Rotaville Rota Software News

Some businesses need to plan rotas across multiple seasons. Our new Extended Plan lets you schedule shifts up to 24 months ( 2 years! ) ahead and look back through 24 months of shift history, compared with 12 months in each direction on the Essential Plan.

The extra planning window follows continuing work on how Rotaville handles shifts, and on the code and infrastructure behind it. If it would help your business, the workforce owner can switch to Extended on the Account Upgrade page. For the same staff size, the monthly upgrade price is twice that of Essential.

Also recently added, on the Account Upgrade page, you can now choose annual billing. Previously, you had to contact us to arrange yearly payments.

If you’d like help choosing a plan or run into a problem while switching, please get in touch.

We’ve added three new videos to the Rotaville Academy, covering chat for managers, chat for employees, and backups and archives. The missing lessons are finally here.

• Chat for Managers shows how to set up chat rooms, post announcements, reply privately to employees, check read receipts and moderate messages.
• Chat for Employees covers messaging your managers, joining team conversations, reacting to announcements and choosing which rooms notify you. It also shows chat on your phone.
• Backups and Archives, for managers, explains how to keep copies of upcoming shifts and records of past ones, using printouts, automatic Google Drive backups and monthly archives.

We’ve also updated Multiple Rotas to include rota colours. It’s well worth another look to see how good several rotas can look together in colour. The video shows how to turn colours on, choose them yourself, and view one rota, all rotas or a selection together.

The Rota Usage and Rota Management certificates are now at version 6. If you qualified previously, return to your course, watch the new lessons and pass their questions. Complete any lessons marked “Unit Pass Outdated” too. Your current lesson passes still count.

Sign in to the Rotaville Academy to check your results, update your certificate to version 6 and bring your course progress back to 100%.

You can now give each rota its own colour in Rotaville. This is especially useful for workforces with separate rotas for different teams, departments or locations.

Rota colours appear in desktop calendars, mobile rota lists and shift views, and colour PDF exports of weekly and monthly rotas. Individual employee schedule PDFs also use rota colours for shifts.

For example, you could use blue for reception, green for the kitchen and purple for housekeeping. When viewing several rotas together, the colours help managers distinguish them and employees recognise where each shift belongs.

To turn it on:

1. As a workforce owner or manager, open Workforce Settings.
2. Under Records, set Use Rota Colours to Yes and save.
3. Edit each rota to keep its automatic colour or switch off automatic colour and choose a manual colour.

You can also add a photo to each rota. Enable Use Rota Photos in Workforce Settings, then use the Photo button in Add or Edit Rotas.

Colours and photos are optional, with separate settings. You can enable rota colours without displaying photos.

Your Shifts on Home is easier to navigate. Move back or forward by a week, jump straight to a date, or return to today. We’ve also made week navigation and date jumping easier on mobile.

We’ve continued our regular work on speed, too. Recent changes cut down the queries and data needed for personal rotas and calendar subscriptions, leaving less work to do when those views load.

We’ve also refined what employees see. The Show Draft Shifts setting now applies to shifts only. An employee’s own pending holiday request can still appear when requests are enabled, while colleagues’ pending requests remain private. Sick leave follows its own visibility setting.

Along the way, we fixed week-boundary navigation, calendar-feed time zones and a repeating-shift issue that could send duplicate notifications.

If you spot a problem or need a hand with any of these changes, please get in touch. We’ll be happy to help.

Rotaville now includes new notification settings to help rota managers stay informed without unnecessary distraction.

You can now choose how on-screen toast notifications behave: Full, Minimal, or Off. There is also a new Toast Speed setting, with Slow, Normal, and Fast options. This gives each user more control over how much attention notifications ask for during a busy shift planning session.

Minimal notifications are smaller and tidier, while Off mode keeps the screen calm but still records recent notifications. A new notification indicator gives a subtle sign that real-time updates are happening, and recent notifications can be reviewed when needed.

The new settings are live now on the desktop and mobile websites, and will arrive in the next Rotaville mobile app update.

For Android and iOS, Rotaville App v64.11.16 is now available - please update your apps now!

We've made several performance improvements to the mobile App and the desktop Web app. Rotaville is now running faster and more smoothly than ever.

Everyone will have seen improvements in recent weeks, and Workforces with large rotas and many repeating shifts are now loading much faster.

More performance improvements are in the pipeline.

In other news, problems sending mail to Hotmail, Outlook, and MSN email addresses now seem to be solved (by Microsoft).

Some email messages sent from Rotaville to Hotmail and Microsoft addresses are currently being delayed.

We suspect a Hotmail user might have lazily hit the "Spam" button instead of using the "unsubscribe" link.

Hotmail users can help us fix this problem by

1. Check your Spam/Junk folders for any emails from Rotaville and mark them as "NOT Spam" or "It's not Junk".
2. Add support@rotaville.com to your Contacts/People list
3. Send a happy email to support@rotaville.com telling us everything you like about Rotaville, along with any suggestions for things that you think could be improved.

thanks.

When you use the click-and-drag feature to mark a new shift on the rota, hold down the "Shift" key while releasing the mouse button. This will open the new shift form with the start and end times automatically filled in with your selected times.

This trick is helpful when you know you want to add details like Shift Title, Shift Info, or Shift Break to a newly created shift.

Some new updates for the desktop Rota (Work page) view:

• Calendar navigation now shows separate buttons for moving by month or by week, with clearer “Month”/“Week” arrows on both sides.
• Jump-to-date dropdown and view toggles tightened for a bit less horizontal space, but behavior unchanged.
• Forward/back logic adjusted so week/month jumps honour actual week starts and month boundaries; you’ll still get the same plan-limit warnings if you go too far.

We’ve added a little bit of focus (and fun) to Rotaville.

From today, you can turn on optional “click effects” for your own account:

• A subtle visual ripple wherever you click.
• A gentle click sound when you press and release.

These are personal settings, so you can choose what suits you without affecting anyone else.

You’ll find the new options under:

• Home → Settings → UI Settings

on the desktop site. And in the mobile app (from version 64.11.11 onwards):

• Home → Menu → Settings (look for the “Click Effects” section).

You can turn the visual and sound effects on or off separately, and your choices apply across desktop, mobile, and the mobile apps
when you’re logged in.

These are the same click and sound effects that you see and hear in the Rotaville help videos and screencasts.

I have these effects turned on for my account all the time - weirdly, they make me feel more productive.

If you’d prefer things quiet and minimal, leave them off – Rotaville will carry on working exactly as before.

Rotaville only keeps historical shift information for 12 months.

If you need to keep records for longer then then you should keep your own copies of the PDF or CSV reports that you need.

A new feature now makes this easier, an Archive report of shifts from the past month can be automatically emailed to you or uploaded to your Google Drive. For more details about this feature, read this page, from the HELP Documentation https://rotaville.com/docs/backup-and-archive

You can configure Google Drive archive reports and email archive reports (it's the same report either way) by following the Google Drive and Settings links from your Home page,

We’ve recently completed another round of system updates - Rotaville is now running faster than ever. Along the way, we’ve also squashed a few bugs and made other minor improvements.

As you might have noticed, the Shift Interest feature now uses face icons, and the Shift Agreement feature now uses thumbs-up/down icons. These icon changes will make the two features easier to distinguish from each other and allow us to introduce newer features more easily in the future.

The Rotaville Mobile App has been updated, and the latest version is now 64.7.4 on both iPhone and Android.

Merry Christmas!

Jason.

Hello, Rotaville community!

Are you a new manager or starting a free trial? We’ve created a short, engaging video to help you quickly create your work rota.

Head over to the HELP tab in the Rotaville Academy to check it out: https://rotaville.com/help/quick-start.

Get ready to dive in with confidence!

Cheers,
Jason

Hello Rotaville Users,

We're excited to announce that Rotaville has received a major speed boost! Over the past few months, we've worked hard to modernise, update, and upgrade the code and infrastructure powering Rotaville. The result? Faster rota management for your business!

No matter the size of your workforce, these upgrades will help you create, update, and maintain your work rotas more quickly and efficiently than ever before. With improved page load times, faster data processing, and an enhanced user interface, Rotaville is better equipped to handle even the most complex staff rota management needs.

We're confident that these upgrades will make a big difference in how you experience Rotaville, and we can't wait for you to try them out. As always, your feedback is essential to us, so please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any comments, questions, or concerns.

From all of us at Rotaville, thank you for choosing us as your go-to rota management solution. We're committed to providing you with the best possible experience, and we're excited to continue improving and expanding Rotaville to meet your evolving needs.

Happy Rotavilling!

Best regards,
Jason.

A new update for the Rotaville Rota Software App is now available in the App Store and Play Store.

Version 64.2.0 includes 2 important bug fixes, and it's worth upgrading your app ASAP.

Reminder! We're now gathering feedback on potential features and improvements (ie. your ideas, upvotes and comments ) for Rotaville at

https://rotaville.canny.io/ <-- if you have any suggestions, please share them here.

And we've just fixed some twitchyness with the desktop website UI and released an update to the mobile app with new Feedback and Review options.

Watch a live demo now of this new feature on these networks

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrPK3kQcmDg

Facebook - https://fb.watch/myzpMEp-lP/

𝕏 - https://twitter.com/rotaville/status/1693449157313470500

We're now gathering feedback on potential features and improvements (ie. your ideas, upvotes and comments ) for Rotaville at

https://rotaville.canny.io/ <-- if you have any suggestions please share them here.

And we've just launched a NEW Date Navigation feature making it easier to use and navigate the Rota view.

Watch the live launch and demo of this new feature on these networks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lCgbFZMdM

https://www.facebook.com/RotavilleRotaSoftware/videos/1002930360861004

https://twitter.com/rotaville/status/1688400947993772032

We are excited to announce the release of a new feature for Rotaville: Shift Interest. This feature allows employees to mark their interest for shifts they are not yet assigned to as "Willing" or "Reluctant."

To use Shift Interest, the Workforce Settings must allow employees to see all shifts. Shift Interest only applies before an employee is assigned to a shift. The old pre-accept and pre-decline functionality has been removed from the system.

After an employee has been assigned to a shift, they can register their Shift Agreement (Accept or Decline) as before.

We have also fixed a collection of minor bugs and improved system performance. We have also updated the design on many screens and pages.

To coincide with the new Shift Interest functionality, an updated version of the Rotaville App is available for Android and iOS. Please be sure to look for the new app version 62.0.0.

We've also updated some Short Video lessons with details about Shift Interest.

For managers:

https://rotaville.com/help/assigning-employees

https://rotaville.com/help/advanced-workforce-settings

For employees:

https://rotaville.com/help/employee-introduction

https://rotaville.com/help/employee-shift-interest

We hope this new feature is helpful to you. Please let us know if you have any questions.

We have recently updated the styles used on our pages and screens. We have been working on this for some time and are pleased with the results. We believe it makes the overall experience more modern and user-friendly.

If you notice any pages, screens, or dialogs, that do not look quite right, please let us know. We would be grateful if you could take a photo or screenshot and send it to us. This will allow us to fix the issue as soon as possible.

Thank you for your help and we hope you enjoy the updated look!

At Rotaville, we are constantly working to improve the user experience for our customers. Recently, we have made some updates to our production server and other backend components, and we are excited to share with you the positive results.

First, we've upgraded our servers to newer, more powerful machines. This ensures that the service can handle increased traffic and perform more complex tasks without slowing down.

Next, we optimized our database architecture to reduce the number of queries and improve data retrieval times. This means users will experience faster load times when accessing their data on Rotaville.

We are proud to say that these updates have led to a significant improvement in the performance and reliability of Rotaville. We hope that you will notice the difference as you continue to use the service.

As always, we are committed to providing our customers with the best possible experience and will continue to make updates and improvements to the service in the future.

Thank you for choosing Rotaville!