Moving your roster off Excel: the complete guide for 20+ staff venues

The short version: yes, it is still common for a pub with 20 staff to roster in a spreadsheet, and there is no headcount at which it becomes wrong. The sheet stops working when three things arrive together: more than one department, more than one person editing, and a casual-heavy team whose availability changes every week. For a 22-staff pub that combination costs about $13,700 a year in manager time, re-keying and one recurring penalty error, and it leaves the award rules a sheet cannot flag unchecked. You can move off it in a fortnight without a consultant. This is general information, not legal or financial advice: the Fair Work Ombudsman is the source of truth for the Hospitality Award (MA000009).

Is it normal to still roster on a spreadsheet at 20 staff?

Yes. Plenty of Australian pubs and bars in the 15 to 30 staff range still build the roster in Excel or Google Sheets, photograph it, and post it to a group chat. Nothing in the Fair Work Act or the Hospitality Award (MA000009) says a roster has to live in software. The award says a roster has to exist, show certain things and be accessible, and a printed sheet on the office wall has met that test for decades.

So headcount is the wrong question. A 30-person cafe can run happily on a sheet when one owner rosters one room and the same nine people work the same days. A 14-person pub with a kitchen, a bar and two managers can fall apart on the same sheet. The difference is never the number of names. It is three things landing at once:

• Two or more departments. Bar, kitchen, floor, functions. Each has its own rhythm, its own manager and its own view of who is essential on a Saturday.
• Two or more people editing. The moment a head chef and a bar manager both hold a copy, there are two rosters, and the version staff saw is rarely the one that got changed last.
• A casual-heavy team whose availability moves weekly. Six permanents on fixed lines are easy. Sixteen casuals with uni timetables, second jobs and visas are a fresh puzzle every Sunday.

One of these on its own is manageable. Two is uncomfortable. All three is the point at which the sheet starts costing more than it saves, and most 20-plus staff pubs have all three. This guide covers how to tell, what the sheet actually costs, what it cannot check for you, what to look for in a replacement, and how to move over in a fortnight.

A spreadsheet is still fine if…

Keep rostering in Excel, with a clear conscience, if all of the following are true:

• One person builds and edits the roster. Not one person who is supposed to, one person who actually does. Everyone else only reads it.
• Availability is stable. Your permanents are on fixed lines and your casuals work the same nights most weeks, so you are copying last fortnight forward rather than solving it from scratch.
• Changes are rare. One or two swaps a fortnight, not one or two a day.
• Hours worked are checked against hours rostered somewhere else. You have a real timesheet process, paper or app, and someone reconciles it before payroll rather than paying the roster.
• Someone checks the award rules by hand on every change. Breaks between shifts, the right day's rate, who is a permanent and who is a casual. Every time.

If that describes your venue, the hidden costs in our piece on why free roster templates cost more than you think mostly do not apply to you yet. Bookmark this and come back when a second manager or a second room arrives.

12 signs you have outgrown the sheet

Tick the ones that happened in the last month. Four or more and the sheet is already the most expensive free thing in the building.

• "Am I working tonight?" texts. Staff cannot see the current roster from their phone, so they ask you, and you check the same sheet they could have.
• Several versions in circulation. A screenshot in the group chat, a printout by the till, a file called roster_wk37_FINAL_v3 on the office laptop, and none of them agree.
• Re-keying hours into Xero. Someone spends part of every pay run reading timesheets and typing hours against pay items, and the totals need a second look before they go.
• Nobody can see leave. A casual booked a week off in a text three weeks ago, the manager who received it is on days off, and the roster has them on Friday.
• Cover is found by texting three people. A sick call at 3pm turns into forty minutes of messages, a favour owed and, often enough, the manager working the shift.
• A break clash you found on payday. A permanent closed at 1am and opened at 9am, nobody noticed until the timesheets came in, and the extra cost or the conversation landed two weeks late.
• Department rosters that do not talk to each other. The kitchen has its own sheet, the bar has another, and the one person who works both is double-booked at least once a month.
• The roster costed by formula, and the formula is wrong. It was right in 2024. Two rate changes later it multiplies Saturday hours by a number nobody has checked.
• Award level guessed from job title. Every bartender is a Level 2 because that is what the column says, including the one who has run the bar unsupervised since March.
• Sunday afternoon belongs to the roster. Three or four hours, every week, and not because placing the shifts is hard. Here is where those hours actually go.
• Public holidays get their own emergency. Each one needs a separate spreadsheet, a separate cost check and a separate argument about who is working.
• You cannot say what a fortnight's labour cost until payroll. The roster does not tell you, so the first sight of the wage bill is the pay run itself.

What the spreadsheet costs a 22-staff pub

Take a real shape of venue. A pub with 22 staff: 6 permanents (a venue manager, a head chef, two cooks, two senior bar staff) and 16 casuals across bar, kitchen and floor. Two people edit the roster, the venue manager and the head chef. Payroll runs fortnightly. Nothing unusual.

A salaried venue manager on about $80,000 costs about $40 an hour across a 38-hour week, or about $45 once super and workers compensation are added. That is the number the manager's time is priced at below. It is above the Level 6 award floor of $32.13 an hour deliberately, because a salaried manager is what most 22-staff pubs have. Award figures are the Hospitality Award rates from 1 July 2026; everything else is an estimate, marked as one.

The third line is the one to sit with. If the error runs the other way, a Friday paid at the Saturday rate, it is $1,408.16 handed out a year. If it runs as written, it is $1,408.16 owed to one casual, found later, with the record-keeping conversation that comes with it. Either way it is one error, once a fortnight, on one person. Most sheets at this size carry more than one.

And the table leaves out the incident that convinces people. Here is how it goes with two editors.

Sarah is a Level 2 casual on the main bar every Saturday. On Wednesday the functions booking for a 21st upstairs firms up at 80 guests, so the head chef, who runs functions, moves Sarah to the function bar on his copy of the roster. The venue manager's copy still has her on the main bar, and his copy is the one photographed into the group chat on Thursday night. Sarah reads the group chat. At 6pm on Saturday she is downstairs pouring schooners, the function has 80 guests, a cake and no bartender, and the two managers find out about each other's roster from the birthday girl's mother.

The breaking point is departments and editors, not headcount.

What Excel cannot check for you

A spreadsheet can hold a roster. It cannot read the award against it. These are the specific rules in the Hospitality Award (MA000009) that a sheet will let you break in silence.

Clause 15.5 is headed Rosters (Full-time and part-time employees), and that heading is the first thing a sheet cannot know. The clause applies to your permanents, not your casuals, so at the 22-staff pub above it covers six of the 22 names, and only if the sheet knows which six. Within it:

• 15.5(b) and (c): the roster must show each employee's name and the times they start and finish, and be posted in a conspicuous place easily accessible by the employees. A group-chat screenshot from Thursday probably meets this. A file only the manager can open does not.
• 15.5(d): a permanent's roster can be changed at any time by mutual agreement, or by the employer giving 7 days' notice of the change. This is the clause behind the widely repeated line that rosters must be published a week ahead, or with 48 hours' notice. Neither phrase is in the award. The rule is about changing an existing roster for a permanent, and agreement gets you around it. A sheet has no idea whether the person you just moved agreed.
• 15.5(e): an employee must have a minimum break of 10 hours between finishing ordinary hours on one day and starting ordinary hours on the next, and 8 hours on a changeover of rosters. This is the rule a spreadsheet is worst at. A close at 1am and an open at 9am is an 8-hour gap, and it looks completely normal in two adjacent cells.

Then there is the money. Every Saturday, Sunday and public holiday hour, every weeknight hour after 7pm, every hour past 38 in a week for a permanent, is priced at a different rate, and the rate depends on the person's classification. A sheet multiplies whatever number is in the formula. It does not know that Jack moved from Level 2 to Level 3 in April, or that a casual's overtime hour is priced off the minimum rate rather than the loaded one. The award levels are about duties and autonomy, not job titles, and the sheet only knows the title.

Finally, the record. Fair Work requires time and wages records to be accurate, legible, accessible, in English and kept for 7 years, and they cannot be altered except to correct an error. A roster is part of that picture. Twenty-six files a year across two laptops and a phone camera is a record in the technical sense. One roster with an edit history that shows who changed what, when, is the version you want to hand over when someone asks how a figure was reached. Our timesheet app checklist covers the hours side of the same record.

What to look for when you replace it

Criteria, not vendors. For a venue with departments, two editors and a casual-heavy team, these are the things that matter, roughly in order.

• Departments as a first-class thing. You should be able to roster the kitchen and the bar as separate views of one roster, so the person who works both is one person, not two rows on two sheets.
• Permissions per manager. The head chef edits the kitchen, the bar manager edits the bar, one person publishes. Two editors with one source of truth is the whole fix for the Sarah problem.
• Award level attached to the person, not the shift. So the estimate for a Sunday hour changes when the person's classification does, without anyone touching a formula.
• Break and hours checks at build time. The 10-hour break, the 8-hour changeover, permanents past 38 hours, flagged when you drop the shift in, not on payday.
• Availability and leave that staff enter themselves. Collected before you build, visible on the grid, so you are not decoding a group chat.
• Live cost as you build. The running total for the fortnight, by day and by department, before it is published.
• Roster to timesheet to payroll without re-keying. Rostered hours become the timesheet's starting point, approved hours become the payroll export, and nobody types 22 people's hours by hand.
• One published version. Every phone shows the current roster, and a change notifies the people it touches.
• A cover path that is not your phone. Staff can offer a shift out and pick one up under rules you set. What self-service swaps actually save is more than it sounds.
• Pricing that does not punish headcount. Twenty-two staff is where per-user pricing starts to look like a real bill. Know what you will pay at 22 and at 30, before you import anyone.

The options, by type

Australian venues moving off a sheet land in one of three places. None of them is wrong; they cost different things.

• Per-user paid workforce suites. Roughly $6 to $22 per user per month, which at 22 staff is somewhere between about $1,600 and about $5,800 a year. Long track records, deep integrations, and a bill that grows with every casual you onboard for summer.
• Apps with a free tier capped at a small headcount. Free until you pass the cap, which is usually around ten users, then the paid plan. A 22-staff pub passes the cap on the day it imports the team, so read the free tier as a trial.
• Free-at-every-size platforms. No per-user fee at any headcount, with the business model somewhere other than the roster. Shiftly sits here: the workforce management side is free, and the company earns a per-shift fee when a venue fills a gap through its on-demand network. Whatever you choose in this group, understand what funds it.

The fortnight migration plan for a multi-department venue

Our weekend guide to switching from Excel works for one room and one manager. At 20-plus staff with departments, you want a fortnight: a week to set up and a week running both systems side by side. Here is the order, and the order matters more than the speed.

1. Export the team list from payroll, not from the sheet. Xero or MYOB has the correctly spelled names, current emails, mobiles and employment type. The sheet has nicknames. Fix the gaps in the export before anything else, and mark each person full-time, part-time or casual, because clause 15.5 only applies to the first two.
2. Set up locations, departments and positions before you import a single person. Bar, kitchen, floor, functions. Bartender, cook, kitchen hand, floor, supervisor. If you import people first you will spend day three re-assigning all 22 of them.
3. Import the team and assign an award level to each person. By the work they do and how much supervision they have, not by job title. This is the setup that makes every future cost estimate right, and it is the step people rush. Half an hour with the head chef and the bar manager in the room settles it.
4. Set permissions per manager. The head chef edits kitchen and functions, the bar manager edits bar and floor, the venue manager sees everything and publishes. Nobody edits a department they do not run.
5. Build a base roster template per department. Mirror the layout of the sheet so it feels familiar, with the usual Saturday headcount attached. Templates copy forward; the sheet never did.
6. Run one full fortnight in parallel. Build the next fortnight in both the sheet and the software. Staff keep working from the sheet for now. Compare the two totals by department: where the software's estimate differs from the sheet's formula, the software is usually right and the formula is usually old. Fix classifications, not formulas.
7. Reconcile the parallel fortnight against payroll. When the pay run for that fortnight goes through, compare what was paid to what the software estimated. A gap you cannot explain is a classification or a rate you had wrong on the sheet all along.
8. Pick a cutover fortnight on a quiet week. Never the fortnight before a public holiday, and not the run into December; the Christmas surge is the wrong time to be learning a tool. Mid-winter or the fortnight after a long weekend is ideal.
9. Staff on the app by day one of the live fortnight. Send the invite the week before, have the casuals enter their availability before you build, and make the first published roster the one they see on their phones. A roster that arrives as a notification is the moment the group-chat screenshot era ends.
10. Make the sheet read-only and keep it. Do not delete it. It is part of your 7-year record. Archive the files in one folder, dated, and never open one to edit again.

Total hands-on time across the fortnight for a 22-staff venue is about six hours, most of it in steps one to three. The parallel week costs nothing extra because you were building the roster anyway.

Where Shiftly fits

We built Shiftly's rostering for exactly the venue in this piece: departments as separate views of one roster, permissions per manager, a template per department, and an award level attached to each person so the award interpretation can estimate what a Saturday or a Sunday hour costs at that person's rate. Casuals enter their availability and leave in the app before you build, and the published roster lands on every phone through Shiftly Mobile, one version, with a notification when a shift moves. A close-then-open that breaks the 10-hour break is flagged when you drop it in. The core platform is free at every headcount, with no per-employee fees, so 22 staff costs the same as 12.

Shiftly is a calculation tool and a staffing network, not a payroll provider, and it will not sign off your award obligations for you; the Fair Work Ombudsman remains the source of truth. The part no sheet will ever do is the other half of the job: when a casual drops out on Saturday morning, the same open shift can go out to a network of local hospitality workers from inside the roster. That is what we mean by the roster that fills itself. It works once the on-demand network is live in your area, beginning with Sydney. Get started with Shiftly

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to move a 20-staff venue off a spreadsheet roster?

About a fortnight, of which roughly six hours is hands-on work. The first week is setup: exporting the team from payroll, building departments and positions, importing staff, assigning award levels and setting manager permissions. The second week is a parallel run, building the same fortnight in both the sheet and the software and reconciling the totals. Cutover happens on the next quiet fortnight. A single-room venue with one manager can compress this into a weekend.

Can I move one department off the spreadsheet and leave the others on it?

You can, and some venues start with the bar because it has the most casuals and the most weekend penalty hours. The cost is that the two systems cannot see each other, so a person who works the bar on Friday and the kitchen on Saturday is still two rows on two rosters, and the 10-hour break between those shifts is checked by nobody. If you stage it, move the departments that share staff together, and set a date for the rest.

Do I need to keep the old Excel rosters after I switch?

Yes. Fair Work requires time and wages records to be kept for 7 years, and rosters form part of the picture of what was worked and what was paid. Keep every version in one dated, read-only folder rather than scattered across laptops and phones. Start the new system fresh from the next roster; there is no need to re-enter history, and the archived sheets remain the record for the period they cover.

What does rostering software cost for a 22-staff pub?

On per-user pricing of roughly $6 to $22 per user per month, 22 staff costs between about $1,600 and about $5,800 a year, and the bill rises with every casual added for summer. Free tiers on capped apps usually end around ten users, so they act as a trial at this size. Shiftly's rostering, timesheets and award calculation are free at any headcount, with no per-employee fees, so the cost of moving is the fortnight of setup rather than a new subscription.

The bottom line

Rostering 20 staff in Excel is normal, and it is not a failing. It is a tool that was right for one room and one editor, still running a venue that now has three rooms and two. The sheet cannot see a 10-hour break, does not know which six of your 22 people clause 15.5 covers, and costs a 22-staff pub about $13,700 a year to keep pretending it can. Pick the quiet fortnight, run both, then close the sheet.