Outsourcing

How to include employees on the rota who don't work for you.

Amelia Andrews avatar
Written by Amelia Andrews
Updated over a week ago

If your organisation outsources work to external agencies (such as cleaning or security) where the workers aren't employed directly by you, but you still want to include their shifts on your rota and optionally include the labour cost in your wage calculations, outsourcing is for you.

Outsourcing allows you to add arbitrary workers (and their shifts) on your rota without needing to create Rotaready employee accounts for them.

Unlike with regular employees, Rotaready won't take the following into account for outsourced workers:

  • Time and attendance (they won't need to clock in/out)

  • Holiday allowance/pay/accrual

  • Social taxes, pensions and other supplementary wage contributions

  • Shift validation checks (such as skills, availability, etc.)

Adding an outsourcing organisation

The first step to using Rotaready's outsourcing feature is to create an outsourcing organisation. This only needs to be done once for each agency/outsourced business you work with.

It defines the name of the organisation, how their workers get paid (daily or hourly, for example), their rate of pay and optionally the times of day at which workers are available and the maximum number at your disposal.

  1. Click Settings from the main navigation menu

  2. Click Outsourcing

  3. Click Add organisation by either organisation-wide (which will be visible across all your sites/venues) or site-specific.

  4. Complete the form and click Save

The organisation will now appear as a new section on your rota, just below your staff groups.

Adding shifts for outsourced workers on the rota

The next step is to create arbitrary workers within the organisation and assign them shifts - this is really simple!

  1. Click the Rota editor tab from the main navigation menu (Rotas -> Rota Editor)

  2. Navigate to the relevant week's rota using the date picker

  3. Click the Tools button

  4. Select Add outsourced worker

  5. Select the Outsourced group (as created in the above steps)

  6. In the Worker name field, find an existing worker from the list or type to add a new outsourced worker

  7. Click Add worker

  8. Now a row will appear for the worker, much like those for your own employees. You can assign shifts to them like normal by clicking or dragging and dropping.

  9. Repeat steps 3-7 for additional outsourced workers

You'll notice that the labour cost for those workers will be included in your wage calculations.

Outsourcing shifts when generating rotas automatically

You can also have Rotaready automatically assign shifts to outsourced workers when generating a rota from a template.

A common use case of this feature is to automatically assign shifts to an outsourcing organisation if none of your own employees are available and eligible.

To use this feature, you must have correctly completed the hours available, resourced available and tags properties when creating an outsourcing organisation.

  1. Click Rotas from the main navigation menu

  2. Click Templates

  3. Click on the template you wish to use

  4. If you already have a group of shift sets you wish to outsource, skip to step 5, otherwise click Add group then create one or more shift sets like normal.

  5. Alongside the group you wish to outsource, click Group options then Edit constraints.

  6. Click on the Staff tab and type the name of the organisation you wish to outsource to.

  7. Click Save.

When you generate a rota from this template, Rotaready will attempt to automatically assign shifts to the outsourcing organisation so long as none of your own staff are available and eligible to work the shifts.

If you wish to exclude your own staff from being considered as eligible for those shifts, create a new tag, assign this tag to both your outsourcing organisation (by editing the organisation) and the template group (follow steps 1-5 above, then look for the Staff selection option ("Pick fairly from those who match all of the below tags")).

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