Set it up in an afternoon. Genuinely.
Import your people, set who can do what, and build a first rota. Most teams are running live within a week.
Three steps, no implementation project
Import your staff from a spreadsheet or add them by hand. Set contracted hours and who is qualified for which role.
Build one week as a template. Copy it forward, then adjust — which is how rotas actually get made rather than from scratch each time.
Invite the team. They see their shifts, set availability and request swaps from their phone. Nothing changes without approval.
Three things worth understanding before you commit
Including the parts that are limitations rather than features.
Conflicts are flagged, not prevented
Cadence will warn you when someone is double-booked, unavailable, unqualified for the role or heading past their contracted hours — and then it will let you do it anyway with a note. Real scheduling involves judgment calls that software should not veto, and a tool that blocks you gets worked around inside a fortnight.
The staff app is deliberately small
Your team can see their shifts, set availability, request a swap and message about cover. That is all it does. Every feature we have added to the staff side has reduced how much it gets used, so we stopped adding them.
It does not do payroll
It exports hours in a format your payroll provider or accountant can import, and stops there. Payroll is a regulated, high-consequence problem and a four-person company should not be near it. If someone sells you a rota tool that also runs payroll, ask them who is liable when it is wrong.
Four things people use most
Ranked by what actually gets clicked rather than what demos well.
The week view
Where managers live. Drag, drop, copy forward, publish. Keyboard shortcuts for everything if you prefer.
Availability
Staff set when they cannot work, with a cut-off you control. It removes most of the back-and-forth before a rota is even built.
Swaps and cover
Requests go to everyone qualified, first acceptance wins, and a manager approves. The whole thread is logged.
Hours and costs
Running totals per person and estimated wage cost per week, so you see the overspend while you can still change it.
Asked before signing up
Not currently. We are a four-person company and a formal certification is a serious undertaking we have not yet done, so we are not going to put a badge on the site implying otherwise. What we do have: encryption in transit and at rest, daily backups tested quarterly, access logging, and a written security summary we will send on request. If your procurement requires certification, we will fail that check and we would rather you found out now.
You can export everything at any time as standard files, without asking us. If the company ever wound down we commit to ninety days’ notice and keeping exports available throughout. It is worth asking any small vendor this question.
No. Under fifteen people it is free permanently, with every feature. It is not time-limited and there is no card required. Plenty of teams have used it free for years, which is fine — they tell other people.
Yes to both, including shifts crossing midnight and multiple shifts per person per day. Rest-period warnings are configurable but they are warnings only, and you remain responsible for compliance with working-time rules in your jurisdiction.
We export a file that most systems import cleanly, and we will help you get the format right. We do not have direct integrations, because maintaining them across dozens of providers is not something four people can do well.
Start free and see whether it survives a fortnight of real use.
That is the only meaningful test of a rota tool.