Questions about Aroha Connect

Aroha Connect is workforce management software for businesses that run their own temp and casual staff. You post a shift or a role, the platform matches and notifies the people in your pool whose compliance documentation is current, and the first suitable acceptance confirms the booking. They then submit their hours from their phone, you 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 casual staffing still runs on. It is a software platform, not a staffing agency — it does not employ, supply or place anybody.

No. It is software you use to manage your own workforce. Aroha Connect never employs workers, never supplies labour and does not recruit on your behalf — the people you book through it are your own casual staff, engaged by you. There is a related company, Aroha Consulting, that does provide casual staffing as a service; it is a separate business and one of the platform's customers, and the connection is explained on the About Us page. Buying the software does not involve it.

Four: education, covering schools, kura and licensed early learning services; retail and hospitality, covering stores, distribution, restaurants, cafés, bars and function venues; construction, covering sites, trades and civil; and aged care, covering rest homes, retirement villages and home and community support. Each is configured for its own compliance requirements rather than sharing one generic checklist, because a Site Safe card, a duty manager's certificate 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.

Each person completes registration and uploads their documentation before they can be booked, and your team checks and approves it. From then on the platform does the watching. Every document is held 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 that person 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. To be clear about who does what — the checking is yours, the monitoring is the software's.

No, and we would rather say so plainly. Aroha Connect gives you the tools to track, evidence and monitor 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 the relevant status visible at the moment you are making a decision, and an audit trail you do not have to reconstruct afterwards. Any vendor suggesting software can take your compliance duty off you is misreading the law.

Your 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. Aroha Connect does not run your payroll or pay anybody — it produces the approved record your payroll system works from, 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 subscription is paid by the employer side. The people you manage through the platform register, pick up shifts, keep their documents in one place and submit timesheets at no cost to them.

It is a software subscription: 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. You are paying for the platform, not per worker or per placement. 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.

Your organisation. Aroha Connect is software and is never a party to the employment relationship: it does not employ, supply or engage anybody, and it is not an employer of record. The people you book through the platform are your own casual or temp staff, engaged by you on your terms, and PAYE, holiday pay, ACC and health and safety duties sit with you exactly as they would if you were running the same workforce on a spreadsheet. What changes is the record-keeping, not who is responsible. If you separately engage a staffing company — Aroha Consulting or any other — that arrangement is between you and them, and the same question is worth asking of them directly.

Your side is quick — an account, your sites or centres, your roles and your compliance requirements. The part that takes real time is building your pool, because everyone completes registration and document checks 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 found 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 — and worth saying plainly, building that pool is your work. The software makes it manageable; it does not do the recruiting.

You repost the booking 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. How you handle it with the person is your call; the platform just makes sure you are not arguing about what happened.

Rather than broadcasting every shift to everyone, matching ranks the available people in your pool 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. It ranks and suggests; your team decides. 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. Your team sees the status and currency relevant to booking someone 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.