Field notes › Running the business
The hidden cost of the free Excel roster template
Search for a roster template and you will find hundreds, all free, all promising to sort your scheduling in minutes. For a small labour hire crew, one of them probably did sort it, for a while. But free describes the download, not the running cost. The template's real price is paid weekly, in hours and in risk, and it climbs as the crew grows.
The labour you pour into it
A template does not roster anyone. A person rosters people, and the template just holds the result. Every swing built cell by cell. Every change re-entered, then re-communicated by text or phone because the spreadsheet cannot tell anyone anything. Every new client site meaning another tab, or another file, plus some copy-paste glue between them. The coordinator doing this is usually one of the most experienced people in the business, spending a serious slice of every week being a human sync engine between a spreadsheet and reality. That time has a cost even though it never appears on an invoice.
What the template cannot check
The deeper cost is everything the spreadsheet silently allows. It will happily let you book one worker onto two client sites for the same dates, because the sites live on different tabs and Excel does not know they are the same person. It will let you roster someone whose ticket expired last month, because the expiry lives in a different file. It will let a shift go out with no flight booked against it. None of these are data entry errors. They are structural: the template has no idea what a valid roster is, so it cannot object to an invalid one. Compare that with a system where every booking is checked server-side against competencies, inductions, availability and double bookings, and a failed check blocks the booking outright. The spreadsheet's flexibility is precisely the problem.
Which file is the roster?
The moment a spreadsheet is emailed, there are two of it. One coordinator updates the office copy, a client marks up the one from Tuesday, and a supervisor is reading a printout from last week. Every conflicting copy is a worker who might get two versions of the truth about where to be on Monday. A single roster timeline that everyone reads live, with each client seeing only its own sites through its own login, removes the question entirely. There is one roster because there is only one roster.
The phone calls it creates
A spreadsheet roster is invisible to the people on it. So workers ring: what am I on next week, has the swing changed, can I grab extra shifts. Clients ring too, wanting to know who is arriving and whether travel is sorted. Every call is a symptom of the same disease, information that exists but cannot be seen. A worker portal on any phone, no app required, and a client portal per site turn most of those calls into nothing at all. People look instead of asking.
Doing the honest sums
Rostering software costs real money and the spreadsheet does not, so be honest in both directions. Mustr is a flat monthly price per organisation, stepped by crew size, with everything included and no per-seat billing. Plans start from $660 a month including GST, and full pricing is public on the pricing page. Against that, weigh what the template is costing you now: the coordinator hours, the double-booking near misses, the cert nobody caught, the client who noticed. For a crew of a handful, the spreadsheet may still win. Past that, the free template is usually the most expensive tool in the business.
If your roster lives in a file called FINAL_v7, see it on your own roster.