Field notes › Choosing software
Workforce management, rostering or labour hire software: which one you need
Search for software to run a crew and you get three kinds of result, all claiming to solve the same problem. Workforce management, rostering, labour hire software. The marketing pages use the same words and the same photo of someone smiling at a phone. Underneath, they are built for different businesses, and buying from the wrong category is an expensive mistake, mostly because you don't find out until everyone has been moved across.
Here is how the categories divide, what each is good at, and how to tell which one your operation needs.
What a workforce management suite covers
Workforce management is the broadest label. These suites are usually built around an employer's own staff and the pay run: time and attendance, clocking on and off, leave requests, timesheets approved by a manager, award interpretation, payroll or a close link to it, and often HR records like contracts and performance reviews. Scheduling tends to be one module among many.
They suit organisations whose people work at the organisation's own locations, such as a retail chain or a manufacturer with a few plants. The manager approving the timesheet works for the same employer as the worker. The hard problem there is turning hours worked into correct pay across awards and leave, and if that describes you, a suite is probably right and its scheduling module will be good enough.
What a rostering app covers
Rostering apps are narrower. They focus on building the roster, getting it to staff and handling the weekly churn of availability and gaps. Many add a timesheet or clock-on feature and an export to payroll. Most are designed around a single workplace, or a few, each with its own manager, and they are usually quick to set up.
For a business with one or two venues and a settled team, a rostering app is often all you need. There's no sense paying for a full suite, or for anything labour hire specific, if the roster is a weekly grid and the main headache is people swapping shifts by text.
What labour hire adds on top
Labour hire breaks an assumption both of those categories share, which is that the workplace belongs to you. Your workers are on someone else's site, under someone else's rules, and the client decides what a worker needs before they get through the gate. That creates needs a general tool was never asked to meet:
- client sites as their own records, each with required tickets and inductions that can vary by role and by shift
- those requirements checked at the moment of booking, because the roster decision is also the compliance decision
- one pool of workers across many clients, so a clash between two sites shows up
- client logins that show each client only their own site
Mustr sits in this third category. Every booking is checked on the server when the worker is assigned, against the competencies the client, role and shift require, the site induction, double-booking and the worker's own unavailability, and a failed check blocks the booking outright. Each client site gets its own logins and sees only its own roster. What it doesn't do is the pay side. Timesheets, exports and pay runs are on the public roadmap rather than in the product, so a firm using it today still runs payroll in another system.
When a general tool is enough
Plenty of firms that call themselves labour hire don't need labour hire software yet. If you place a handful of workers with one or two clients, the tickets involved rarely expire, and the client is happy with an emailed roster, a rostering app and a well-kept certificate spreadsheet will carry you for a while. The same goes if most of your work is closer to payroll outsourcing, where the client runs the roster and you run the pay. There the pay run is the hard part, and a workforce management suite with strong award interpretation is the better fit.
The signs you have outgrown a general tool are fairly specific. Tickets and inductions tracked in a spreadsheet the roster never looks at. A worker booked at two clients on the same day because each client has its own schedule. Clients ringing to ask who is coming because they can't see it. A near miss where someone was sent to a site they weren't inducted for. If any of those happens regularly, the roster and the compliance record have come apart, and patching that by hand gets harder with every site you add.
Running two systems without making a mess
Many firms end up with one system for rostering and compliance and another for pay, which can work well. It goes wrong when both hold a version of the roster, or when certificates live in both and disagree. Decide which system is the record for bookings and compliance and which is the record for hours and pay. Then work out how information gets from one to the other. If that step is manual for now, write down who does it and when, and ask each vendor how it will change.
Once you have settled on the category, choosing rostering software when you run labour hire covers the questions to ask, and the free trial lets you try Mustr with sample data.