A care home manager I know was spending two hours every Sunday evening manually checking her staff rota in Excel — trying to spot coverage gaps before the week started.
She'd been doing it for two years. It still occasionally failed.
I built a rota analyser. Drop in the spreadsheet, and in seconds it:
→ Checks every shift across 4 weeks against the minimum staffing requirement
→ Flags zero-cover shifts (red) and understaffed shifts (amber) immediately
→ Calculates each staff member's total hours and flags anyone heading for Working Time Directive breach
→ Shows the full rota as a heatmap — problems are impossible to miss
What it found in the first run:
→ 2 shifts with zero staff assigned (Monday late and Friday late in week 3 and 4)
→ 3 understaffed shifts across the month
→ 12 staff members with overtime risk
The zero-cover gaps would have been noticed Monday morning. Not Sunday night.
Built in Python. Takes a CSV. Under 100 lines of logic.
Interested in this project?
I'm always happy to talk through how it was built, the problems it solves, or how something similar could work for you.