WorkRoster Roster Software News

A year ahead isn’t enough for every business. Extended plans are now available for WorkRoster teams that want to build rosters across more than one year. They let you plan up to 24 months ahead and access to 24 months of shift history. Essential plans continue to offer 12 months of each.

Ongoing improvements to our code and infrastructure support the longer window. If it suits your business, the workforce owner can switch on the Account Upgrade page. The monthly Extended upgrade costs twice as much as the equivalent Essential upgrade for the same staff limit.

You can also choose annual billing on that page for either Essential or Extended plans.

If you need a hand with either option, or have trouble using it, please get in touch.

We’ve re-recorded the Multiple Rosters lesson, and this time you can see roster colours in action!

If you organise shifts across different sites, teams or clients, Multiple Rosters shows how to give each roster its own colour and choose which rosters to view together. Have a look at the combined view: the colours look great, and you can see which shifts belong to each roster.

Three more Academy videos are now ready too. These were the missing lessons, and we’re pleased to finally have them available.

For managers, Chat for Managers walks through workforce chat settings, staff announcements, private conversations with employees and message moderation. Backups and Archives covers keeping a copy of the roster for an outage, setting up nightly Google Drive backups, checking the Activity Log and saving monthly archives.

For staff, Chat for Employees demonstrates how to reply to managers, read announcements, use reactions and manage chat notifications, including on the mobile app.

We’ve updated both Academy qualifications, Roster Usage and Roster Management, to version 6. Previous graduates can update their certificates by watching the new lessons in their course and passing the outstanding questions. Any out-of-date lesson passes need updating as well; current passes carry forward.

Open your course results in the WorkRoster Academy to see what’s left to complete for your version 6 certificate and 100% course progress.

WorkRoster now lets you give each roster its own colour. If your workforce has more than one roster, you can use colours to distinguish your venues, departments or crews.

For example, use blue for the café, green for the warehouse and orange for deliveries. When you view rosters together, you can quickly see which shifts belong to which part of the business. Staff working across locations can see which roster each shift belongs to.

Roster colours appear in desktop calendars, mobile roster lists and shift views. They also appear in colour PDF exports of weekly and monthly rosters, and on shifts in individual employee schedule PDFs.

To turn on roster colours:

1. As a workforce owner or manager, open Workforce Settings.
2. In Records, set Use Roster Colours to Yes, then save.
3. Edit a roster to use its automatic colour or turn automatic colour off and select a manual colour.

You can also add a photo for each venue or team. Enable Use Roster Photos, then add a photo through Add or Edit Rosters on desktop or the roster’s edit page on mobile.

Colours and photos are optional. You can enable them separately.

We’ve made a few changes to help you find your shifts and keep your roster moving smoothly. The Shifts section on Home now lets you browse week by week, jump to a date, or return to today. Mobile week navigation has also been tidied up.

Employee visibility settings now behave more consistently. Show Draft Shifts applies to shifts only. Employees can still see their own pending leave requests when requests are enabled, but colleagues' pending requests stay private. Sick leave is controlled separately.

We also keep working on speed behind the scenes. Recent updates reduce unnecessary queries and data in personal schedules and calendar subscriptions. Other fixes address calendar time zones, week changes at month boundaries and duplicate notifications from repeating shifts.

If anything doesn’t work as expected, or you’d like a hand with these updates, get in touch, and we’ll help out.

WorkRoster now has more flexible notification settings, designed to make roster management feel calmer and easier to follow.

You can now set Toast Notifications to Full, Minimal, or Off, depending on how visible you want updates to be. You can also choose a Toast Speed of Slow, Normal, or Fast.

Full notifications work much like before. Minimal notifications use a smaller, cleaner layout. Off mode keeps pop-up notifications out of the way, while still showing a subtle notification indicator and keeping recent updates available in notification history.

These improvements are live now on the desktop and mobile websites, and will be included in the next WorkRoster mobile app update.

Just released, some improvments to the Roster view:

• Calendar navigation now shows separate buttons for moving by month or by week, with clearer “Month”/“Week” arrows on both sides.
• Jump-to-date dropdown and view toggles tightened for a bit less horizontal space, but behaviour unchanged.
• Forward/back logic adjusted so week/month jumps honor actual week starts and month boundaries; you’ll still get the same plan-limit warnings if you go too far.

We’ve added a small quality‑of‑life upgrade to WorkRoster that you can feel straight away: optional click effects.

You can now choose to:

• Show a quick visual “ripple” where you click.
• Play a soft click sound on mouse click or finger tap.

These are personal settings, so you control them for your own account only.

Where to find them:

• On the web app (desktop): go to Settings → UI Settings, then adjust the click options.
• On mobile (site or app): open Settings and look for the Click Effects section.

You can turn visual and sound effects on or off independently, and your choices follow you across desktop and mobile when you’re logged in.

The video roster training lessons on the HELP page use these effects already.

If you prefer things quiet and minimal, leave them off - WorkRoster will carry on working just as it always has.

Hello WorkRoster Managers,

WorkRoster stores your shift data for 12 months. If you need to keep records beyond one year, we recommend saving your own PDF or CSV copies for safekeeping.

To simplify this process, we’ve introduced a new Archive feature. Each month, you can automatically receive a detailed shift report by email and/or have uploaded it directly to your Google Drive—giving you a secure backup with minimal effort.

For more detailed instructions, please visit our HELP documentation. To configure Google Drive or email archive reports (both options deliver the same report), simply follow the Google Drive and Settings links on your WorkRoster home page.

Thank you for choosing WorkRoster to manage your team’s roster. Please get in touch if you have any questions!

Best regards,
The WorkRoster Team

Hey WorkRoster People,

The WorkRoster Mobile App has been updated, and the latest version is now 64.7.4 on both iPhone and Android. Please update as it contains important fixes.

Under the covers, the WorkRoster system has been updated and is now running faster than ever - allowing you to spend even less time planning and viewing your staff roster.

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Jason.

Hey, WorkRoster community!

Are you a new manager or starting a free trial? We’ve created a short, engaging video to help you quickly make your work roster.

Visit the WorkRoster Academy on the HELP page to check it out: https://workroster.com/help/quick-start.

Create your work roster today!

thanks,
Jason.

Hello WorkRoster Users,

We're excited to announce that WorkRoster has received a major speed boost! Over the past few months, we've been working hard to modernise, update, and upgrade the code and infrastructure powering WorkRoster. The result? Faster rostering for your business!

No matter the size of your workforce, these upgrades will help you create, update, and maintain your work rosters more quickly and efficiently than ever before. With improved page load times, faster data processing, and an enhanced user interface, WorkRoster is better equipped to handle even the most complex roster planning needs.

We're confident that these upgrades will make a big difference in how you experience WorkRoster, and we can't wait for you to try them out. As always, your feedback is essential to us, so please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any comments, questions, or concerns.

From all of us at WorkRoster, thank you for choosing us as your go-to roster solution. We're committed to providing you with the best possible experience, and we're excited to continue improving and expanding WorkRoster to meet your evolving needs.

Happy Rostering!

Best regards, Jason.

We're excited to announce the launch of a new feature for WorkRoster: Shift Interest. With Shift Interest, employees can indicate their willingness or reluctance for unassigned shifts.

To use Shift Interest, ensure that the Workforce Settings allow employees to view all shifts. This feature only applies before employees are assigned to shifts, and the old pre-accept and pre-decline functionality has been removed.

Once an employee is assigned to a shift, they can confirm their Shift Agreement ( Accept or Decline ) as before.

We've also made performance improvements, resolved minor bugs, and updated the design of various screens and pages.

To make the most of Shift Interest, download the updated version v62.0.0 of the WorkRoster App on Android and iOS.

We've also added informative Short Video lessons on Shift Interest for managers and employees:

** For managers: **

Assigning Employees: WorkRoster Help Center - Assigning Employees

Advanced Workforce Settings: WorkRoster Help Center - Advanced Workforce Settings

** For employees: **

Employee Introduction: WorkRoster Help Center - Employee Introduction

Employee Shift Interest: WorkRoster Help Center - Employee Shift Interest

We hope Shift Interest proves to be a valuable addition. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.

We've recently updated the styles on our pages and screens. We've been working hard on this for a while, and we're really chuffed with the results. We think it makes the whole thing look a lot more modern and user-friendly.

Nearly every screen has been updated in one way or another. If you spot a page, screen, or dialog that doesn't look quite right, then please do let us know. We'd be really grateful if you could take a photo or screenshot and send it over. That way, we can fix it up as soon as possible.

Cheers, and we hope you like the new look!

The Show More Calendar button, located at the bottom of the roster "Month" view, now loads the entire next month instead of just one additional week.

This improvement will be particularly useful for managers who frequently plan shifts for multiple weeks or months in advance using the Month view.

##Hello World!

The new WorkRoster.com is now live and available for any type of business to manage their staff work rosters.

Everything is Ready to go! Including

• Automatic Repeating Shifts
• PDF Reports
• Mobile Apps
• And Our easy to use Desktop Web App

We’re calling this a “beta” launch - just in case there are any kinks to be ironed out, but we’re not expecting any problems or issues.

If you have any questions, then please get in touch with Support.