Switching
Switching from Shiftbase to Rosterly
You already build your rota on Shiftbase. What does moving actually involve, what has to be rebuilt by hand, and what would you give up? This page is the honest answer, including the parts where we are the weaker choice.
We publish no figure about their product here: we can only stand behind a number we have re-checked on the vendor's own page ourselves, and their terms are theirs to state. Rosterly is planning software — not payroll, not an accountant and not legal advice — and we have no customers yet.
The short answer
The people come across easily. The rota does not. Plan for one sitting to set the workspace up, one evening per location to rebuild a week, and a few days of calendar time while your staff answer the availability question.
- Your people transfer; your schedule does not. A published schedule is a record of what happened, not a set of templates, so a week has to be rebuilt here once — by hand on the grid, with the automation doing the first pass.
- The price has one shape: €3.50 per active employee per month, free up to three active employees, no minimum, no per-location or per-planner fee and no implementation project unless you ask for the optional €195 guided setup.
- Two things we deliberately do not do. We do not forecast with AI, and we do not run an App Center of third-party add-ons. That is a decision, not an oversight, and if a tool like that is load-bearing in your week you should not move.
- What you gain that a café or a shop can actually measure: working-hours checks that run before the roster goes out to anyone, surcharges calculated per calendar day, an installable staff app in the employee's own language, and a CSV export with nothing locked in.
Deliberately missing from this page: their prices, their seat counts and their feature list. We can only stand behind a comparison figure we have read on the vendor's own page on the day we publish, and a stale number is worse than no number. Ask them for their current terms and compare the whole picture rather than one column.
What the switch actually involves, step by step
Seven steps. The times are what we would budget for one location with a team of about ten; more locations multiply step four, not the rest.
-
Export your people from Shiftbaseabout half an hour
Start with the staff list: names, email addresses, the departments they belong to, and their contract hours if you keep them there. Download it as a file and keep a copy outside both systems — it is also the only lasting record of the weeks you planned there, and nobody can delete a spreadsheet on your own laptop.
-
Import them hereabout an hour, including the fiddly rows
Open the planner, go to Team and press Import staff. Paste the table or upload the file. Dutch column headings are read as they are, the role column translates the words these exports actually contain, and the window shows a count with a reason per row before anything is written. Expect to spend most of this hour on two things: departments that do not exist here yet (one button creates them and re-checks the file), and rows with a missing or duplicate email address, which the importer refuses rather than guesses.
-
Rebuild your shift types, onceone sitting
This is the step people underestimate. Your old schedule carried its shapes in the shifts themselves; here, a shift type is an object with a name, a start and end time, a location and a department, and your week is assembled from those. Write down the shapes you actually run — opening, mid, closing, the split shift that covers the middle, the shift that ends after midnight — and create them once in Settings. Half a dozen types usually covers a week, and from then on they are reusable for every week you plan.
-
Rebuild one week, by handone evening per location
Take next week, not last week: press Draft the week for a first pass, then correct it on the grid. The engine only proposes people whose availability genuinely covers a shift, and every shift it could not fill comes back with a reason instead of silence, so an evening is enough for one location. Do one location properly before you start the next one.
-
Invite the team and let availability arrivea few days
Send the workspace code from the Team tab. Your staff install the app from the browser — Add to Home screen on Android, Add to Home Screen in Safari on iPhone — choose their own language and tick when they can work. This is the part that needs calendar days, not hours, so send the code while you are still rebuilding the week.
-
Publish one location and run both tools for a weekone week of calendar time
Publish for real, with the notifications that go with it, and leave the old tool running everywhere else. For one week you are paying for two products and learning what is missing while it still does not matter. This is the cheapest insurance in the whole move.
-
Cancel the other subscriptionwhen, not if
Once every location has planned and published a full week here. Download the last export from the old tool before you cancel, because after cancellation the history is theirs, not yours.
What the importer already reads
A switching file is the first file our importer ever sees, so it reads the vocabulary a Dutch roster export actually uses — including the words that describe roles.
- A file out of a Dutch Excel export works. Comma, semicolon and tab separated files are all accepted, the separator is detected and shown, and a semicolon wins a tie.
- Capitals do not matter. Name lookups are case-insensitive, so a location or department written Singel is found exactly like singel — these exports capitalise place names, and that used to be exactly where an import stopped.
- A role word outside the list blocks the row, on purpose. The product has two roles, so a word it cannot translate is refused rather than guessed. Leave the role column unmapped and everyone arrives as an employee.
- Contract hours must be whole numbers. A Dutch decimal comma — 32,5 — is refused; round it in the file or leave the column out and set the hours per person afterwards.
- A missing department is offered, not invented. The import window offers to create it and re-check the file, which is usually the difference between an import that works on the first try and one that does not.
- Nothing is written until you press Import. The preview counts the rows, names the reason for any it would skip, and the server revalidates that exact payload before the button unlocks.
What we do that matters to one café or one shop
Not a longer list — the five things a small Dutch business actually pays for after the first month.
One published price, no project
€3.50 per active employee per month, free up to three, no minimum, no per-location or per-planner fee, and no implementation project. You can be planning a real week the same evening; the optional €195 guided setup exists for owners who would rather we loaded it with them.
Working-hours checks that are enforced
Rest between shifts, day and week length, the night-shift limits over their reference period, the under-18 night band, contract caps and fixed-location rules are checked on the week you are building — and again when you publish.
Press Publish with a finding in that week and it is refused: the person and the rule are named, nothing is published, nobody is emailed. A planner who has a reason can publish anyway by typing it in, and that reason is written into the workspace log — the sentence an inspector asks for.
Surcharges per calendar day
Sunday, public-holiday and night percentages are applied per calendar day, so a Saturday evening shift that runs past midnight earns the Sunday rate on its Sunday hours alone, and the shift splits across two rates instead of pretending it is one. Never a silent zero in the cost column.
The staff app, in their own language
English, Dutch, Polish and Romanian, chosen on the phone by the person holding it, and installable to the home screen with no app store in between. A mixed kitchen or cleaning brigade reads the app it can actually read.
Your files, and the way out
Data & export hands you the shifts of any week, your employees with departments, contracted hours and wages, and the full availability profile — plain CSV, one click each, plus a payroll file with the hours split into regular, Sunday, night and public-holiday columns.
Delete the workspace and it is erased, not deactivated. Nothing here is held hostage.
What you would lose, and when not to switch
We would rather you stayed than moved for the wrong reason. Do not move if any of these is true.
- You depend on the wider ecosystem. We do not connect to a kassa or POS, we do not feed a payroll package automatically, and there is no app-store listing for Rosterly. We are not going to claim our integrations are as numerous as what you have today, because they are not.
- You want the roster forecast from sales data. We do not do AI forecasting, and we will not build it to win a comparison table. A rota that fills itself from a predicted turnover figure is a product we do not sell.
- You want an app store of add-ons. There is no App Center here and no third-party marketplace. If your workflow is built on an add-on, stay.
- Your payroll bureau consumes a feed from your current tool. We hand over a CSV that a human imports. If the retyping is exactly the cost you wanted removed, we are on the wrong side of it.
- Your team is settled on the app they use now. Retraining ten people costs real hours, and a cheaper invoice does not refund them.
- You run many branches with a head office. Multi-branch reporting, franchise views and a corporate structure are not what this product is.
- What you have already works. If the only argument for moving is a smaller monthly number, an evening rebuilding your shift types and a week of two systems is probably not worth it.
Be clear about what we are
A planning tool, and nothing more than that
Rosterly plans shifts, records hours worked and estimates what a week costs. It is not a payroll system, not an accounting record and not legal advice: payslips, tax and payroll filings stay with your administration, and we hand over the numbers in a CSV.
The cost figures are estimates for a week not yet worked, built from the wages and percentages you enter, and Dutch surcharges differ per CAO. The working-hours checks are a planning aid that names what it looked at — not a professional's opinion.
Read next: what an import looks like in detail, how we compare with L1NDA, and the whole price list.
Rebuild one real week, then decide
Clicking below creates a real workspace — no card, no call, no trial clock — where you import your own staff list and rebuild one week you have already planned elsewhere. Free while three or fewer active employees work in a month, then €3.50 per active employee per month. Worst case you have spent an evening and you still have your old rota.
Questions about anything on this page: support@roosterly.pro. We are planning software, not payroll and not legal advice.