Most church rotas are still managed by one weary volunteer at 9pm on a Saturday night, paging through a spreadsheet and texting people who haven't replied. The worship leader doesn't know who's confirmed. The sound desk is one cancellation away from being unstaffed. The duty pastor arrives at 9am Sunday and finds out three people are off, not from the rota, but from the WhatsApp group at 8.42am.

It doesn't have to be like that. We've rebuilt rotas in ChurchLinker so the people who actually run a team, the worship leader, the kids' team coordinator, the sound desk lead, can run their own rota from their own phone, alongside the people they actually lead.

Rotas belong to groups now

When you create a rota, you can link it to one of your groups (Worship Team, Kids Team, Sound Desk, Stewards). That single link unlocks four small but important things.

First, the role picker becomes a dropdown. The Worship Team has a tidy list of roles (Lead, Backing vocals, Acoustic guitar, Drums, Keys) that the team's leader curates. Slot forms pull from that list, so nobody types 'Worship leader' on one slot and 'Worship Leader' on another and confuses the auto-scheduler the next day. The typo soup that breaks every rota tool quietly goes away.

Second, the leader of the group can manage the rota themselves from the member app. They go into their group, tap Manage rota, and they have the same affordances staff have: add a slot, set the role and the date and the time, assign people from the group's own rota members. No more bottlenecking through the church office.

Third, members can see all the rotas across every group they belong to in one place. Open the member app, tap Group rotas, and there's the whole picture: who's on welcome team next Sunday, who's leading worship the week after, who's on coffee. Filter by group, sort by role or date or time, see who you'll be serving alongside.

Fourth, time is finally a first-class field. Each slot carries a date and a UK local time (10:00, 18:30, whatever the team meets). British Summer Time is handled automatically, so a 10am Sunday slot stays 10am Sunday in the summer and in the winter without any clock arithmetic on your part.

Reminders that fire when they should

Every rota gets its own reminder schedule. You pick how many days before the slot fires, the hour and minute in UK local time (we built minute precision in for the church that wanted '09:15 reminder', not '09:00'), the channel (email, SMS, WhatsApp) and the recipients (everyone assigned to the slot, all pastors, all staff, a tag, a fixed email). You can stack rules. 'A week before by email, the day before by SMS, on the day at 8am by WhatsApp' is three rules deep and takes thirty seconds to set up.

Leaders can put themselves on a slot

Sounds obvious but it caught us out. The first version of the leader members API self-excluded the caller from the list. So we built a separate name-only members endpoint that includes the leader, and the picker uses that. The worship leader can put their own name on the keys slot in the same five seconds it takes to assign anyone else.

Admin and pastor stay in control

An admin or a pastor passes the same gates a group leader does. There's also a new church-level permission called 'Group and rota coordinator' that grants the same powers without the wider admin role: useful when the church wants to delegate cross-team rota coordination to one trusted person without giving them finance or directory access.

What's in it for the people serving

The point of all this isn't the admin's UI. It's the volunteer's experience. A volunteer in your worship team now opens their member app and sees, in one screen, when they're next serving, who they're serving with, what role they're doing, and what time they need to be there. They can subscribe their phone calendar to their slots. If they can't make a date, they can request a swap from the same screen.

Available now

Per-group rota roles, leader rota management and the member-side group rota view are on every plan, including Seed. The 15-minute precision on reminders and the 'Group and rota coordinator' permission flag are also on every plan.

If you've been running the rota on a spreadsheet, this is the week to stop.

Run your group's rota from your phone, without the spreadsheet