Open Rota
A comprehensive shift management system to organize schedules, track earnings, and manage roles with authentication. I also added earnings tracking as this was a common question from team members wanting to know how much they earned over a period of time. Adding this to shift coverage and shift swapping made it a lot easier for team members to accecpt shifts more often as they could see how much they would earn from it.
Overview
Open Rota enables users to plan shifts, calculate pay, and manage teams. It supports role-based access, secure auth, and a clean UI optimized for desktop and mobile. Built with PHP and MySQL, it emphasizes security, usability, and performance to streamline workforce management. This project is my personal favorite as it was my first full stack application and I learned a lot about backend development and database management. And solving real world problems. I start planing this project on shift at the job creating page templates on paper after a conversation with my supervisor about the paper system we currently use for shift management before moving to figma for designs and prototyping. Then finally moving to development. I tried to tackle as many issues as I could think of with their shift management and created a solution that works for my venue, after doing a cover shift at a different venue I realized this could be useful for other venues as well, as a colleague from that venue asked if I could make it for them as well. This lead to a update that included multi venue support and role based permissions for different team members. allowing mangers to have controll over their venue and staff. issues i identified where shift swapping allowing team members to swap shifts with each other, notifications for upcoming shifts and changes, steming from a relation that when shifts where changed or added it would be done on paper and not communicated to the team effectively. I also added earnings tracking as this was a common question from team members wanting to know how much they earned over a period of time. Adding this to shift coverage and shift swapping made it a lot easier for team members to accecpt shifts more often as they could see how much they would earn from it. I also implemented an intuitive cover-shift workflow so managers can post cover requests and team members can browse and claim available shifts. Cross-venue support allows staff to manage schedules and earnings across multiple locations and enables managers to request cover from employees at other venues, improving flexibility and reducing gaps. A "super user" role was added to administer all venues and staff, providing elevated permissions for global settings, reporting, and user management. Overall, Open Rota is a robust solution for shift management that enhances team coordination, simplifies scheduling, and improves operational efficiency.
Tech Stack
Backend: PHP, MySQL • Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript • Other: Sessions, role-based guards.
Key Features
- Account creation, login, and protected routes with one time password authentication
- Shift CRUD with earnings calculations
- Role-based permissions for team workflows
- Responsive UI with clear information hierarchy
- Multi-venue support for cross-location management
- Intuitive cover-shift workflow for easy shift claiming
- Earnings tracking for individual and team financial insights
- Secure authentication and session management
- Optimized for both desktop and mobile devices
- Robust error handling and user feedback
- Clean, modern design focused on usability
- Standalone application with offline support