Free diagnostic laboratory roster tool
Draft your laboratory roster in minutes. Rules-based, competency-aware, and always a draft for your review.
Describe your laboratory once in an Excel workbook: staffing levels, competencies, shift patterns and bench coverage. Lab Shift Roster generates a draft roster in minutes, then shows you every issue it found.
How it works
Six steps, start to finish.
- Download a workbook
- Add your workforce and requirements
- Upload the workbook
- Generate a draft roster
- Review the issues raised
- Export to Excel
1 · Get a workbook
The blank workbook has the headings, guidance and dropdown lists but no staff. Both examples are complete fictional departments you can generate a roster from straight away.
- Balanced example — a well-staffed department. Shows what Lab Shift Roster produces when a workforce comfortably covers its requirements.
- Challenging example — deliberately contains staffing, competency, leave and availability constraints so you can see how Lab Shift Roster identifies problems. It is not typical.
2 · Build your draft roster
Excel workbook (.xlsx). It is read inside this browser tab and is not uploaded anywhere.
Advanced settings
Leave the dates blank to use the period set in your workbook. The generation ID is recorded with each draft so the same roster can be reproduced; you do not normally need to change it. Use Generate alternative roster instead.
Roster summary
This is a draft for you to review. Lab Shift Roster supports your decisions about staffing; it does not make them.
The staff rota is a simplified workbook for circulating to the team: who is working, when, and in which section. It deliberately leaves out competency records, individual hours, fairness analysis, workforce vulnerabilities and the reason for anybody's absence. The manager report keeps the full analysis.
Issues
Grouped by how much attention each one needs. Related warnings with the same underlying cause are combined into one item.
Adjust an assignment
Change who is working a shift. Lab Shift Roster re-runs every check afterwards, so you see straight away whether the change creates a new problem. Manual changes are kept and are never overwritten when the roster is rebuilt.
Roster preview
Scroll sideways to see the whole period. Filter to focus on one shift, section or person.
Section coverage
Who was allocated to each laboratory section. One person covers one section at a time, so this reflects who is actually there.
Contracted hours
Target hours are contracted weekly hours scaled to the length of the roster period.
Workforce resilience
How many people could cover each discipline if somebody were unavailable. This is about the department as a whole, which is a different question from whether one shift is thinly covered.