Free rota template
A weekly staff rota, a monthly rota and a timesheet. The hours add themselves up, including shifts that run past midnight. Download them and use them, there is nothing to sign up for.
Weekly staff rota
.xlsx · ~8 KB
The one most people mean by a rota. Staff down the side, Monday to Sunday across the top, a start and a finish in each cell.
- Start and finish per person per day
- Hours per person and a weekly total, worked out for you
- A shift running past midnight is counted correctly
- Sample week for a cafe, ready to type over
Monthly rota
.xlsx · ~8 KB
A month across, staff down. One letter per day: D for a day shift, N for a night, O for off, H for holiday.
- 31 days by staff, colour coded for days and nights
- Shifts and hours counted per person automatically
- Sample set up as two crews on days and two on nights
- Change the shift length in one cell
Monthly timesheet
.xlsx · ~9 KB
One row per day for a single person. Enter a start, a finish and a break, and the hours work themselves out.
- Every day of the current month, weekends marked
- Hours per day and a monthly total
- Break in minutes comes off the total
- Handles a shift that runs past midnight
Try it without an account
Three free tools that need no sign-up and no email. Build a rota or add up hours right now, and move to an account when the team has to see it.
When the spreadsheet starts costing you evenings
InShift builds the rota from templates you set once, tells the team on their phones when it changes, lets them swap between themselves, and adds the hours up for payroll. Free, with no cap on people or sites.
Create a free account →What a rota template needs to do
Most rota templates you can download are a grid with the days written across the top. That is the easy half. The half that matters is the arithmetic: if you have to add the hours up yourself at the end of the week, the template has handed the work straight back to you.
So the three above carry formulas. You type a start and a finish, and the hours appear. A shift running from 22:00 to 06:00 is counted as eight hours rather than as minus sixteen, which is what a naive subtraction gives you and the reason so many downloaded templates quietly produce nonsense on night shifts.
Weekly or monthly
Use the weekly one if your shifts move around: hospitality, retail, salons, anywhere the times change with the day and you care about who is on at four o'clock. It holds real clock times, so it can tell you your coverage, not just who is in.
Use the monthly one if your people work a fixed pattern and the question is which days, not which hours: care homes, security, warehouses, manufacturing. One letter per day is faster to fill and easier to read across four weeks than a wall of times.
The timesheet is a different document. The rota is the plan, the timesheet is what happened. Keep them apart and payroll arguments get much shorter.
Where a spreadsheet gives up
A spreadsheet is genuinely fine for one site and a small team, and there is no reason to replace something that works. It stops working at a specific, recognisable point, and it is worth knowing what that point looks like before you are standing in it.
- The team cannot see it. You post a photo of the grid in a group chat. Two swaps later, four people are working from three different versions and one of them is a screenshot from Tuesday.
- Nobody is told anything. Move a shift and the file changes. That is all it does. Whether the person finds out is down to whether they scroll.
- Sickness at six in the morning. A file cannot ask eleven people at once whether they can come in. You can, one call at a time, while the delivery lands.
- The second site. Two spreadsheets means the question of who is on tomorrow at the other one now costs a phone call.
- It never catches a mistake. Double-booking someone, leaving a Saturday with nobody on, rostering a person who booked the day off: the grid takes all three without a murmur.
None of that is an argument against the templates. Take them, use them, they are free and there is no email box to fill in. It is an argument about when to stop.