Field notes › Choosing software
The real cost of rostering software, beyond the licence
When labour hire firms compare rostering systems, the comparison is nearly always per user per month against per user per month. It is the easiest number to line up and the least useful one, because it is rarely the biggest number in the decision.
Here is what is actually in the total, roughly in order of how often it gets missed.
The second system you still need
Most rostering tools do not do compliance in the sense labour hire means it: requirements per client site, certificates with verified states and expiries, and a check that stops a booking. So firms buy a roster tool and a compliance tool, or a roster tool and a skills passport, and pay for both.
When you add the two licences together the comparison changes shape entirely. It also introduces a cost that is not on either invoice: the two systems do not share a brain, so nothing stops a booking when a ticket lapses, because the roster tool does not know. The passport comparison goes into that in more detail.
Setup, whoever does it
Every system has a setup cost. The question is whether it appears on an invoice or on your own payroll.
Loading workers, building the competency matrix, configuring client sites and their requirements, and training the office is a real body of work. A vendor who charges for it has made it visible. A vendor who does not has usually handed it to you, and your operations manager's three weeks is not free just because it is not itemised.
Ask which it is, and if it is yours, ask for an honest estimate of hours from a reference customer rather than from the salesperson.
The admin time the software creates or removes
This is the largest number in most cases, and nobody puts it in the spreadsheet.
Per-seat billing on a workforce that churns weekly creates ongoing billing admin: adding and removing seats, reconciling counts, arguing about the month someone was on for four days. Reporting that clients want but cannot access themselves creates a weekly production job. A roster the crew cannot see creates phone calls.
Against that, a system that removes the ring-around, publishes to a client portal and chases its own expiry reminders gives back hours that were previously invisible because they were spread across five people's days.
A rough way to estimate: count how many hours a week your office currently spends on the roster, the phone calls about the roster, and the compliance chasing. Then ask which of those the system removes. That number will usually be bigger than the licence.
The cost of the thing that did not happen
Harder to put a figure on and worth thinking about anyway. A non-compliant worker at a gate costs a turned-around shift at minimum. It can cost the contract. The rare bad version costs considerably more than any software.
You cannot count incidents that were prevented, which is why this line is always missing. But if one system warns and another blocks, the difference between them is exactly this line, and it is not small.
Growth, and what a bigger crew costs
Per-seat pricing means growth is a linear cost. Bracket pricing means growth is a step. Neither is universally better, and the shape matters more than the rate.
What is worth checking either way: does a bigger crew mean a bigger office? If the system scales your admin along with your headcount, that is the real cost of growth, and it will exceed the licence difference quickly.
The cost of leaving
Last, and easy to defer: what does it cost to get your data out and move it somewhere else. If the answer is a project, that cost belongs in the decision now, because it is the price of being wrong.
Putting it together
A fair comparison has six lines, not one: licence, setup, ongoing admin created or removed, the second system you still need, the risk of the compliance failure the system does or does not prevent, and the cost of leaving.
For what it is worth, our own answer is a flat price per organisation stepped by crew size with everything included, a stated one-time setup we do for you, and no lock-in contract: every plan is month to month. It is on the pricing page rather than behind a quote form, which makes exactly this kind of comparison possible.