Moving from Excel rosters to rostering software

Written by Roster Flow. Published 31 July 2026.

A spreadsheet roster rarely fails all at once. It gets slower to build, a copy goes out of date, availability arrives by text and hours are retyped into payroll, until one week keeping it going takes more effort than changing. The change itself is not the hard part. The hard part is everything the spreadsheet does that nobody wrote down, the data in it that is only half right, and a team that has to stop reading one roster and start reading another in the same week.

If you are still deciding whether to move, the page on moving off a spreadsheet sets out when a sheet is still enough and how to run a first week beside it. This guide goes further into the move itself: what to list, what to clean, what to keep, how to time it and how to bring everyone across.

Write down what your spreadsheet actually does

A roster sheet that has run for a year or two does more than show shifts. Colours mean things, a notes column carries agreements, and a formula somebody added once warns about long weeks. If you do not list those jobs before you move, you find out what the spreadsheet was doing in the first week it stops doing it. Open the workbook and go through it tab by tab. If it follows the layout in the weekly roster in Excel, most of the jobs below will be there.

Mark each job as one of three things: the new software does it, you will do it another way, or you have decided to stop. The third list matters as much as the first. A colour code that only one manager ever understood may not be worth rebuilding.

Clean the data before it moves

Whatever goes from the spreadsheet into new software takes its mistakes with it. A week spent cleaning the team list is cheaper than a month of fixing shifts built on it. Work through every person on the roster:

• Name and contact details. One spelling of each name, and the email address and mobile number each person actually uses. An invitation sent to an old address is a common reason someone cannot see a new roster.
• Employment type. Full-time, part-time or casual, taken from their employment records rather than from habit. Someone who has worked the same three days for a year is still casual on the roster if they are casual in their employment.
• Part-time agreements. Under several awards, part-time hours are agreed in writing when the person starts, so the agreement, not the spreadsheet, is the source for their hours and availability. Find each one before you enter anything.
• Availability by the hour. "Weekdays" is not availability. "Monday to Thursday, 7:00 to 15:00" is. The free staff availability form collects it in a shape you can type straight in.
• Roles and skills. Who can open, who can close, who holds keys, who can run the coffee machine or the bar. If only the manager knows, write it down now.
• Pay details. The award and classification for each person, and a rate if you want cost estimates. Check rates on the award pay rates pages rather than copying last year’s figures out of the sheet.

Part-time availability is where a careless move can break an award rule without anybody noticing, because new software will place a shift wherever you put it unless it knows the limits. These are the rules in four awards many small food and retail businesses use, as consolidated to 1 July 2026.

Other awards set different terms. Confirm which award covers each person with the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Find my award tool and read its part-time clause before you enter anyone’s availability. The guide to availability and leave covers keeping it current once you have moved.

Keep the records you already have

Changing software does not end your obligations for the weeks the spreadsheet covered. The Fair Work Ombudsman’s record-keeping guidance says employers have to keep time and wages records for 7 years, that the records must be legible, in English and readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector, and that they cannot be changed unless the change corrects an error. For a casual employee, or an irregular part-time employee paid for time worked, the hours they work are part of that record. If your spreadsheet, or the paper sheet beside it, is where those hours were written, it is a record.

Some awards add a rule about rosters themselves. The General Retail Industry Award requires the employer to keep a copy of each completed work roster for at least 12 months and produce it for inspection on request, under clause 15.9(c). Before you switch:

• Save a copy of the whole workbook, named for the date you stopped using it
• Export each completed week as a PDF, so any week can be shown exactly as it was
• Make the file read-only, or move it to a folder only the owner can change
• Keep timesheets, sign-in sheets and payroll reports for the same period with it
• Write down where it is stored, so somebody else can find it when you are away

Questions to ask any rostering software

Every product looks good with a made-up team. Test it with yours. Set up a trial with your real team list and one real week, and look for clear answers to these:

1. Can staff give their availability and request leave from their own phone, and does it show while you build the roster?
2. Does it warn you when someone is booked twice, or rostered outside the availability you recorded?
3. Does it show total hours and an estimated wage cost before you publish?
4. How does each person see the roster, and what happens for someone with no smartphone or no email address?
5. When a published shift changes, who is told, and how?
6. How are start and finish times recorded, and can a manager correct one with the reason kept?
7. Does it send approved hours to your payroll system, or export a file your bookkeeper can use?
8. Can you export your rosters and timesheets if you ever leave?
9. Who can see pay rates, and can you limit what a supervisor can change?

The last two are easy to skip and costly to discover later. A rostering system ends up holding records you have to keep, so you need to be able to get them out again.

Choose the week you switch

The best week to change is a boring one. Aim for:

• The start of a pay period, so the first pay run comes entirely from one system rather than half from each
• An ordinary trading week, not a public holiday week, a school holiday peak or the run up to Christmas
• A week the person who builds the roster is working, with no leave booked for the fortnight after
• A week clear of other changes, such as a new menu, new opening hours or a new venue

Then work back from that date. The changeover week has to be published in the new software when your team normally expects the roster, so if you usually publish a week ahead, it is built and published a week before it starts. How far in advance to publish a roster covers the timing.

A plan for the month around the switch

Publishing the changeover week in the new system while the current week still runs from the spreadsheet feels awkward. It is also what gives people time to sign in and ask questions before the roster they are reading actually counts.

Bring the team across

Staff do not need to know why you are changing. They need to know when, what they have to do and who to ask. Send one message to everybody at once, and say the same thing to each shift in person:

• The date the new roster starts, and that the spreadsheet or the PDF stops being the roster from that date
• What to do: open the invitation, set a password, check the changeover week’s shifts and enter their availability
• The day to have it done by, at least two days before the changeover week begins
• Who to ask if the invitation has not arrived or they cannot sign in

Follow up with anyone who has not signed in face to face, not with another message. Some people have no email address they check, share a phone, or find a new app hard going in English. Five minutes together on a quiet part of a shift usually sorts it.

Check your award before you take the printed roster down. The Restaurant Industry Award (clause 15.3(c)) and the Hospitality Industry (General) Award (clause 15.5(c)) say the roster for full-time and part-time employees must be posted in a conspicuous place that is easily accessible by the employees. The General Retail Industry Award allows the roster to be on a noticeboard at or near the workplace or available through accessible electronic means (clause 15.9(a)). Where your award speaks only of posting the roster, keeping a printed copy on the wall costs little.

A worked example: a cafe’s changeover week

Here is how a changeover week might go for a cafe with 14 staff, 5 part-time and 9 casual. It is an example, not a benchmark. The owner sent 14 invitations the week before. By Wednesday, 11 people had signed in. Of the other 3, one had never given an email address, one had been invited on an old address and one had not opened it. The owner fixed the first two that afternoon and reminded the third on shift, so all 14 could see the changeover week before it began.

At the end of the week the spreadsheet showed 312 rostered hours, and the new system showed 305.5 hours worked and approved. Before running payroll, the owner accounted for the 6.5 hour difference:

Every difference had a reason the owner already knew about, which is what a good changeover week looks like. A difference with no reason is worth finding before the pay run, not after it. The roster vs actual hours calculator makes the same comparison for any week, and comparing rostered and actual labour costs covers what the differences cost.

Problems in the first month, and what to do

• People still ask in the group chat. Reply with where to find the roster rather than the shift time, and stop posting roster photos there.
• Someone keeps editing the spreadsheet. Lock it. Two rosters that both look current are worse than either one on its own.
• Availability goes stale. Ask everybody to review theirs at a set time, such as the start of each school term, and before any big week.
• A part-time shift lands outside agreed availability. Move it, or agree a change with the employee and record it in writing the way their award requires.
• Payroll does not match. Work through the roster to payroll checklist for that week before deciding the software or the staff are at fault.

Review the move after a month

After four weeks, go back to the list of jobs you made at the start. Check that each one marked keep or replace is really being done, and ask two or three staff what has become easier and what has become harder. Look at the time the roster takes each week, from collecting availability to approving hours, and compare it with what the spreadsheet took. If a job has fallen through the gap, fix it now, while everybody still remembers how it used to be done.

If you are still choosing where to move, Roster Flow covers the jobs a roster spreadsheet struggles with most: availability and leave from staff phones, the roster published to everybody at once, clock ins that become timesheets, and approved hours sent to Xero, MYOB or a CSV file.

A checklist for the move

• Every job the spreadsheet does is listed and marked keep, replace or stop
• Each person has one name, a working email and mobile, and the right employment type
• Part-time hours and availability come from the written agreements
• Availability is recorded by the hour, not by the day
• The old workbook is saved, exported, locked and kept with the payroll records
• The switch starts at the beginning of a pay period, in an ordinary week
• Everyone signed in before the changeover week, and anyone without a phone has a printed copy
• Rostered and worked hours for the changeover week are compared, and every difference has a reason

Sources

• Fair Work Ombudsman: record-keeping
• Fair Work Ombudsman: rosters
• Fair Work Commission: Restaurant Industry Award 2020 [MA000119]
• Fair Work Commission: Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 [MA000009]
• Fair Work Commission: General Retail Industry Award 2020 [MA000004]
• Fair Work Commission: Fast Food Industry Award 2020 [MA000003]
• Fair Work Ombudsman: find my award

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