Shift scheduling and rosters in Pitch N Hire HRMS

What shifts & rosters includes

How do you set up a shift pattern and rotation?

A shift in Pitch N Hire is a reusable definition, not a row on a plan. You give it a start and end, a break window, a grace period before a late mark applies, and the thresholds that separate a short day from a half day and a full day. That definition is then available to every team, so the same morning shift means exactly the same thing in two departments. A rotation is a repeating sequence of those shifts with a cycle length, applied to a group of employees with a start date. From there the roster advances on its own: a team on a three-way rotation moves through the sequence without anyone retyping next month's plan. Changing the underlying shift changes it everywhere it is used, from an agreed effective date, so an amended break window does not rewrite days already worked and approved.

• Shifts are defined once and reused, not copied per team.
• Rotations advance by cycle length from a start date you set.
• Shift edits take effect from a date rather than retroactively.

How does roster publishing work for a team?

A roster is built in draft, where a scheduler can move people between shifts and leave slots empty without anyone seeing an unfinished plan. Publishing is a deliberate step: it makes the roster visible to the team, notifies the people whose assignments changed, and fixes the shift that attendance for those dates will be measured against. After publication, edits are still possible but are treated as changes rather than planning, so the affected employee is notified again and the previous assignment stays in the history. Employees see their own upcoming shifts in the app and portal alongside their approved leave, which removes the recurring failure of a roster that lives in a spreadsheet nobody outside the scheduling team has opened. Managers can publish a week, a fortnight or a month depending on how far ahead their operation genuinely plans.

• Draft rosters are invisible to the team until published.
• Publication notifies only the people whose assignment changed.
• Post-publication edits notify again and are kept in the history.

How are week-offs and holiday calendars applied to a roster?

Week-offs are an employee attribute rather than a company-wide weekend, because a support desk on rolling cover and a head-office team rarely rest on the same days. You set the pattern per person or per group, and rotating week-offs move with the shift cycle. Holidays sit on calendars attached to locations, so a regional festival closes one office without marking absence for another. When either applies to a date, that date is non-working for the affected employee, and attendance treats it accordingly rather than producing a loss-of-pay day for someone who was legitimately off. If somebody does work a week-off or a holiday, the day is flagged so it can follow the compensatory-off or overtime rule you configure. Approved leave is shown on the roster during planning, so a scheduler is not assigning shifts to people already granted time away.

• Week-off patterns are per employee and can rotate with the shift cycle.
• Holiday calendars are attached to locations, not to the whole company.
• Work on a rest day is flagged for your comp-off or overtime rule.

Can employees request a shift swap?

Yes, and the request carries the agreement rather than assuming it. An employee picks the shift they want to give up and the colleague they have arranged to take it. The colleague is asked to accept first, then the manager approves or declines, and only after both does the published roster change for both people. This ordering matters because the common failure is a swap agreed verbally, never recorded, and discovered when attendance is measured against the wrong shift and produces a late mark for someone who worked exactly as agreed. Declines are recorded with the reason, so a pattern of refused swaps is visible. Managers can also make a direct reassignment without a request when cover has to change at short notice, and the affected people are notified in the same way as any other post-publication edit.

• The receiving colleague accepts before the manager sees the request.
• The roster only changes after both parties have agreed.
• Attendance for the swapped date is measured against the new shift.

How does Pitch N Hire handle night shifts and split shifts?

A night shift crossing midnight is attributed to the date the shift started, so a person beginning late on Monday produces one Monday record rather than a partial Monday and a partial Tuesday. That single decision removes most of the confusion in overnight operations: payable days count correctly, a late arrival is measured against the real start time, and a week of nights totals the way the team expects. A split shift has two working windows in the same day with a gap between them, and only time inside those windows counts, so the unpaid gap is not accumulated as hours worked or as an early departure. Both types carry their own grace periods and thresholds, because tolerance appropriate to a day shift is often wrong for a night crew, and the attendance record reads whichever definition is assigned.

• Overnight hours stay on the shift start date instead of splitting.
• Split shifts count only the time inside each defined window.
• Night and split shifts hold their own grace and threshold values.

How do you spot coverage gaps before the week starts?

The roster view shows a date range with headcount per shift beside the requirement you set for that shift, so an unfilled slot reads as a gap rather than as an empty cell somebody has to notice. Approved leave, week-offs and holidays are drawn on the same view, which means the most common cause of thin cover is visible during planning instead of on the morning it bites. A scheduler can filter to a location, a department or a skill group to check that the people rostered can actually do the work, not just that a number has been reached. This is the planning half of workforce management: deciding who works when, checking the plan covers demand, and fixing it while there is still time to ask somebody rather than to explain an absence.

• Required versus rostered headcount is shown per shift and date.
• Approved leave and week-offs appear on the planning view.
• Filters by location, department or skill group check the plan is workable.

How are overtime hours calculated against a shift?

Overtime is derived by comparing attended time with the shift the employee was rostered to, which is why the roster has to be right before the overtime figure means anything. You configure what qualifies: time beyond the shift end, time before the shift start, work on a week-off, work on a holiday, or hours above a weekly total. You also configure how each is treated, whether that is a payable rate, a compensatory off, or neither. Pitch N Hire then computes the hours and applies your rule. Qualifying thresholds and rates vary by country, by state and by employment type, and they change, so they are settings rather than assumptions built into the product; confirm your own before configuring them. Approved overtime flows to payroll with the same period lock that governs payable days.

• Qualification and treatment are both configurable per rule.
• Comp-off and payable overtime can apply to different situations.
• Overtime figures are locked with the attendance period at cut-off.

What connects the roster to attendance, leave and payroll?

The published assignment is the connection. Once a date and employee have a shift, attendance measures the punches for that date against that shift's window, grace period and thresholds, so a late mark or short day is judged against what the person was actually asked to work. Leave requests check the roster, so a day off falls on a rostered working day rather than being spent on a week-off. Payroll receives payable days and qualifying overtime already derived from the same assignment, and the period lock covers all of it together. When a swap or reassignment happens after publication, the change propagates to the same three places, which is the point of holding the roster in the HRMS instead of in a shared spreadsheet that only the scheduler ever reconciles. Nobody re-enters the change into attendance, and no one has to remember that it happened.

• Attendance judges punches against the published shift, not a default day.
• Leave is applied to rostered working days.
• A post-publication change propagates to attendance, leave and payroll together.