Planning and Building Your Rota

The rota is where coverage comes together — every shift, across every site, in one view. Planning it well means workers aren't double-booked, compliance limits aren't breached, and open shifts are visible early enough to fill from your own bank.

Care Bank's Plan Rota lets you build the schedule from templates or from scratch, applies your shift types, and runs built-in compliance guardrails as you go — flagging rest-period and weekly-hours issues before they become problems.

Opening the Rota Planner

Open Jobs from the main menu and select Plan Rota. You'll see the schedule laid out across your sites and dates. From here you can add shifts, allocate workers, and review coverage.

Creating Shifts

You can build shifts two ways:

From a template: Pre-fill a saved shift (see Managing Job Templates for Rota). Fastest for regular cover.
Manually: Create a one-off shift by setting the site, shift type, times, and required skills directly.

Shift Types

Each shift is assigned a type so it's costed and rostered correctly:

General (Day) — standard daytime cover.
Sleep-in — overnight shifts where the worker may rest but remains on call.
Waking Night — overnight shifts where the worker stays awake and active.
Night — night-time cover.

Built-in Compliance Guardrails

As you plan, Care Bank checks each allocation against your organisation's rules and warns you when something doesn't fit:

Mandatory rest period between shifts. A minimum gap is enforced between a worker's shifts (for example, 30 minutes) to avoid back-to-back bookings and allow travel between sites.
Maximum hours per day. A cap on how many hours a worker can be scheduled within a 24-hour window.
Weekly hours warning. If an allocation would push a worker over their weekly limit (for example, 60 hours per rolling week), Care Bank shows a warning so you can review before confirming.

Note: These limits are configured for your organisation during setup. The weekly-hours check is a warning to support good practice — confirm the exact thresholds set for your team.

Worker Filtration Order

When you allocate a shift, candidate workers are listed in a deliberate order so the most suitable people surface first. A common configuration lists workers who have been to the site before at the top, followed by alphabetical order. This helps you assign familiar staff quickly and maintain continuity of care.

Loading Many Shifts at Once

To create a large rota quickly, use Bulk Job Upload in Settings: download the template, populate it with your shift data (this can be exported from your existing rota system), and import it in one go.

Exporting the Rota

Once planned, the rota can be exported for sharing and record-keeping — for example, total hours worked per worker across sites on a monthly basis. See Reports for the full export options and formats.

Tips for Provider Admins

Lead with templates. Build regular cover from templates first, then fill the gaps manually.
Don't dismiss warnings blindly. A weekly-hours or rest-period flag protects both the worker and the organisation — review before overriding.
Plan around familiarity. Use the "been to the site" ordering to keep continuity of care where you can.

Check out our step-by-step guide to planning your rota: