Rockpool Beach Cafe cut the time it spends on the roster after moving to Shiftly

Rockpool Beach Cafe moved its roster to Shiftly after using other rostering apps, and director Shannon Andrews reports two changes: less time spent building the roster each week, and a product team that made modifications she asked for. She rates Shiftly five stars. The café pays nothing for the software.

Why is a café roster so slow to build?

A café roster is slow because it is rebuilt every week around availability that never settles. Casual staff study, travel and pick up second jobs; opening hours stretch and shrink with the season; a wet weekend needs half the floor of a sunny one. Each of those changes has to be collected, usually by message, and typed into whatever the roster lives in.

Rostering apps promise to fix this and often move the problem rather than remove it. The roster still has to be built from scratch if templates are clumsy, staff still message their availability if the app has no simple way to record it, and the pay side still gets checked by hand if the app only shows hours and leaves the award to payroll.

What changed for Rockpool Beach Cafe

The weekly build got shorter. On Shiftly a manager copies a saved roster template forward and edits the exceptions; staff set their own availability in the Shiftly Me app, so the manager sees who can work before placing a shift rather than finding out afterwards. Shannon's summary, in her own words, is that Shiftly reduced the time spent doing the roster compared to other apps.

The other change is the one she leads with in her review. Shiftly made tailored modifications to the app based on her feedback, and did it quickly. A small product team that talks to its venues directly can do that; the change she asked for became a change every café on the platform now has.

Shiftly has helped my business with tailored modifications to their app. They listen to the feedback from myself and others and act immediately to improve the user experience.

How does Shiftly handle café pay rules?

Shiftly calculates café pay from approved timesheets using the award the venue is on, so weekend penalties, casual loading, early-morning loadings and minimum shift lengths are applied to the hours actually worked rather than checked afterwards. Cafés open early and trade hardest on weekends, which is exactly where manual pay checks go wrong.

For a café on the Hospitality Industry (General) Award, the rules that bite are:

• Casual loading of 25% on the minimum hourly rate, applied before any penalty.
• Saturday at 150% and Sunday at 175% for casuals; 125% and 150% for full-time and part-time staff.
• An extra $4.42 an hour for work between midnight and 7am, which catches early bakers and setup shifts.
• A 2-hour minimum engagement for casuals and 3 hours for part-time staff, warned at roster time.

The award interpretation engine applies all of these to each approved timesheet. The pay run itself stays in the café's payroll software; Shiftly supplies the calculated hours and rates that the pay run depends on.

Award figures are as stated on Shiftly's Hospitality Award guide, current for the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026 and last verified July 2026.

What does the café pay for this?

Nothing. Rostering, availability, timesheets, award interpretation, leave and onboarding are free on Shiftly, with no per-employee or monthly fee. Shiftly is paid when a venue fills an extra shift through its On-Demand marketplace; a café that only uses the roster never sees an invoice. The cafés page covers the setup for a venue like this one, and pricing has the full detail.