Questions about Aroha Connect

Aroha Connect is a New Zealand on-demand staffing platform. Employers post a shift or a role, the platform matches and notifies available workers whose compliance documentation is current, and the first suitable acceptance confirms the booking. Workers then submit their hours from their phone, employers approve them, and approved hours become an invoice and a payroll-ready export. It replaces the combination of spreadsheets, phone trees, group chats and paper timesheets that most temp staffing still runs on.

Four: education, covering schools, kura and licensed early learning services; retail, covering stores, malls and distribution; construction, covering sites, trades and civil; and aged care, covering rest homes, retirement villages and home and community support. Each vertical is configured for its own compliance requirements rather than sharing one generic checklist, because a Site Safe card and a practising certificate are not interchangeable. Aroha Connect grew out of relief staffing in early childhood education, so education is the deepest of the four.

No. Aroha Connect is New Zealand only, and that is deliberate rather than a limitation waiting to be fixed. The value of the platform is in how specifically it handles New Zealand compliance — Teaching Council practising certificates, Children's Act safety checking, ConstructSafe and SARNZ tickets, Ngā Paerewa, the Holidays Act. A platform built to work in five countries at once cannot hold that detail properly.

Every worker completes registration and uploads their documentation before they can be booked. Each document is recorded with its expiry or review date — practising certificates, ConstructSafe assessments, scaffolding Certificates of Competence, machine endorsements, police vetting, immunisation records, qualification records and right-to-work status. Alerts fire before something lapses, and once it has lapsed the worker automatically stops appearing as available for roles that require it. That last part matters most: the safe outcome is the default, rather than depending on somebody noticing in time.

No, and we would rather say so plainly. Aroha Connect tracks, verifies and evidences compliance. It does not transfer or discharge your obligations, and you remain the responsible party — the duty holder under health and safety law, the employer under employment law, and the licensed service under education or health regulation. What the platform gives you is verification before a placement rather than after, and an audit trail you do not have to reconstruct. Any staffing provider suggesting they can take your compliance duty off you is misreading the law.

Workers submit their hours from the app at the end of a shift. You review and approve, which takes a tap, and variances are flagged before approval rather than discovered in the pay run. Approved hours then become both an invoice and a payroll-ready export, so nobody re-keys a number between the shift being worked and the worker being paid. Because the record is approved rather than asserted, the figures your payroll calculations depend on are correct at source.

Yes, and it serves both sides. Workers can register, apply for jobs, manage their compliance documents in one place instead of emailing them around, submit timesheets, and see their current and upcoming bookings on a dashboard. Employers and centres can register, create and duplicate jobs, approve timesheets with one tap, and manage invoices. Booking confirmations are instant on both sides.

No. The platform is paid for by the employer side. Workers register, apply for shifts, manage their documents and submit timesheets at no cost.

Pricing is built as a fixed monthly base plus a usage-based component, so it scales with how much you actually staff rather than charging a large flat fee regardless. There are three tiers, with the top tier priced individually for larger multi-site organisations. Exact figures are being finalised — see the pricing page, or ask us directly and we will size a plan against your shift volume and industry.

This depends on how you engage workers through the platform, and it is worth getting explicit for your situation rather than assuming — the answer affects PAYE, holiday pay, ACC and, on a construction site, who carries which health and safety duty. It is one of the first things we cover in a demo, and we would rather walk you through it against your actual arrangement than give a general answer here that turns out not to apply to you.

The employer side is quick — an account, your sites or centres, your roles and your compliance requirements. The part that takes real time is building your worker pool, because every worker completes registration and document verification before they can be booked. Organisations that already have a list of regular relievers or casuals get moving fastest, since those people can be invited in rather than recruited from scratch. We would rather be honest that a pool takes a few weeks to become genuinely useful than promise it works fully on day one.

The booking can be reposted immediately, which puts it back in front of everyone available rather than starting the search again from nothing. Because every booking, acceptance, change and cancellation is timestamped, no-shows are visible in the record rather than being a matter of recollection — which matters both for managing your pool and for any conversation about shift cancellation compensation.

Rather than broadcasting every shift to everyone, matching ranks available workers on how well they fit the specific booking — qualification and ticket currency, proximity, and whether they have worked that site, store, centre or facility before. Alongside that, the platform flags likely coverage gaps ahead of time and handles the administrative follow-ups that usually consume a manager's morning: reminders, confirmations, document chasing and reporting. The intent is to reduce admin, not to make hiring decisions for you.

Documents are held centrally so they stop circulating as email attachments, which is the least secure place they could live. An employer sees the verification status and currency relevant to booking a worker for a role. If you have specific data residency, retention or access requirements — common for health and education providers — raise them in a demo so they can be answered against your policy rather than in general terms.