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seconds, not hours

Automatic roster generation fills an employee schedule without manual shift-by-shift assignment. RosterMate's bot reads your employee data — availability, approved positions, leave, work patterns, and recent shift history — then applies your configured rules to find the best employee for each open shift. The result appears in your roster instantly for review before you save anything.

Hard rules are absolute — the bot will never assign a shift if doing so would violate one, even if that means leaving the shift unfilled. Examples include maximum weekly hours, minimum rest periods, and position qualification requirements. Preferences are softer guidelines the bot will try to honour but can override if no better option exists — for example, preferring employees with fewer hours, or filling from shift requests before assigning anyone else.

Yes. Before assigning anyone to a shift, the bot checks approved leave requests, recorded unavailability, and work patterns for that employee. If an employee has approved leave on a day, they will never be assigned to a shift on that day regardless of any other rule. Unavailability windows — recurring or one-off — are respected in the same way.

Yes. Every employee in RosterMate has a set of approved positions. The bot will only assign an employee to a shift if they hold an approved position for that shift's role. You can also add a rule to roster employees only at their highest approved position — useful when a staff member is qualified at multiple levels and you want to deploy them at their most senior role first.

Fair hour distribution is a built-in preference. The bot loads 42 days of previous roster history and the current forward calendar month so it can track how many hours each employee has accumulated across the broader period — not just the current week. When multiple employees are equally eligible for a shift, the bot favours the employee with fewer accumulated hours.

Absolutely. The bot fills shifts in your working roster view and nothing is saved until you explicitly click Save. You can run the bot, review every assignment, manually adjust anything you like, and only then save and publish. The bot only fills empty shifts — it will never overwrite cells that already have an employee assigned.

RosterMate's auto-scheduler is designed around the real constraints of shift-based industries in New Zealand — including hospitality, healthcare, retail, and logistics. It handles multi-area rosters, varying shift lengths, overnight shifts across day boundaries, public holidays, casual and part-time workforces, and complex position hierarchies. The rule system is flexible enough to reflect the employment agreements of most industries.

If no eligible employee can be assigned without breaking a hard rule, the shift is left empty and you receive a notification showing how many shifts couldn't be filled. You can then review those gaps manually, adjust a rule, or override the assignment yourself. Shifts where employees have requested or bid are marked with icons, so unfilled cells still have useful context about who is interested.