Free Rota Template UK: Excel, Google Sheets, PDF
Meelik Samel
November 24, 2023
Download our free rota template to quickly calculate working hours and salaries. Read this guide to get quickly started.
Free rota templates for shift managers
Efficient employee scheduling doesn't have to be daunting. And it doesn’t need to waste schedulers and shift managers' time with unnecessary paperwork or manual tasks. We understand all these challenges regarding how to schedule employees effectively, and we're here to simplify the process for you. That’s why you can use our free shift planner template to make your staff scheduling process quicker and more efficient.
Download our free staff rota template for Excel and Google Sheets and get a PDF version if you need to use a printable staff rota template. The rota spreadsheet versions of our weekly and monthly rota templates come prefilled with demo data for pay rates and hours to quickly get you going. You can add as many team members as needed, quickly duplicate the current week or month and adjust dates for the following periods.
Free weekly rota template
Free monthly rota template
Why use PARiM UK’s free staff rota template?
If you already know how to make a rota, PARiM free rota templates are budget-friendly and perfect for startups and small businesses looking to optimise their staff schedules without incurring upfront expenses. They're pre-designed and ready to use, sparing you the tedious task of creating schedules and formulas from scratch. You can thus reduce errors, ensuring your staff coverage remains balanced and efficient.
Build quick staff rotas
These templates are ready to use. Instead of starting from scratch, we have already got you covered with working hours and salary calculation formulas. You don't have to spend precious hours reinventing the wheel. Just add new employees, describe their positions, input hourly rates and start scheduling.
Calculate salaries
After setting up pay rates and allocating hours, the templates will take care of the salary calculation. So, when swapping shifts or hours, you don’t need to do manual calculations for each shift.
Monitor shift coverage, costs & budgeting
The weekly shift planner template lets you input the starting and ending times of shifts and uses that as a basis to calculate total hours and salaries to have an even closer view of what shifts each employee is working. The monthly rota template lets you input the total daily hours for each employee and provides you with a quick overview of your surpluses or shortages based on your input budget.
Comply with working time rules
Our rota templates provide you with a quick overview of each employee's weekly and monthly hours and salaries to help you ensure that you are staying on budget and also to ensure that you are complying with your local working time regulations.
Who are these rota templates for?
Our free rota templates will be helpful to everyone who needs to manage working hours and salaries. But here are some examples of what real-life situations could find these templates beneficial:
Managers and Supervisors: Managers and supervisors can use rota templates to efficiently allocate shifts.
Administrative Staff: Administrative teams can benefit from templates designed to manage office hours.
Retail Staff: Retail positions often require flexible scheduling. Rota templates for retail staff enable businesses to adjust shifts quickly and efficiently based on customer demand and sales trends.
Teachers and Educators: Educational institutions benefit from rota templates designed for teachers, allowing them to create class schedules, allocate classroom resources, and manage faculty workload.
Factory Workers and Production Staff: Manufacturing and production positions can take advantage of rota templates to ensure continuous production cycles, meet production targets, and coordinate shift work effectively.
Service Technicians: Service-based businesses like HVAC or plumbing services can use rota templates to schedule field service technicians, manage appointments, and meet customer service requirements.
Volunteers: While the templates provide salary calculations, you can ignore these features and use the templates to ensure fair workload distribution.
Temporary Staff: Temporary staffing agencies can benefit from rota templates to manage shift hours and salaries.
Shift Workers: For positions involving shift work, rota templates are invaluable for creating rotating shift schedules, managing rest days, and ensuring fair allocation of night and day shifts.
Remote Workers: Remote and distributed teams can access and update their schedules using online rota templates, allowing team members to coordinate work across different locations.
Compliance Officers: Professionals responsible for compliance within an organisation can use rota templates equipped with compliance features to ensure adherence to labour laws, regulations, and internal policies.
How to use our free rota template
Our free rota templates are incredibly easy to use. Just follow these simple steps:
Choose your platform
While Excel has long been the staple of spreadsheets, recently, Google Sheets has become increasingly more popular thanks to its cloud-based workflow that provides real-time editing and viewing options. Alternatively, you can download the pdf blank rota template if you need printouts. Our recommendation is to get started with Google Sheets, as you can provide quick access for all team members and speed up your workflow with automated calculations.
Add team members and pay rates
The first two columns are for your employee information. Write down the names and positions in Columns A and B, respectively and pay rates to Column C. If you have additional information you want to add for each employee, such as phone number or email address, you can easily add new columns. To do this, right-click anywhere on column B and select either “Insert new column left” or “Insert new column right”. This will make sure that information about pay rates, hours and salaries will stay in one section.
Set up your scheduling timelines
Our free templates come with set-up demo periods for November and December 2023. First, adjust these to your scheduling timelines. In our weekly template, you just need to change the dates on the first row, and you’re good to go. You can also change the name of the current sheet from Week 1 to something to your liking and duplicate these as you move forward.
In our monthly templates, you just do some quick copying and pasting to get weekdays and dates to match your current month. For example, if you want to create a new month for January 2024, first duplicate the sheet for December 2023. This will create an identical sheet titled “Copy of Dec 2023”. Rename it to “Jan 2024” and see what is the weekday for 1 January. In this case, it’s Monday. Select a workweek starting with Monday and copy and paste it to the column where the month starts (in this example, column F). Then adjust the date numbers, and you’re good to go.
Add shifts & hours
Now, you can start adding shifts and hours. In our weekly rota template, you need to add the start and end times of each shift. To do this, first, add hour, separate it with a colon, add minutes and finally specify AM or PM. Do this for both start and end times, and make sure to follow exactly these steps for the calculator to work correctly. In our monthly template, you can input daily working hours and minutes separated with a colon.
Add monthly budget
Our monthly rota template also includes a monthly budget function in the top left corner. You can use this to have a quick overview of how well you are staying on budget. Input your monthly budget to cell B1, and you will get automatically calculated surplus or shortage data in Cell D1.
Get the PARiM software and manage rotas easily
If you want to fully automate your rota management process, we have got you covered with the best employee scheduling software. PARiM Rota Software lets you automate advanced shift patterns and complex pay rates to schedule even more efficiently without any human errors.
You will get an unlimited staff database for employee information about positions, skills and qualifications. PARiM ensures that shifts will be filled with the best matches to avoid scheduling conflicts and ensure fair workload distribution. You can also publish open shifts. PARiM will automatically select the relevant members and invite them to self-schedule in our rota app.
Time and attendance tracking and break management ensure compliance with working time regulations. PARiM GPS Time Clock app will ensure that employees clock in and out at job sites. Managers and schedulers can overview this data in real-time. The software uses this to create timesheets with automatically calculated salaries.
FAQs related to our work rota template
Can you change role names in this free rota creator?
Yes! Both PARiM weekly and monthly rota templates have some demo data with names, positions, pay rates, and hours to help you get started quickly with some rota examples. You can easily edit each cell to input the employee's name, position, pay rate, and working hours. Just make sure not to edit the cells with formulas that help you with automatic calculations (columns D and E).
Can you change the dates of the weekly rota?
Absolutely! PARiM monthly free rota template has got you covered for November 2023 and December 2023 in separate sheets for both Google Sheets and Excel. If you need to adjust weekdays and dates to a new month, simply duplicate the sheet and edit the data. The process works identically for the PARiM weekly free rota template.
Does this Excel staff rota template work for scheduling shifts in a restaurant?
Of course! Our weekly rota template is an excellent option to ensure that all hours and shifts are provided with sufficient coverage while overviewing all labour expenses. Our monthly template will complement this with a long-term view and budgeting.
Is this free rota generator good for a cleaning services company?
Yes! Cleaning services will definitely benefit from our weekly and monthly rota templates. These free rota templates help cleaning services quickly overview individual workers’ schedules and provide automatic salary calculations.