Retail Workforce Management Software

Building retail rotas is a constant balance between customer demand, employee availability, labour budgets and compliance. ShopWorks gives store managers the flexibility to build rotas from scratch, copy previous schedules or use templates for recurring trading patterns, helping them schedule the right people at the right time.

Live labour costs, target hours and compliance checks are visible throughout the scheduling process, while multi-contract employees, seasonal workers, apprentices and under-18 colleagues are automatically managed against the correct rules. Open shifts can be offered to eligible employees through the app, making it easier to fill gaps, and integrated leave management helps managers understand the impact of time off before approving requests.

The demand side of the picture comes from AI Forecasting. The models ingest hundreds of internal and external variables, including sales, transactions and footfall, weather, holidays, local events, promotions and macroeconomic signals, and predict demand at the interval the store operates at: 15 or 30 minutes, hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.

Forecasts are multivariate and probabilistic, with best, base and worst-case ranges so peak weeks can be planned against more than one scenario. The model continuously learns week by week, refining itself as new trade comes in.

The demand forecast on its own does not tell a store manager who to schedule. AI Labour Demand Forecasting converts the forecast into a labour curve, showing how staffing needs rise and fall through each trading day across the location or the estate.

Three optimisation modes shape that curve. Profit-first protects margin. Customer service-first prioritises coverage at demand peaks. Historic operating average tracks how the business has traditionally run. The mode is a commercial choice and an estate-level one. The curve allocates staff by venue at 15 or 30 minute, hourly, daily or weekly intervals, and factors in seasonal peaks, bank holidays, sporting events and sudden demand shifts as conditions change.

The labour curve feeds directly into AI-Assisted Scheduling or sits behind the manual rota tool as the labour budget against which every shift is built against.

AI-Assisted Scheduling takes the labour curve and builds the rota. 100+ variables and 300+ configurations sit underneath, covering availability, contract type, skills, working-time limits, premium-hour rules and fair-allocation logic. Compliance is built in, so under-18 Saturday colleagues do not get scheduled into late evening, and Working Time Regulations rest periods are protected by default.

Scheduling runs estate-wide or site-specific. The estate view shapes coverage across a regional manager’s territory, the site view gives your store manager the local judgement they need. Fair and ethical scheduling logic removes bias by design, so premium shifts and unsocial hours move through the team rather than landing on the same colleagues each week.

What that delivers in retail is faster rota build at site level, with the estate view defended.

Real-time dashboards turn the planned and worked record into something an area manager can read on a tablet between stores. The Hours and Cost Comparison dashboard tracks planned versus actual against the labour budget for the trading week in front of you. Hours and Cost Performance Metrics layers in productivity by site and by colleague band.

Clock In and Clock Out and Attendance Metrics dashboards make late starts, no-shows and early finishes visible in the hour, not at month end. Entitlement Utilisation and Absence Breakdown gives the people side of the same picture, with holiday booked, taken and remaining across the estate.

Bespoke dashboards let your operations and finance teams build the views they actually run the business from, including labour-to-sales ratio and SPLH at site, area, region and estate.

Reporting is where payroll, audit, HR and finance pick the platform up. 40+ pre-built reports across categories cover the structured outputs each function needs: payroll and audit reports for monthly close, time-off reports for HR, KPI reports for retail ops, department reports for site-level performance, training reports for compliance, miscellaneous reports for ad-hoc questions, and bespoke reports for the views your business has built up over time.
Payroll receives a clean worked-time file with approvals already applied, so the monthly close is a check, not a rebuild. Audit gets a verifiable record of planned versus worked hours, with the Working Time Regulations evidence pulled from the same source.
KPI reports feed the Monday trading review. SPLH, labour-to-sales ratio, premium-hour percentage, attendance and absence by site sit in the same pack, so the conversation runs against shared numbers.

Sickness, holiday, parental leave, bereavement and lieu time all sit on the same record as the rota. When a Saturday morning call-off lands, the cover process and the absence record are the same workflow.

AI automated holiday allocation handles the moments that take store managers the longest. Christmas, half-terms and the August bank holiday turn into capacity decisions made against the live labour curve, not against memory.
Automated holiday approval against business rules clears the routine requests and surfaces the ones that need a manager decision.

Balances are visible to colleagues in the employee app, so the manager is not the only person who knows where the year stands. Holiday balance is answered in the Employee App, not at the manager’s desk during peak week.

On-Demand Pay sits in the employee app and gives colleagues access to a portion of earned wages from days already worked in the current monthly pay cycle. Employee payroll savings sit alongside it.

In a workforce where rota visibility, earnings transparency and predictable shifts drive retention, on-demand pay is a colleague-experience lever rather than a payroll change. Pay cycle, payroll file, and payroll rules stay the same. What changes is the colleague’s relationship with the hours they have already worked.

For your retention work, that is one of the levers with the shortest path from feature to outcome, and it costs the business nothing to operate.