Lab Shift Roster — user guide

1. What it does

Lab Shift Roster builds a draft rota for a diagnostic laboratory from a spreadsheet of your workforce, then tells you where that rota is thin.

The question it exists to answer is: do I have the right people, with the right competencies, in the right laboratory areas, at the right time?

It understands the things that make laboratory rostering awkward:

• Contracted hours and FTE, so a ten-hour night is not treated as equivalent to a seven-and-a-half hour day
• Part-time and alternating working patterns
• Competency as a status with an expiry date, not a tick-box
• Grade, seniority and competence as three separate things
• Sections that each need their own person standing at them
• Rest intervals measured from real shift times, including across midnight

2. Your data

What that means in practice:

• The workbook you choose is read by the page itself, not sent anywhere
• The rota you download is written on your own computer
• Closing the tab discards everything; nothing persists

Usage analytics

The web page itself does use Google Analytics, so limited information about how Lab Shift Roster is used is transmitted: page views, and three events recording that a draft roster was generated, a staff rota was exported or a manager report was exported. Those events are names alone.

No staff, roster, competency, leave, hours, organisation or workbook information is included — not staff names or identifiers, not your file name, not any figure from your workbook, and no error text. Advertising features, Google Signals and ad personalisation are switched off. The distinction worth holding on to: your workforce data stays local; ordinary website analytics does not.

No absolute security claims are made about your own device or network. Please include only the workforce information the tool needs. Do not add unnecessary personal details, and never add patient-identifiable information — none is required.

3. Quick start

If you want to see what it produces before entering any real data, open the application and press Try the balanced example. That generates a rota from a fictional department in a few seconds.

For your own laboratory:

1. Download a workbook — the blank one, or an example to work from
2. Fill it in — staff, competencies, shifts, requirements, leave
3. Upload it — choose the file, nothing is transmitted
4. Generate a draft roster
5. Review the issues — start with Critical
6. Export — a staff rota to circulate, a manager report to keep

Expect the first attempt to raise issues. That is the tool doing its job: it is showing you where the plan is thin, not failing.

4. Choosing a workbook

Three downloads are offered, and they serve different purposes.

The workbook has eleven sheets. The next sections cover each one. You do not need to complete every column — most have sensible behaviour when left blank — and the guidance below says which ones matter.

5. Roster Details

Who the rota is for and what period it covers. These appear on the exported workbook, so they are worth filling in properly if the rota will be circulated.

A month is the usual period. Longer works, but produces a very wide spreadsheet — you will be warned beyond a year.

6. Rules

Your laboratory's own operating rules. Every one is a setting you control.

A note on sharing nights

Sharing nights evenly is on by default, because concentrating them on a few people while eligible colleagues do none is not acceptable in practice. It has a genuine cost: a block of nights also books the recovery days after it, so spreading nights across more people fragments cover for the day service. On the balanced example, turning sharing on moves requirement compliance from 100% to about 95%. Set it to N only if that last few per cent of cover matters more to you than sharing the unpopular work.

There is deliberately no senior band threshold. Seniority is recorded per person on the Staff sheet, and a shift that needs a particular grade uses Min Band on the Requirements sheet. A Band 7 is not automatically senior, and a senior is not automatically competent in everything.

7. Staff

One row per person. This is the most important sheet, and the one worth taking time over.

Identity and role

Hours

When they are available

8. Week Patterns

Only needed for staff who work alternating weeks. Set Pattern Cycle (weeks) on the Staff sheet first, then add one row here per person per week.

Weeks are counted from the Monday of the week the roster period starts, so a period beginning midweek does not shift the pattern. If a cycle is declared but a week is left out, week 1 is used for it rather than making that person unavailable.

9. Competencies

One row per person per discipline. This is what lets the tool answer whether a section can actually be staffed.

What each status means

Somebody may hold several records in one discipline. The strongest current one governs, so an old In Training row does not hide a later Competent one.

Authorisation is checked independently of competence. A result authoriser must also be currently competent in that discipline — the flag alone is not enough.

10. Shifts

The shifts your laboratory runs, defined by real clock times.

The starting configuration is:

A shift crossing midnight is handled correctly: 21:00 to 07:00 is ten hours, not a negative number. A shift that starts and finishes at the same time is rejected as a data-entry error.

Shifts your laboratory does not run

Those five are a starting point, not a prescription. Plenty of laboratories have no early shift, or run a twilight instead of a late, or work weekends on the same pattern as weekdays.

Set Active to N for any shift you do not run. An inactive shift is never rostered, and any requirement or bench that mentions it is quietly ignored for as long as it is switched off — so you do not have to go and unpick the Shift Requirements and Benches sheets to remove one shift.

To add a shift, add a row. Give it a code that nothing else uses, then refer to that code from Shift Requirements and Benches as normal.

Switching off is deliberately reversible. A laboratory that drops its early shift over the summer can set Active back to Y in September without retyping the times, the colours or the requirements. Deleting the row works too, but you would lose all of that.

If every shift is marked inactive, the roster says so plainly rather than producing an empty rota.

11. Shift Requirements

What each shift needs in order to be safe to run. Every condition is checked independently — a senior does not satisfy a transfusion competency, and a competent scientist does not satisfy a coordinator requirement.

How competency requirements are counted

There is an important distinction here, and getting it wrong is the usual cause of an impossible requirement.

• Sections need distinct people. A section is a physical place somebody stands. Three sections each needing one competent person need three different people, even if one person holds all three competencies.
• A shift's own competency list does not. BT:1, HAEM:1 on a single-handed night shift means one person competent in both. Asking for two distinct people on a one-person shift could never be satisfied.

Because sections drive distinct people, section demand also drives staffing: a shift with a headcount minimum of one will still roster three people if three sections need cover.

12. Benches

The laboratory sections that need somebody actually standing at them.

One person covers one section at a time. Coverage is judged on who is actually allocated, not on who happens to be on duty holding the right competency — so a multi-skilled scientist is never counted twice.

13. Leave and Leave Types

Nobody is ever rostered on a day they are recorded as absent.

Leave

Why credited hours matter

Without them, somebody who takes a week off still shows a shortfall against their contracted hours, and the rota tries to fill it — giving them a full workload squeezed into fewer days. Crediting the absence closes that gap, so hours lost to leave are not clawed back with extra shifts.

Hours are therefore reported as five figures:

Leave Types

The supplied codes are A/L, S/L, C/L, M/L and S/D, all crediting hours by default. This is a planning setting, not a statement of HR or pay policy — organisations treat sickness and long-term absence differently, so it is configurable rather than assumed.

Because credited hours come from each person's own pattern, a part-timer absent for a week is credited a part-time week.

14. Generating a roster

Choose your completed workbook, then press Generate draft roster. Everything happens on your own machine, so nothing is uploaded and the speed depends on your computer rather than a connection.

If the workbook needs correcting you will get a list of everything wrong at once, each naming the sheet, the row and the column heading. Fix them, save, and choose the file again — you do not have to reload the page.

A workbook from an earlier version still works. You will see a note saying it predates the current template, because it will not have the newer optional columns — Active on the Shifts sheet and Initials on the Staff sheet. Nothing is rejected, and a missing Active column simply means every shift runs, exactly as before.

Advanced settings

Optional. You can override the start and end dates without editing the workbook, which is useful for producing next month from the same file. The Roster generation ID is recorded with each draft so a particular rota can be reproduced; you never need to change it by hand.

15. Reading the dashboard

The headline is the roster status: No issues found, Review suggested, or Attention required.

The two coverage figures

These are different questions and it matters not to confuse them.

The other tiles

Fairness is a coarse judgement to review, not a score to optimise — there is no single correct fairness formula. Night fairness is measured in blocks, because ten three-night blocks shared between eight people cannot come out level, and counting individual nights would call the closest available split unfair.

16. Working through issues

Issues open with counts by severity and the main causes ordered by frequency, so you can see where to start rather than reading a list.

Each issue states the date, shift and section, what was required, what was available, the impact, and a suggested review point. For example:

Related warnings with the same underlying cause are combined. A missing morphology scientist produces one issue, not two — one for the competency and another for the section that consequently could not be staffed.

17. Roster preview and section coverage

Staff down the side, dates across the top, shift codes in the cells, coloured as you configured them. The name column stays put while you scroll sideways.

This on-screen preview names people in full. The exported rota adds an Initials column, because that is where the section allocation rows use initials — see Exporting.

• Search staff by name, role or band
• Filter by shift to see who is on nights, for instance
• Narrow the dates to focus on a week
• Hover a cell for the shift name, times and any section allocation
• A cell marked * was adjusted by hand
• A blank cell means not scheduled

The Section coverage panel below lists each date and shift with the section, how many people were required and allocated, a status of Covered, Review or Not covered, and who is on it. Filter by date or section.

18. Contracted hours

Per person: contracted weekly hours, target for the period, worked, credited absence, total accounted, variance, percentage of target, and a status.

Work is distributed by hours, not by counting shifts. Twenty ten-hour nights total 200 hours where twenty seven-and-a-half hour days total 150 — treating those as equivalent would be the wrong answer. Shift counts are reported as a statistic only.

Somebody mildly under target is often just a part-timer whose available days do not line up with demand. Somebody well over is worth investigating: it usually means they are one of very few people who satisfy a constrained requirement.

19. Workforce resilience

How exposed you are if one person is unavailable. Two different risks are reported separately, because they are not the same thing.

At workforce level, one competent person is Critical, two is Review, three or more is Passed. Shift-level thinness is reported once per shift and discipline with a count of affected dates, rather than once per day — a thinly covered section is one problem to think about, not thirty.

Section rotation is also tracked: if somebody competent in a discipline was not allocated to it during the period, that is flagged against your configured interval. No rotation rule is invented; the report simply says how long it has been.

20. Adjusting a roster by hand

The draft is a starting point. To change it, use Adjust an assignment:

1. Choose the date and shift
2. Choose somebody to take off, somebody to put on, or both
3. Add a reason if you want a record of why
4. Press Apply change

Only people who could actually work that shift are offered, each listed with their current competencies. Anybody excluded is counted with the reason — on leave, not their working day, cannot work nights or weekends, or already working elsewhere — so you can see why a name is missing rather than wondering.

Every check then re-runs: staffing, competency and section coverage, hours, fairness, rest rules, resilience, the dashboard and both exports. If your change creates a problem, you will see it immediately.

Manual changes are marked as such, listed with an Undo for each and an Undo all, and they survive Generate alternative roster — they are never silently overwritten. Undoing everything returns exactly the automatic roster.

Generate alternative roster

Produces a different valid draft from the same information, keeping your workbook, date range and rules. Useful when a rota is technically fine but you would rather the work fell differently. If you have manual changes you will be warned before they are replaced.

Start new roster

Clears the loaded workbook, the draft, the issues, the filters and any manual changes, and returns to the upload state. No page reload, and the tool stays ready to use.

21. Exporting

One draft, two audiences. Both come from the same roster, so exporting one does not change the other or lose your manual adjustments.

Export staff rota

A simplified workbook for circulating to the team: Roster, Section Allocations and Notes. Clean, printable, and deliberately limited to what somebody needs in order to read their own rota.

The Roster sheet carries an Initials column beside each name, so the initials used in the section allocation rows can be matched to a person without leaving the sheet.

Export manager workbook

The full analytical record, in ten sheets:

Both are formatted to be usable: freeze panes, filters, sensible column widths, landscape and fit-to-width for printing, and a legend. Status is always carried by a word as well as a colour, so nothing depends on colour alone.

22. How it decides

Useful to know when a result surprises you.

Hard rules it will not break

If a shift cannot be filled without breaking one of these, it is left short and reported:

• Nobody is rostered on a day they are recorded as absent
• One shift per person per day
• Nobody is rostered outside their working pattern or available hours
• No shift the day after a night, and the configured rest interval is honoured in both directions
• Maximum consecutive days and nights
• Nights only for staff marked as night-capable; weekends likewise
• Personal caps on nights, weekends, days per week and hours

Order of work

1. Nights first. They are the most constrained and they generate the recovery days everything else has to work around
2. Then day shifts, hardest first — the shift with the fewest eligible people goes first
3. Within a shift, the rarest capability first, so a scarce competency is not spent on a slot somebody else could have filled
4. Then top up to the minimum headcount
5. Then allocate sections, one person to one section

Who gets offered work

Among eligible people, whoever is furthest below their contracted target goes first. For weekend days, whoever has done fewest weekends leads instead — ordering by hours alone concentrated weekends on full-time staff, because a larger target means a larger shortfall. Nights are shared the same way when Share nights evenly is on.

Fairness comparisons are only ever made within the group eligible for that work, so somebody who cannot work nights is never counted as having an unfairly light night load.

23. If something goes wrong

The workbook is validated before any rota is produced, and every problem is reported at once so you can fix them in one pass. Each names the sheet, the row and the column heading rather than an internal error.

The rota looks wrong rather than broken

• Somebody is never rostered. Check their Mon–Sun availability, night and weekend eligibility, and any personal caps
• Nobody is rostered at weekends. Their availability pattern probably excludes Saturday and Sunday
• A section is never covered. Check the discipline code matches, that somebody is Competent rather than In Training, that the competency has not expired, and whether the section requires an authoriser
• Everybody is over or under target hours. Your total shift demand does not match your total contracted hours. Adjust the requirements or the hours
• Too many people are under target. Often a sign that a requirement routes work to a small group, leaving others idle

24. What it does not do

• It does not make staffing decisions. Every rota is a draft for managerial review
• It is not artificial intelligence. It is a rules engine. Where it cannot fill a shift without breaking a rule you set, it leaves the shift short and says so
• It does not determine legal or regulatory compliance. Rest intervals and other limits are rules you configure
• It does not replace local workforce policies, HR systems, payroll, ESR or professional judgement
• There are no user accounts, no external database, no cloud storage and no integrations

Not yet supported

• Bank holidays are not modelled as a distinct category
• Section rotation is reported but is not yet an input to scheduling
• Part-shift sections — morphology 09:00–13:00 then coagulation 13:00–17:00 — are not yet available; sections are covered for a whole shift
• The engine produces a workable draft reliably but does not prove it is the best possible one. A human-built rota may sometimes be better