Public & advice services
Staff rota and clinic planning software for multi-site services
Built for an Irish government-supported organisation whose information officers run sessions across a number of sites and departments.
Services like this have two jobs pulling in opposite directions: fill the rota, and prove afterwards what was delivered. Doing the first in a document makes the second impossible.
- Sector
- Public & advice services
- Stack
- Vue · Laravel
- Role
- Full stack developer
The problem
Why weekly rotas eat so much time
The rota is rebuilt from scratch every week
Last week’s document is copied, edited and printed. Most of it was the same, and none of that repetition was saved.
Nothing records what kind of session was delivered
A slot is filled, but whether it was a drop-in, an advocacy appointment, form filling or outreach is not captured — so the funder’s question cannot be answered from the rota.
Cover gaps appear on the day
A hole in the week is spotted when somebody does not arrive, because the week is a document rather than something that can be checked.
Counting activity is manual
Totals by department, site and session type are compiled by hand at the end of a reporting period, which is slow and arrives too late to change anything.
The version on the noticeboard is out of date
The PDF that went up on Monday is not the rota that ran by Wednesday, and there is no easy way to reissue it.
The answer
How the portal handles it
The week is built once as a rota of morning and afternoon slots across sites and departments, and can be duplicated forward — the repetition that used to be retyping becomes a starting point.
Every slot is typed by the kind of clinic it is: drop-in, advocacy, form filling or outreach. Because that is captured while the rota is made, the reporting is a by-product rather than a separate exercise.
The dashboard summarises tasks by department, site and clinic type, and the task report counts each activity type across the week — the numbers a funder or a board asks for, available the same day.
The published week goes out as a PDF, so the noticeboard copy comes from the same source as the system rather than being maintained beside it.
Screens
What it looks like in use.
Features
What is in it
- Weekly rota across sites and departments
- Morning and afternoon slots per officer
- Every slot typed by clinic kind: drop-in, advocacy, form filling, outreach
- Weeks duplicated forward instead of rebuilt
- Publish the week as a PDF for printing and circulation
- Dashboard of tasks by department, site and clinic type
- Task report counting each activity type across the week
Under it
How it is built
The PDF output mattered more than it sounds. A printed week on a wall is how this service actually communicates, so the system had to produce that artefact properly rather than treat printing as an afterthought.
Questions
The things people ask first.
Is this only for public-sector services?
No. Any multi-site service that rosters people into sessions and has to report on what was delivered fits: charities and advice services, community health, legal clinics, libraries and outreach programmes.
Why type each slot by session kind?
Because that is what funders and boards ask about. Capturing it while the rota is built is the difference between a report that takes a minute and one that takes a week.
Can a week be reused?
Yes. Weeks are duplicated and then adjusted, which is how most rotas actually work.
Can we still put a printed rota on the wall?
Yes. The week publishes as a PDF from the same data, so the printed copy and the system do not drift apart.
If your service builds a rota in a document every week and reports on it by hand every quarter, both halves of that are worth automating together. I am at cuneyt.irmak@outlook.com.
More work
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