

No. A punch records the time, the shift it belongs to, and any note the person typed when they finished. Rotaaa does not ask your browser or your phone for your position and does not store one, and it does not take a photograph.

If that ever changes it will be announced before it is switched on, with its own controls.

Read the privacy policy

Against a five-minute tolerance. Arriving inside it is on time. Past it the whole difference is recorded rather than the part beyond the tolerance, and the minutes show on the timesheet line for a manager to look at.

Time before the rostered start and after the rostered finish is not paid, so arriving early does not quietly add to the wage bill.

Each day is reconciled from the punches into one line: what was rostered beside what was actually clocked, the breaks, and the minutes that count as paid. A manager approves the line, or overrides the paid minutes with a note explaining why.

Punches themselves are never edited. A correction sits beside the original so the evidence survives it, and the line records both what was derived and what a human decided.

No. Payroll sits outside Rotaaa, and what Rotaaa gives you is the evidence behind it: each day reconciled into one line — what was rostered, what was clocked, the breaks and the minutes that count as paid — approved by a manager.

Export or print one person’s week from their timesheet and hand that to whoever runs your payroll. Rotaaa carries no pay rates onto a timesheet and works out no money against it.

Yes. There is no paid tier, no card at sign-up and no payment processing in the product at all — there is nothing to charge you with.

If that ever changes it will be announced here first, and it will not be applied retrospectively to a period you have already used.

See the terms

No limit is applied to people, sites, teams or job roles, and nothing in the product counts seats.

If you are bringing several hundred staff across at once, tell us before you start. We would rather plan that week with you than meet it as a surprise on either side.

Get in touch

In your account settings. Sign-in is handled by Clerk, our authentication provider, so passwords, verification and any second factor live there — Rotaaa never sees your password.

Archive them, with their leaving date. They are marked as a leaver, their future shifts are released so somebody else can pick them up, and their history stays on the rota where it happened.

Archiving is not deletion, deliberately: a rota is a record of what happened, and it should not lose a month because somebody left.

Most screens that show you a list will hand it over as a CSV — the people list, a week of the rota, one person’s timesheet week, the leave register and both reports among them. The rota file is a row per shift rather than a week grid, because a row per shift is data you can pivot and a grid is a picture you would have to parse back out of the cells.

Two of them refuse rather than truncate. The people list and the leave register stop above ten thousand rows and tell you the figure they found, so you narrow the filter or shorten the range and ask again — a file silently cut off at the bottom is worse than no file, because nothing about it looks wrong.

The leave register leaves out one column on purpose: whatever the employee typed when they asked. People write “hospital appointment” or worse in that box, and a spreadsheet gets emailed, forwarded and kept — two hundred of those rows is a health and family history of your workforce that nobody set out to compile. The leave type is there, because that is a category you defined and roster against, and so is the note whoever decided it left.

Separately, the whole account — people, rotas, leave, allowances and timesheet entries — comes out as one file from your organisation settings whenever you want it.

What is recorded when you export

Yes, and there is nothing to install. The people list and a timesheet week both have a print control that opens your browser’s own print dialog, where “Save as PDF” is one of the destinations. The sidebar, the buttons and the filters drop away, the business’s name and the range being shown go onto the page, and tables break between rows rather than through the middle of one.

It prints what is on screen. A timesheet prints the selected person’s week, so there is no whole-team timesheet document — that is the same boundary the payroll answer describes, and printing does not quietly cross it.

Under Your account there is a control that deletes your sign-in. It removes your name, your email address, your sign-in and your membership of every business on Rotaaa. It is yours to use and needs nobody’s approval.

It deliberately does not delete your employment record, your past shifts or the hours you worked. Those belong to your employer, who has their own obligations to keep them — a rota must not lose its past because somebody closed their account. The link between your sign-in and that record is cut, and the record stays with the business. If you want it gone too, ask your employer, because it is theirs to decide.

One person cannot do this: the sole owner of a business, because it would leave that business with nobody able to run or close it. Make somebody else an owner first, or close the business. Closing the business is a different control with different consequences.

What goes and what stays

Take a copy first. Your organisation settings hand you everything the account holds — people, rotas, leave and hours — as one file you can keep or move elsewhere.

Closing the business is a control in those same settings, behind a typed confirmation: everyone loses access at once and the address stops resolving. The records themselves are kept, because a rota and the timesheets behind it are the record of who worked when and what they were paid from.

Erasing those records as well is done by hand, on request, so that nobody destroys a wage record with a mis-click. Ask us and it is carried out.

Ask us to erase it

No. Every query is bound to the business in the address bar, and your membership of that business is the access check itself — asking for one you are not a member of returns nothing found, from the same query that would have fetched it.

Only roles with permission for it. The staff list does not read pay at all rather than reading it and hiding it, and pay figures are stripped out of rota costs for anybody without that permission before they reach the browser.

Neither. There is no analytics provider, no advertising network, no session recorder and no chat widget — the only cookies are the ones that keep you signed in, and nothing is sold to anyone.

Read the cookie policy

Backups are whatever our database provider performs, and we have not rehearsed a restore — so we promise no recovery point and no recovery time, and we will not until one has been tested end to end.

It is an honest reason to keep your own copy of anything you could not reconstruct.

Read the service level agreement

Yes. Your account lists everywhere you are currently signed in — the device, the browser, roughly where it was last used and when — and you can end any one of them, or every session except this one in a single action. The device you are reading on is marked, so you can tell which row is you before you press anything.

You can only ever see and end your own sessions, and that is built into the shape of the thing rather than checked afterwards: nothing on that screen takes anybody’s identity as an input, so there is no way to ask about somebody else. The session you pick is matched against your own list before it is ended, and an identifier belonging to another account is simply not in it.

The one refusal you can meet: if we cannot work out which row is the device you are on, the “end every other session” control is not offered at all, because there is no “other” it could define safely. End them individually instead.

Email [email protected], or message us in Rotaaa if you can sign in. It reaches us directly, with no queue in between, and a report that somebody can see data they should not is the most urgent thing there is.

Tell us what you did and what you saw; that is usually enough for us to reproduce it. A report that data may be exposed is the same-working-day case in our service level agreement.

Report it