Roster templates

Roster templates are a great time-saving tool, designed to make rostering easier! Before creating your roster template, consider the following points.

• The following elements are included in the roster template:
  • Employees
  • Positions
  • Shifts
  • Shift allowances
  • Shift requirements (qualifications or tags)
  • Breaks
  • Notes (including weekly, day and shift notes)
  • Shift costing
• Please consider how you'd like your template to function. The primary options for this would be:
  • Create all the shifts with no employees. This would allow you to fill or offer the shifts out as required, depending on availability.
  • Create all the shifts with employees pre-filled. This option would be particularly beneficial for a full-time workforce or for employees working standard hours.
  • A mix of the above two options. Full-time employees, working standard shifts every week, could be prefilled, while your casual positions could be left empty.

Create a roster template

When creating templates, you will create them per roster. If you work with multiple rosters, you'll need to create multiple templates to accommodate this. When you create a roster template, it saves all additional details linked to those shifts, like allowances, shift notes, breaks, and shift costing. You'll choose which of this information to include or exclude when loading a template onto a week.

To save a roster template:

1. Navigate to Work > Rosters > and open the roster you want to template.
2. Decide whether you want to use an existing roster or create a new one for the purpose of your template. 
   • If using an existing roster, navigate to the week you'd like to use
   • If creating a new roster, with the included elements in mind, build out your roster
     
       Hot tip: If you would like to edit an existing roster (e.g. removing employees from some shifts, adjusting a few times, etc.), you can copy that roster to the current week and then edit as required.

3. Once you feel confident that the template is ready, select Tools > Save as template.
    

   

4. Name your roster. If you're viewing multiple rosters, select the roster you'd like to template. Please note that you can only select one roster at a time.
   
    Hot tip: Think about a naming convention for your templates. When you have multiple templates available for a roster, you want to be able to select the correct one at a glance. 
    
5. Next to the roster name will be a high-level summary of what is being templated. You'll see the number of shifts, days, and hours.

6. Select 'Save 1 Templates' to save your roster template.
    

   

  Hot tip: If your employees work a pattern over two weeks (e.g. 6 days a week in week 1, 4 days a week in week 2), create two templates to cater for this. Name the templates for each week and then apply them one after the other.

Using your templates is straightforward. Once you've built up a few in your template library, you can quickly select one to save time in restoring. If your rostering needs don't change much week to week, you can save time by loading and applying templates for up to 12 weeks ahead.

  Please note: Roster Templates may only be applied to blank rosters. If any shifts exist on the roster, a template may not be applied to that week without the shifts first being removed. 

To apply a roster template to your blank roster: 

1. Navigate to Work > Rosters > and open the roster you want to load a template onto.

2. Select Tools > Load Template.
    

   

3. If viewing multiple rosters, select the roster you want to apply the template to. Then, choose the time period for which you want the template to be used and specify how many weeks it should cover.
4. Select the relevant roster template that you want to apply from the templates you created for that roster.
5. You can choose which shift details you would like to load with your template onto the roster.
   • For example, if you would like to only load shifts, positions, shift comments and allowances, select the appropriate options.
6. Once you have selected the appropriate options, select 'Load Template'. The template will load with all shifts in an unpublished state. Please make any changes to the roster if needed, and then publish or offer shifts as you usually do.

In the example below, the bar roster template will begin from 04/09/25 and will be applied for 3 weeks. We have chosen not to include the budget and notes for these 3 weeks and will adjust them on our new roster before publishing.

  Please note: If an employee is declined or archived and saved in a template, the templated shifts will apply to the roster in an errored state. This allows you to assign them to another employee or remove them completely.

As time goes on, your business needs may change slightly or drastically, and you'll want to make sure your roster templates reflect the current rosters that you need and use. This might include eliminating those that are no longer required.

Keeping roster templates up to date might mean:

• Renaming them to more accurate names
• Deleting saved templates that are no longer needed
• Refreshing existing templates to better align with current rostering needs

To determine which templates remain relevant to your business, you'll first need an overview of all your roster templates. 

Viewing all templates

Using the 'all rosters in view' filter will allow you to see all of the templates you have for all rosters under one Operation roster.

To view all templates under an Operation:

1. Navigate to Work > Rosters > select any operation to open all the rosters within. 
2. Select Filter > select 'select all rosters' > then select Apply.
3. Select Tools > Load Templates and from the Rosters drop-down, select 'All Rosters In View'.

 Hot tip: When selecting a template, below the template summary, you will find a record of who created the template and when it was created. If your template is more than 6 months old, consider refreshing it (see the section below).

Rename a Template

You may find that as the number of templates you create grows, the naming convention for them needs to be updated to make things easier.

To rename a roster template:

1. Navigate to Tools > Load Template.

2. Locate and select the template, and select the pencil icon next to the template name.

   

Delete a Template

Over time, you may find that there are some roster templates in your list that you no longer need, so you might like to delete them. 

To delete a roster template:

1. Navigate to Tools > Load Template.

2. Locate and select the template you'd like to delete, and you'll find the option to do so underneath the template summary.

   

Refreshing your Templates

We recommend that you edit and refresh your templates a few times a year to keep them current with the types of shifts, positions, and employees you use over time.  Refreshing your templates also picks up any new feature releases that come into the template drawer.

Two methods can be used to refresh your templates:

• Saving a new template from a current rosters you have made
  • Refer to the first section of this guide for these instructions
• Loading and making edits to an existing template then saving it with a new, relevant name
  • Ie. Loading existing template - Bar roster v 1.0 > Make the relevant changes > save as a new template - Bar roster v 2.0

To make changes to an existing template:

1. Navigate to the next blank week in the roster you want to set up.
2. Select Tools > Load Template > Select the appropriate template.
3. On the roster, make all the required changes (think about all the included elements of the roster as listed above).
4. When happy, select Tools > Save as template, then name the template.
5. Lastly, select Tools > Load Template > locate the old template and delete it.

How do I create a template for a fortnightly rotating roster?

In addition to the template creation steps above, you would create the roster for your whole roster cycle. If your rosters rotate fortnightly, you should create 2 weeks of rosters and then save each week as a template.

The naming convention of your rosters will be important, so make sure that it makes sense to you.

Each template should be named the same but have something to specify the number of weeks. The following are two types of naming conventions that you may find useful.

• Example 1
  • Kitchen Staff - Week 1
  • Kitchen Staff - Week 2
     
• Example 2
  • Kitchen Staff 1/2
  • Kitchen Staff 2/2

The above advice applies to most standard rotating roster schedules. 

Do you know if I can create a template from several rosters at once?

While you can work on multiple rosters at a time, when you save a template, you will select a single roster to save as a template. If your template is across multiple rosters, you should save all the rosters as individual templates.

Can a single template be applied to any roster?

At this stage, no. When you create a template, it is created from and saved against a specific roster. The template may only be used on the roster that it was created with. If you would like to use a template with multiple rosters, you should create a template for each.

Can I apply more than one template to a roster?

No. A template may only be applied to a blank roster, so once the first template was applied, no more would be added.

In this instance, the best way forward would be to utilise the template which will save you the most amount of time. Alternatively, you could look to use the roster import if you did not want to manually create all the shifts for that week. 

I selected the wrong template. How do I fix this and apply the correct template?

There are two options in this case. 

The first option would be to delete all the shifts, employees, day and weekly notes from the roster. You can use the bulk delete shifts option to delete shifts for an entire roster and apply the correct template. 

The second option would be to adjust the shift details to suit. 

Whichever method is the least amount of work will be most suitable.