Roster automation that plays by
your rules

You click one button and the bot fills every open shift. Behind that click, it reads each employee's availability, approved positions, leave and recent shift history, then applies your configured rules to pick the best person for each gap. The finished roster appears on screen for review — nothing is saved until you say so.

Hard rules can never be broken — maximum weekly hours, a minimum rest gap between shifts, position qualifications. If filling a shift would breach one, the bot leaves the shift empty rather than bend. Preferences are the tiebreakers: favour whoever has fewer hours, fill from shift requests first, roster people at their highest position. The bot honours preferences whenever it can and tells you when it can't.

Yes — those checks run before anything else. Approved leave means an employee is never assigned that day, full stop. Recorded unavailability windows, one-off or recurring, are treated the same way, and work patterns shape which shifts each person is considered for.

Yes. Every employee carries a set of approved positions, and the bot only assigns shifts within them. There's also a rule to roster people at their highest approved position — useful when your duty manager can also pull beers, but you'd rather they managed.

Fair distribution is built in. The bot loads 42 days of roster history plus the forward month, so it knows who's been getting the hours and who hasn't. When two people are equally eligible for a shift, the one with fewer accumulated hours gets the nod — which also keeps the "why does she always get Saturdays?" conversation off your plate.

Always. The bot fills your working roster view and stops. You look it over, adjust whatever you like, and only then save and publish. It also never overwrites a cell you've already filled by hand — it only touches empty shifts.

The rule library covers the levers most Australian awards and agreements care about at rostering time — maximum weekly hours, minimum breaks between shifts (for example the 10-hour gap many awards specify), qualified-position limits and blocked day types — and you set the numbers to match your own obligations. RosterMates doesn't interpret awards for you, so you stay in control of what the right settings are; the bot just refuses to break them once they're set.

If no one can take the shift without breaking a hard rule, it stays empty and you're told how many gaps remain. From there you can fill it by hand, loosen a rule, or publish it as an open shift and let the willing put their hands up — cells with existing requests or bids are marked so you can see who's interested.