Eighteen shift types, three availability buckets — and why that is not a contradiction

A real horeca company runs about eighteen different shift shapes: morning, evening, the middle shift, the split, the closing shift, per department, per location. But ask a human being when they can work and they think in three answers: morning, evening, all day. The gap between the three answers and the eighteen shapes is where most scheduling breaks.

How other tools handle it

They ask the employee to fill in availability per shift type — a form with eighteen rows nobody completes honestly — or they ignore the mismatch entirely and the planner corrects everything by hand on Sunday night. Both ways, the human ends up doing the reconciliation the software was hired to do.

How Rosterly handles it

The employee fills in three buckets per day. The engine maps those buckets onto the actual shift templates of their location and department — including the "weird" shifts no one sees but everyone works. When the planner needs someone, the engine already knows who genuinely fits each of the eighteen shapes, and it says why.

This mapping is Rosterly's core. It is the difference between a tool that stores availability and a tool that understands the roster.

Every decision the engine makes is shown with its reason — to the planner who assigns, and to the employee who asks "why not me?". Trust is the feature.

Open the demo — watch the mapping in action

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