Start here: Shift Roster Builder, the week's schedule without the Sunday-night puzzle

Who Shift Roster Builder is for, what it does for a small team's weekly rota, your first ten minutes, and the labour rules it does not model.

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If you manage a small team and the weekly schedule is a spreadsheet you shuffle on Sunday night, this post is for you. It covers who Shift Roster Builder suits, what it gives you, how to build your first week in about ten minutes, and the limits you should know before you post anything.

Who it is for

  • The owner or manager of a café, restaurant, salon, shop or clinic front desk who schedules named people by the week.
  • Someone with five to a dozen staff, each with their own availability, hour limits and wage, who keeps finding out on Friday that a close has nobody on it.
  • A manager trying to keep overtime down, stop "clopening" (closing one night and opening the next morning), or share weekends and closes fairly.
  • Anyone scheduling 14- and 15-year-olds in the US who wants the federal hour limits checked rather than remembered.
  • A small team that does not want to pay per seat for a scheduling app just to get a rota out.

The problem, in your words

"Ana can't do Wednesdays, Dev is maxed at 25 hours, Gus closed last night so he can't open, and I still have a Friday close nobody can take." "I didn't see the overtime until payroll." "Somebody called out and I spent an hour texting people who couldn't come in anyway."

Checking availability, rest gaps and hour caps by eye is slow, and the spreadsheet never tells you a shift is unfillable until it is too late.

What you get

A roster that respects the rules you set. You list the shifts to cover and your people. It builds a week that covers as many shift-hours as it can, never puts anyone outside their availability, never double-books, keeps the minimum rest between shifts, and stays inside each person's weekly hours and days-in-a-row limit. Within that, it keeps payroll down, including overtime at the multiplier you choose.

Answers instead of blanks. Every shift it cannot fill comes with a reason, for example "Fri 2pm-10pm close: 4 people are free then, but 4 at their weekly hour limit". A "Who this week depends on" report rebuilds the week without each person, so you can see whose absence would hurt most.

Help when the week changes. After a build, pick any shift to see who could take it without moving anyone else, cheapest first, with overtime flagged. The same panel lists one-for-one swaps that keep both people's weeks inside the rules.

Ready to post. Hours and pay by person, CSV exports, a calendar (.ics) file for everyone or one person, a paste-ready text per person, a group message for the open shifts, and Print a wall copy, which prints only names and shifts, with no wages, for the break room.

More when you want it. Daily overtime presets for California, Alaska and Colorado, unpaid meal breaks, split-shift premiums, pay differentials, a tip pool split by hours, labour cost against projected sales, and planning several weeks in a row with closes and weekends rotated.

Your first ten minutes

  1. Open https://marisstella.app/shift-roster-builder/. There is no account.
  2. Under or start from a template, use Choose a business type (café or restaurant, hair salon, retail shop or clinic front office). The page builds a roster for an invented team straight away, so you can see what a finished week looks like. Load an example does the same with a sample week.
  3. Replace the invented team in Your people with yours, one person per line: name, hourly wage, max hours a week, min hours a week, availability. Availability reads like Mon-Fri 9-17; Sat off. Add off: Wed for a day off this week, or roles: cook if only some people can work a station.
  4. In Shifts to cover, write one line per requirement: day(s), start, end, people needed, and an optional label, such as a Friday close that needs two people.
  5. Check the rules: Minimum rest between shifts (hours), Most days in a row, Overtime after (hours a week) and Overtime pay multiplier. If your state has daily overtime, pick it from Overtime rule (state presets).
  6. Press Build the roster. Read The roster, the open shifts with their reasons, Hours and pay by person and Who this week depends on.
  7. Press Save setup file so next week starts from this one. The page also remembers your setup in this browser.

To gather availability without retyping it, use Collect your team's availability: it makes a link to a phone-friendly week grid each person fills in and texts back as one line, which you paste in and merge with Merge into staff list.

A worked example

The README's invented café week has 7 people and 32 shifts. The tool covers 29 of the 32 for $3,622 with no overtime hours, and each of the three open shifts says why. That is invented data, used to show the output, not a benchmark of your week.

What it costs and where your data goes

It is free and MIT licensed. The browser tool uploads nothing: your staff list, wages and shifts stay in this browser's local storage (Forget saved data clears them) and in any setup file you save. Copy share link puts the whole setup, including pay, in the link itself; it is not sent to a server, but anyone you send it to can see wages, so share it only with people who may.

If you want staff to open one link to see their shifts, add them to their calendar, ask for time off, offer a trade or report a call-out, there is an optional server you run yourself (Docker, Fly or Render). It keeps one JSON file on a disk you own, needs no accounts, and runs nothing on the author's accounts. Wages and hour caps never appear on the staff page. It sends no texts or emails itself: it gives you pre-filled Text and Email links to send from your own phone. See the self-hosting post for how that kind of setup works.

What it does not do

  • It is a planning aid, not legal advice. Check your state and city rules.
  • Predictive-scheduling and fair-workweek laws are not built in. A "changes since you posted it" report does the arithmetic on a notice rule you type in, and ships no city presets.
  • Youth limits: only the US federal rules for 14- and 15-year-olds are applied. State rules, work permits, union rules and seniority are not modelled.
  • No payroll, no time clock, no push notifications. If you need those, a paid scheduler is the better fit, and the README says so.
  • The roster comes from a fast search that can miss the very best answer. On small weeks an exact check runs and says when the result is proven best; on bigger weeks it says when it could not prove it.
  • It was tested on invented teams and against exhaustive search on small problems, not on a real business's payroll.

Where to go next

More in Start here

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