Staffing
The paid side of the club, rostered from real demand
Staffing is the paid side of the club, kept properly separate from members' volunteer duties: your employed and casual staff, their shifts, their leave, the hours they actually worked and what that costs.
The rota knows what the day needs before you do.
Demand is worked out, not typed: the baseline cover an open day requires from your opening hours, plus whatever the day's events need on top. An evening open meeting on a day the club is normally closed still gets staffed, because the event brings its own needs.
Paid staff and volunteer duties can't disagree.
One set of requirements drives both: rows marked as paid staff become shifts, rows marked as members go to the duty rota, and filling an event's staff shift fills the matching duty slot. The safety cover is never double-counted or quietly missed.
Hours worked are checked against hours rostered.
A passed shift arrives in the staff member's portal pre-filled with the rostered times; they adjust to what they actually worked. Any entry that differs is flagged for the approver, so discrepancies get looked at rather than paid.
From a new starter to the payroll export
- Hold a proper staff record: contract details, pay rate, qualifications, availability and documents. Staff who aren't club members are handled exactly like those who are, which matters for the freelance coach or hired safety boat driver, and a member who also works for the club keeps one record rather than two
- Require the documents your club needs: define the club-wide list, mark which are compulsory, and track who has supplied what, with new starters working through an onboarding checklist so they arrive ready rather than being chased
- Fill the week however suits you: generate the open shifts and pick by hand, or fill instantly by giving each shift to the eligible person with the fewest that week, never someone on leave, unavailable, unqualified or already booked. Everything stays in draft while you work
- Publish when you're ready: assigned drafts become scheduled shifts and each staff member is notified in the app and by email. Staff confirm or decline from their portal, and a declined shift comes straight back to your unassigned row with a note of who declined it
- Handle leave properly: contracted staff draw down an allowance, casual staff record unavailability, and approved leave blocks assignment outright rather than merely warning you
- Turn hours into money: approved timesheets feed staff costs by role and by week and export as CSV for payroll systems such as Sage or Xero, with costs kept on their own side of the club's reporting so income is never quietly netted off against wages
Who staffing helps the most
Club manager or team leader
No more an evening a week on a spreadsheet, and the gaps found on the day.
Treasurer
No more paying hours nobody checked against what was rostered.
Staff themselves
No more asking when you're on, and hoping the hours you worked get recorded.
Sailing Secretary
No more paid safety cover and volunteer duties for the same event disagreeing.
Staffing is included in
- Essentialsnot included
- Clubincluded
- Club Proincluded
- Shifts, timesheets, leave and payroll export are all included in Club.
- Club Pro adds the SailAI staff rota optimiser.
The SailAI difference
On Club Pro, the rota optimiser plans a whole week, or a whole month, in one pass. It balances shifts fairly across the period and against recent weeks, which matters most for a casual or zero-hours team where the rota is effectively how much people earn, so fairness isn't an abstraction. It keeps scarce qualifications for the shifts only those people can cover, and prefers fuller days to scattered fragments. What comes back is a proposal: every pick with its reasoning, and an honest account of anything it couldn't fill. Untick what you disagree with, then assign. Nothing is written until you say so, and it only ever touches shifts that are still open.
Discover SailAI →