Rotaready can build a rota automatically from a template.

A template defines your weekly staffing requirements, in terms of the number of employees you need at specific times and on specific days of the week. It's not unusual to have multiple templates to correspond to varying levels of demand.

You can optionally add constraints. A popular example is the staff selection constraint. This allows you to use tags to specify skills or attributes employees must possess in order to be considered eligible for a shift.

✅ Once you've constructed a template, it can be re-used as many times as you like to build rotas automatically. You can even combine multiple templates to generate a single rota, using a different one for each day of the week.

👀 Have a watch of our Spotlight Session 'One click rota building' for more information.

A template is separated into two sections, flexible and fixed staffing.

Flexible staffing is the default and most popular behaviour, where Rotaready automatically considers employees for shifts based on their eligibility and naturally balances rest and fairness in its decision making.

Fixed staffing should be used if you have a requirement to always assign the same specific employees to specific shifts. Rotaready will simply allocate the staff member of your choosing to the shift, every time.

A template is made up of the following key components, listed in order of hierarchy: group, task, shift set. Any number of shift sets can sit within a task, and any number of tasks can sit within a group.

A shift set defines the number of employees you need on each day, at a specific time. When you generate a rota from a template, shift sets are converted into shifts.

Instead of setting an exact number of employees, you can use at least to tell Rotaready to flex up if more people are available and eligible. Conversely, you could also use at most to tell Rotaready to flex down if fewer people are available and eligible.

A group of shift sets or tasks.

A group of shift sets. Optional. Only necessary if groups aren't specific enough for your needs.

You can set a constraint on any component, and due to the hierarchical nature of templates, a constraint will also apply to any other component that sits within it.

Constraints are used for various reasons, such as to define the shift type of generated shifts, or to restrict which employees are eligible for the generated shifts.

Learn more about template constraints and how to use them.

❗️ Reach out if you need help constructing your templates - we're happy to help.