Every shift covered, every hour correct.

Employee scheduling software is a tool for building, publishing and adjusting staff shift schedules in one place, and in the UK it is often called rota software. Shiftbase keeps availability, leave balances and contract hours inside the schedule while you build it, so conflicts surface before you publish rather than after. The same hours then flow into time tracking and payroll prep, so nothing is retyped.

Yes, Shiftbase schedules several locations and departments side by side. Every department and location has its own schedule, and you see them together in one overview. People can work across locations, and Flexpool moves them to wherever a gap opens. Flexpool comes with Premium.

Your team sees the schedule in the Shiftbase app, on their own phone. On Basic you send the schedule round in one click: everyone gets an email, and a push notification if they have the app. Premium adds publishing, so you can build the week unseen and open it up when you are happy with it. Shifts can also sync to their own calendar.

When someone calls in sick, you mark them absent and decide what happens to the shift: keep it on them, take it off, or open it up. Publish it as an open shift and your team can claim it in the app, so you are not the one ringing round for cover.

Shiftbase flags the clash on every plan: a shift that lands on approved time off, overlaps another shift, or runs past someone's contract hours. Working-time law itself runs through Compliance+, a paid add-on available on Basic, Premium and Enterprise, where you assign a ruleset per contract type and Shiftbase checks every shift against it while you build. Outside the Netherlands and Germany that ruleset is the EU working-time baseline rather than a UK-specific one, and Shiftbase flags issues rather than blocking them.

How much notice you owe your team is set by their contract and any collective agreement rather than by one universal rule, and most shift businesses work two to four weeks ahead. In Shiftbase you publish the whole rota in one action, and every change after that goes out as a notification to the people it affects.

The schedule is the baseline, and the hours your team actually works are what carry over to payroll. Worked hours, surcharges, and leave add up as the week runs, so payroll prep starts from finished numbers instead of a spreadsheet you rebuild.

You move your rota from Excel to Shiftbase by importing your team from the spreadsheet and recreating the week you already run, once, as a shift template. From there you copy it forward week by week. What the spreadsheet cannot do is show you who is on holiday, tell your team when you move a shift, or warn you when a shift runs past someone's contract hours.