It's Sunday evening and you're building next week's rota. You've done the hard part, fitting fourteen shifts around eight people, and sent it to the group chat.
On Monday morning, someone points out they booked Thursday off in July.
This is the most common rota mistake in small businesses, and it isn't carelessness. Shifts are in one app, holidays are in a spreadsheet (or a group chat, or someone's memory), and checking one against the other is a chore that gets skipped.
Keep shifts and leave together
In Worktree, the Shift Planner and Annual Leave sit side by side in the People module, and they use the same employee records. There's no second app to log in to and no spreadsheet to keep up to date. Checking who's off next week is one click from the rota you're building.
Build the week as a draft
The Shift Planner is a weekly, drag-and-drop grid. Build next week as a draft: drag people into shifts, swap them around, and move things until it works. Nobody sees a draft, so half-finished rotas don't cause confusion.
Before you publish, open Annual Leave for the same week and check it against what you've planned. Then press Publish week and the shifts go live for the team.
On a staff-room screen or counter tablet, the planner's fullscreen mode shows the whole week at once.
Leave requests go to the right person
Employees request leave themselves, for full days or, if your business allows it, half days (morning or afternoon). Each request goes to their manager's Inbox with the dates and any notes.
Because approvals are scoped to the people who report to each manager, the floor manager sees the floor team, and the kitchen manager sees the kitchen. When leave is approved, the employee's remaining allowance updates on its own.
A simple weekly routine
- Approve or decline the leave requests waiting in your Inbox.
- Draft next week on the Shift Planner.
- Check it against Annual Leave for that week.
- Publish the week.
It's four steps in one place, instead of three apps and a group chat.
See the People module, which includes Employees, Annual Leave and the Shift Planner.
