Cover peak trade and everyday gaps from one system

Peak trade is the easiest thing to plan for and the most commonly left too late. Because you can post the whole block of shifts in advance — Black Friday weekend, the December run, Boxing Day, stocktake, the Christmas function calendar — your pool sees them early and commits early, which is when availability is at its best. Same-day gaps during peak are handled the same way as any other sick call: the shift broadcasts to everyone matched and available at once, and the first suitable acceptance confirms it. The practical advice we give customers is to post seasonal blocks well before December, because in the last week of November you are competing with every other retailer and every other venue in the country for the same casual workforce — and that is a recruitment problem no software solves for you.

By recording them once instead of re-checking from memory. Entitlement to work in New Zealand is captured during registration before anyone can be booked, and where entitlement is time-limited the visa conditions and expiry date are recorded and monitored. When an expiry approaches, alerts fire; once it passes, that person stops appearing in your available pool automatically rather than continuing to be offered shifts. That matters because right-to-work compliance is one of the few areas where the consequences land on the employer regardless of who made the administrative error — and the employer, in every case, is you. Aroha Connect does not perform the check or vouch for anyone's status; it makes sure a check you have done cannot silently go stale.

It shows you before you publish, rather than blocking you after the fact. Under the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012 a certificated manager must be on duty whenever alcohol is being sold or supplied to the public, so who holds a current manager's certificate is a rostering constraint, not a filing detail. Certificates are held against the person with their expiry date, so a roster with nobody certificated on a given shift is visible while you are still building it. The expiry side matters as much: a manager's certificate runs 12 months from first issue and 3 years on renewal, and the alerts fire before the date rather than after. What the platform will not do is make the judgement for you — it surfaces the gap, and a person decides how to cover it.

One. The vertical is configured for both because plenty of New Zealand operators run both — a retail group with an in-store café, a venue with a bottle store attached, a hotel with a shop in the lobby. Locations sit under one account with their own induction records and their own required checks, so a site that serves alcohol can require a duty manager's certificate while a site that does not simply never asks for one. The pool is shared, which is the point: someone inducted at your café and two of your stores can cover any of the three, and you are not running the same casual bank in two systems that disagree with each other.

Under the Holidays Act 2003, which remains in force, genuine casual employees are usually paid annual holiday pay on a pay-as-you-go basis at a rate of no less than 8% of gross earnings, shown as an identifiable component of their pay. That applies where the work is genuinely intermittent or irregular and the employee has agreed to it in their employment agreement. This is changing: the Employment Leave Act 2026 received Royal assent on 6 August 2026 and comes into force on 6 August 2028, after which casual workers will instead receive a leave compensation payment of at least 12.5% of their hours and will not accrue annual or sick leave, while retaining bereavement and family violence leave. Until the new Act commences, the Holidays Act 2003 continues to apply in full. We would strongly suggest getting your own employment law advice on the transition rather than relying on a vendor website — including this one.

Yes, and for multi-site operators this is usually the biggest single gain. One pool spans every location, so someone inducted at three of your sites can cover any of them. Bookings, approvals and reporting roll up by site and by region, which means an area manager can see where cover is consistently short instead of finding out when a store or venue manager escalates. It also stops the situation where one site is desperately short while another has someone available two suburbs away.

Yes — the platform offers shifts first to people who have covered that site before. That is deliberate: a shift where someone already knows the till, the layout and the opening procedure — or the section plan, the POS and where the glassware lives — is worth considerably more than one where they do not, and the difference shows up in the first hour of trade. Over a season this compounds, because your own pool gets progressively more useful rather than starting fresh each time. That is the core argument for managing a casual bank yourself rather than treating every gap as a fresh search.