On Wednesday the 25th, the server JustRosters is hosted on suffered in a hardware failure, leading the corruption of our main storage database.

Access to the site was restored late Wednesday night, however, the last non-corrupted backed was taken Wednesday morning, so data entered into the system during the day was lost.

In most cases we have restored the missing data based on the SMS and email logs. For example, if a time-off was approved during that time, and a staff was emailed, we have gone in and approved said time-off.

Changes to the system that did not trigger an email (like the building of a un-published roster) will need to be made again so can you please login to the system and check your account.

We are extremely sorry about any inconvenience this has caused the handful of effected clients. We are happy to organise a free month account extension to any client who lost data during this window.

We have also increased the frequency of our database back-up to every hour and added several more early warning alerts to our end.

I am loving using your system as it is foolproof and finally now all the staff and management know exactly what is going on and there can be no mistakes.

You can access the new view by clicking the ‘Work on roster’ link on your dashboard, then click the ‘Role coverage’ link (renamed to whatever you are calling ‘roles’).

Switch between days using the arrows or calendar icon in the top bar, and add and edit shifts as you would in staff or role view.

There are still a few things missing from this view like cost and hour totals, but we didn’t want them holding up an early launch.

Happy Rostering!

For example: If a company with 26 staff signs up through your link, you’ll earn up to $11.70 per month they renew their subscription monthly and/or $117.00 if they pay for the year. With our average client paying for 4 months monthly before paying for the year, you will earn around $163!

Plans That Sell

We make your job easy by giving you a great product that sells. All you need to do is spread the word (well… link) to your friends, colleagues, manager, or clients. Conversion rates of 8% are not uncommon, and the people you refer might even spread YOUR link!

Promotional Material

We give you links, banners, and suggestions on how to promote JustRosters. These can be integrated into your blog, website, email, twitter feed and more! Your affiliate code is embedded in a clean, short URL to make it easier to pass around.

Get Paid Often

Affiliate payments are calculated on the 1st of every month. As long as your earnings are more than $100 at the end of the month, you’ll be paid. If you haven’t earned $100, we’ll pay you the first month you’ve crossed the threshold. All payments are made via PayPal.

More information and a sign-up form can be found on the affiliate program page.

We have also been spending time speeding up our rostering software, particularly in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which suffers from a very poor web engine *shakes fist at Microsoft*. These changes should be very noticeable while working on large rosters. We still recommend running JustRosters in a different browser for the best experience. Google Chrome is 2x faster than Mozilla Firefox which is 2x faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer 8!

The ability to include roster notes in roster summaries heads our list of new features this week. The option is found at the bottom of the ‘Add note’ form while building a roster. If you select ‘yes’, the note will be added next to the date on the staff’s roster summary, when you publish the roster. If the note is attached to a day or role (not a particular staff), it will be added to the roster summary of each staff, working that day and/or in the role.

Other small tweaks include the addition of hour, cost and shift totals on each area in role view. We have also added ‘pending acknowledgement’ icons to shifts on published roster that have not been confirmed by staff, but still fall within the 24-hours they have to confirm them.  This is only relevant if you have ’staff shift confirmation’ turned on in your company settings.

All of our new features and improvements are announced via Twitter as we complete them. If you want to be the first to hear about them, we recommend following us!

Happy rostering!

The manager manual can be found here. You can use a table of contents or search form to navigate the pages. We recommend having a browse though all of the pages when you have a chance; you might even find out about some features you never knew existed! (We sure did as we wrote the manual.)

We are now busy integrating the help contents into your account (behind all those blue ‘?’ icons), finishing up the staff manual and putting together a quick start guide.

As always, get in contact with us if you still have questions, and please let us know if we have made any blinding mistakes in the manual.

Happy rostering!

Taken from our Manager Manaual:

The Pay Rates page can be used to add a percentage of loading to your staffs’ base rate, on specific days / times of the week. The loading settings are then factored in to shift costs and roster budgets, while you roster.

By default, all date / hour combinations are set to 100.00, indicating hours worked during this time earn the staff member 100% of this base rate. To add loading to a date / time, click on it and change the value from ‘100.00’ to something like ‘150.00’ (50% loading). You can update values in bulk by clicking and dragging over multiple cells. Each row represents the hour between the time labelled and the time of the next row.

Once you have finished working on a rate card, click the Save Changes button in the right column. You can create multiple rate cards by clicking the Create new tab above the table. You can assign different rate cards to each staff member on the Staff page.

We also had to bring break start and end times back in… so we know which hour brackets the non-billable time falls into. We have added some ‘smarts’ to the break guesser and like always, once you have added a specific shift once, it will remember the settings for next time.

Happy rostering!

Getting the printing to work has been one of the biggest programming challenges for us, for a few reasons:

• Multiple internet browsers. Each internet browser has different ways of blocking automatic print requests. I guess this makes sense, can you imagine what ad networks could do if they had control of your printer!!!
• Multiple screens sizes. Getting the preview to look similar to the printed version is tricky when A4 pages look different in size at different resolutions.
• Thousands of printers. Anyone who has tried to install (or even work!) a printer will understand our pain here. Trying to control something like the landscape setting is made impossible due to a lack of standards in printer software.
• Range in rosters. From simple weekend rosters for 10 staff to 30 day rosters for 80 staff, there is a huge range of possibilities we need to cater for and test.

We recommend everyone reads the new help manual page on roster printing; get in contact if you have problems.

Happy rostering!

What this means for existing clients:

We have written a blog post about making your transition to the new system as easy as possible.  Give it a read or contact us if you have any questions.

If you want to keep a closer eye on what we getting up to, please start following our Blog, Twitter account, Facebook page or catch up with us at an upcoming trade show or meetup.

If there are things you feel are still missing, head to our feedback forum to submit and vote on the features you want.

Let us know what you think and I hope we live up to our new tagline: Great rostering, for everyone.

Happy Rostering!

JustRosters helps us manage more than 330 staff over 55 locations in a much more efficient way saving us both time and money. Letting staff login to the website and fill out unavailability has removed the need for us to chase and re-enter that data into a separate spreadsheet.

SMS Broadcasting is a highlight in communicating quickly to notify staff of their shifts, filling empty shifts and automatic notifications of their next shift.