Ensure you and your managers are rostering compliant shifts based on your business and award requirements with Tanda’s roster validation feature.
Customise the values, and choose to warn managers or block publishing of the shifts when certain validations have been breached.
What Does This Help Guide Cover? |
Validations on the Roster
When roster validations are enabled, they'll appear on a shift with an orange or red icon:
Orange is a warning that a validation has been breached, but shifts can still be published
Red shows that a shift validation is breached, and cannot be published
Clicking on the icons that appear will show the validation rules the shift has breached, as well as the recommended rostering practices to resolve the errors.
When a shift has breached a custom validation rule set, the relevant set name will be included in the description (in the example above, the Casual validations rule set has been breached).
Block Roster Publishing
Certain validations can be configured to prevent shifts from being published until validation errors have been resolved. This blocking setting applies to all users, irrespective of permission levels.
Should a user attempt to publish a roster breaching the validations, the Publish button will be disabled until the errors are resolved. All other shifts can be published by deselecting the affected Teams or Staff.
Validation Toggles
Ensure the roster validations setting (Settings > All Settings > Roster Validations) has been toggled:
Customise All Staff validations to determine which should warn managers, and which should block roster publishing.
The Blocking toggle cannot be switched on without the Enabled toggle also being on.
These validations, including where the related value is configured in your account, are explained below:
Validation name | Description | Where to configure |
Shift Clash | Triggered when two shifts are overlapping |
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Leave Clash | Triggered when a shift overlaps a pending or approved leave |
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Unavailability Clash | Triggered when a shift is rostered with overlapping pending or approved leave |
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RDO Clash | A shift is overlapping with a rostered day off |
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Preferred Hours Under | Total hours rostered for a week are less than half the total preferred hours by an employee | Preferred weekly hours for rostering field under the Pay Configuration tab in employee profiles
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Preferred Hours Over | Total hours rostered for a week exceed the total preferred hours by an employee | Preferred weekly hours for rostering field under the Pay Configuration tab in employee profiles
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Qualification Invalid | A qualification is expired, pending approval, not currently effective, or has had maximum hours breached | Qualifications tab in staff profiles |
Overtime | The rostered shift will incur an overtime rate or penalty | Applicable award rules and overtime rates for each employee found in 'Award Rules' on staff profiles. Additionally, click See Costs on the rostered shift to see which specific rules are applying |
Under Rostered | Total hours rostered do not meet an employee's contracted weekly hours | Based on the value under Employee Profile > Pay Conditions > Edit current pay conditions > Contracted weekly hours:
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Missing Regular Hours of Work | Staff that have permanent part-time shift acceptance applying do not have regular hours configured | Add agreed hours of work in the Regular hours of work field of employee profiles |
Mismatching Regular Hours of Work | Rostered shifts do not match the regular hours configured on staff profiles | Based on values in the Regular hours of work field of employee profiles |
Breaks Don't Match Automatic Break Rules | When automatic break rules have been enabled in your account, any manual breaks that do not match will be flagged | Configure break rules through Settings > All Settings > Shift Breaks |
Consecutive Days Off | An employee doesn't have two consecutive days off in a week (or similar) |
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Additional Validations
On top of the above toggles, roster validations can be based on specific values, and configured to apply to individual staff.
Default Rule Set
A default validation rule set will apply to all staff not covered by a custom rule set.
Here, you can enter values for:
Maximum shift lengths (in hours)
Minimum shift lengths (in hours)
Minimum hours between shifts (in hours)
Earliest start time for a shift
Latest finish time for a shift
Maximum number of shifts per week
Maximum number of hours per week
Maximum number of shifts per day
Maximum span of hours per day (for back-to-back/multiple shifts in one day)
Maximum hours in a day
Set these validations to block roster publishing with the toggle underneath.
Custom Rule Sets
You may wish to apply certain validations to only a few staff based on employment type, age, mutual agreements, and other factors.
When creating a new validation rule set, you'll need to enter:
Name of the validation
Who it applies to
When it applies
Validations they should receive
Any overtime conditions that should be blocking
Who it Applies To
For custom validation rule sets, you can restrict who it applies to based on:
Minimum and maximum ages
Classification tags
Locations they work at
Hover over the x employees match these filters box to see which staff will have these rules applied.
When it Applies
Applicable days or periods that the rules should apply can be based on:
Date ranges (Note: date ranges must apply to the full week selected)
Days of the week
Leaving this section empty will have the validation rules apply to the relevant staff at all times.
Validations They Should Receive
Value-based validations are split into two sections - shift validations that look at the individual shifts, and roster validations that look at an entire roster week. Values can be entered for:
Maximum shift lengths (in hours)
Minimum shift lengths (in hours)
Minimum hours between shifts (in hours)
Earliest start time for a shift
Latest finish time for a shift
Maximum number of shifts per week
Maximum number of hours per week
Maximum number of shifts per day
Maximum span of hours per day (for back-to-back/multiple shifts in one day)
Maximum hours in a day
Breaches to these conditions can be set to block publishing with the toggle below.
Blocking Overtime Conditions
Customise which overtime conditions or penalty rates, based on your managed award template, should block roster publishing.
Blocking can be set for the following overtime conditions:
After certain hours per day worked
After a certain span of hours per day
After certain hours worked in a period
Beyond set fixed hours for part-time staff
Minimum rostered work hours per day
Minimum rostered work hours per week
After certain days worked in a week
After certain days worked in the second week
After certain days worked in a period
After consecutive days worked (in an overtime period)
Rest between shifts
Minimum break during shifts
These conditions are based on the values against each managed award template that the applicable staff for the rule set are under. View the values of specific award templates through Compliance > Manage next to the template > Edit in the Ordinary Business Hours or Maximum Shift Length boxes.
Blocked Roster Publishing Approval Requests
Even if there are blocking roster validations applying to shifts, you can configure Approval Workflows to allow certain staff to request that the roster be published anyway. If approved by another user, the blocked schedules will be successfully published.
Configuring Roster Publish Approval Workflows
Follow the steps below to set this up:
Navigate to Settings > All Settings > Roster Validation
Tick "Enable approval of rosters to be published despite 'blocking' validations" and click Update Settings at the bottom of the page
Navigate back to the Roster Validation page and click Manage Approval Processes to configure who can request blocked roster publishing and who can approve the requests.
On the Approval Processes page, click + Add Approval Process and fill out the following details:
Name the Approval Process
Choose who can submit publish requests (via Positions, Teams, or a combination of both)
Choose who can approve publish requests (via Positions, Teams, or a combination of both). You can have multiple stages of approval:
To have multiple users approve the request in a single stage, click + Add Approval and select who can approve the request. Multiple approvals within the one stage means that one user from each of the selected groups must approve the request before it can progress.
To add additional stages of approval, click + Add Stage. The order the stages are listed is the order in which approval will be required.
Click Create when done. You'll be able to see the workflow you just created on the Approval processes page:
Creating Blocked Roster Publish Requests
If you are part of the "When submitted by" group in the approval process above, when blocking shift validations are present in a roster, you can send only those shifts for approval.
When you click Publish in the top right of the roster, you'll see which schedules can be published, and which are blocked (that need to be sent for approval):
If a shift has no blocking validations, it will publish like normal. If it has a blocking validation, it will be included in the "request approval for (_)" number and sent to the appropriate users for approval.
Reviewing Publish Requests
You can view all approval requests in the roster sidebar under Tools > Publish Requests.
View the requests you can approve under Pending My Approvals and click Complete to either approve or decline the publish request.
This allows you to see the validation on the blocked rostered shifts. To Approve or Decline the publishing of this shift, click Review and Publish (or just Review if there are other stages of approval required after you):
Select Approve or Decline, add an optional comment (this will be visible to the staff member who requested it be published) and click Submit and Publish.
If there are multiple stages of approval, the next group of staff that can approve the request can now action it.
If this was the final stage of approval, the rostered shift will now be published, despite the blocking validation.
Creating Custom Roster Validation Rules
Natural Language Roster Validations let you write roster rules in plain English. The system uses AI to interpret and convert your rules into standardised validations, which are automatically checked whenever a roster is built, flagging violations before publishing.
To create custom Roster Validation Rules, navigate to Settings > All Settings > Rosters > Natural Language Validation Rules.
You can create roster rules that will apply organisation-wide or just for specific locations. Write roster validations in natural, plain English, with each rule on a new line.
When creating rules, be as specific as possible, since the AI does best with measurable constraints (e.g., instead of "roster enough staff during lunch rush on Saturdays", a better written rule would be "roster at least 4 FOH staff during 11:30am-1:30pm on Saturdays"). Open the Example Rules dropdown to see different types of validations that can be configured.
Rules that have successfully been interpreted will be listed under Active Rules:
Common Use Cases (Roster Validations)
Wage Comparison and Outer Limits Validations
For organisations using Wage Comparison, additional rule types are available that link roster validation directly to Wage Compare costing.
Wage Compare Top-Up Warnings flag employees whose rostered shifts (when costed against your wage comparison scenario) would result in a top-up payment, where the comparison cost exceeds the standard award cost.
For example:
"When rostered schedules would trigger a wage compare top-up".
When triggered, the projected top-up amount is shown against the relevant shifts for that employee.
Outer Limits Breach warnings alert you when an employee’s penalty or overtime hours exceed the outer limits thresholds set in their wage comparison settings.
For example:
"When penalty hours exceed outer limits thresholds" or "When overtime hours exceed outer limits thresholds".
If a threshold is exceeded, the rule will show how much it has been exceeded by, in both hours and dollar value.
Exceeding Budgets
When Budgets have been configured, you can use custom roster validations to flag when days exceed their budgeted hours. This also allows you to prevent roster publishing if a budget has been exceeded.
You can use rules such as: "Budgeted Hours cannot be exceeded each day" or "Budgeted Hours cannot be exceeded each week" to do so.
The validation will flag at the top of the roster for each day that exceeds the budget:
A warning will also be displayed when attempting to publish the roster:
