Questions about the rota builder

A rota builder for parish ministries. You enter services, ministries and people with their availability, choose the rules, and it builds a fair rota for a month, a quarter or a year, with a review grid and printouts.

Yes. Everything on the site is free, with no account. No paid plan is offered at present.

Names never leave this computer: the list, the rota and every printout are made and kept in this browser, and nothing is uploaded. There is no account and no server copy. Save a backup file to keep a copy or to move the rota to another computer.

No. Altar servers are often children, so PewRota never asks for a birthdate, an age, an address or a phone number. A senior tick box does the job an age would.

Always: nobody serves a ministry they are not trained for, on a day they are away, or in two roles at one service. As you choose: not twice in one weekend unless the person opted in, families and pairs together, a senior person at every service, a monthly limit and a minimum gap. A rule is never broken silently: a place that cannot be filled is left open with the reason.

Turns are shared as evenly as the rules allow, prime services are shared evenly on their own, preferred services are honoured where they can be, and last quarter's turns can be carried into this one, so whoever served most serves a little less next time. Someone new, or back from a period away, starts at the group's average rather than at zero: with 10 lectors who served 2 or 3 times each, a newcomer gets 2 of the next quarter's 26 places, where counting them as zero would have given 5.

Yes. Drag a name onto another place to move or swap, or pick a place and choose someone. The grid says before the drop if a move would break a rule, and flags it after. Lock a place and it stays put when you rebuild.

Yes. Choose the Church of England wording and the ministries become readers, intercessors, sidespeople, chalice assistants, servers and the flower rota. Every name can be changed.

Paste a list from any spreadsheet, or import a CSV with a header row: name, ministries, senior, family, monthly limit, preferred services and dates away. First name and last name columns, or forename and surname, are joined into one name. A column of birthdates or ages is ignored, and in a list with no header row a date or an age is dropped with a note.

An independent site. PewRota is not affiliated with or endorsed by any church, denomination, diocese or scheduling software company.