Every school has a timetable. Every school also has the other spreadsheet — the one nobody talks about, that somebody copies down forty-six rows every September and fixes by hand when the INSET day moves.
Ours was called IT_Room_Checking_Rota_2627_v2.xlsx. Eighteen rooms, two checked a week, six of them small enough to be done in pairs. Columns for cleaned, damage found, damage reported, who checked it and when.
Yours is probably fire extinguishers, or fire doors, or the minibus.
Rota is that spreadsheet, done properly.
Give it the list
A rota is a list of things and a rule for taking turns. You give it the list, say how often it comes round and how many at a time, and it produces the whole year.
Start from a preset — eight ship, each carrying the columns that check actually needs:
- IT room check — cleaned, damage found, damage reported
- Fire extinguisher — in place, seal intact, pressure OK, access clear
- Fire door — closes onto the latch, seals intact, gap under 4mm, signage
- Minibus walk-round — odometer, fuel, tyres, lights, fluids, defects
- PAT testing — pass or fail, next due, tester
- Legionella flush — flushed, minutes run, temperature
- Fridge temperature — temperature, in range, action taken
- Blank — three columns and nothing assumed
A preset is a starting point rather than a mode. It writes its columns and then forgets it was involved, so changing any of it afterwards does not put the rota back to "custom" and nothing is locked.
The pairs work themselves out
Our real sheet has a column headed Checked With. Six small rooms, paired up so two get done in one turn — N11 with A4, H22 with T11, T21 with T22.
That column was maintained by hand. Which means it could disagree with the rota printed underneath it, and nobody would know until somebody cleaned the wrong room.
In Monospace you mark a room as taking half a turn and the pairing falls out of that. The line printed under the title is worked out from the rota below it, so the two cannot drift apart.
A weight is not a priority, incidentally — it is how much of a turn something takes. Over a year every room comes round the same number of times; a half-turn room is simply checked alongside another one.
It knows your school year
A rota can run across the academic year you already have, taking its week letters and its holidays from the same calendar the timetable prints. Week A and Half Term mean the same thing on both sheets, because they come from the same place.
By default it keeps assigning through the holidays, because a rota that gets done in the holidays is a real thing — our own sheet has rooms scheduled through Half Term, Christmas and Easter. Switch that off and a closed week keeps its row and its number, names nobody, and the order picks up afterwards.
And if you have no timetable in Monospace at all, a rota can carry its own start and end dates. You can run a fire-door rota and never touch the timetable half.
Ticking it off
Two views of the same thing.
The list puts what is due now at the top, then anything overdue, then what is coming and what is done — so the question on a Monday morning has an answer at a glance. The grid is the spreadsheet shape: week down, columns across, filled in place. Both write the same record, and it saves as you go.
One thing worth knowing, because it is the kind of thing that goes wrong quietly elsewhere: if you take a room out of service mid-year, the turn order for every week after it shifts. Anything already recorded against a turn that moved is kept, and deliberately not shown against any turn — the section tells you how many there are rather than putting somebody's tick on a row they never checked. A fire door reading as inspected because the door next to it was is not a mistake worth making.
And it prints
Two sheets: the rota, and everything on it with your own columns beside each row — No of PCs, Telephone, whatever you keep.
Two buttons, and the second is not a worse version of the first. With data prints what has been recorded; that is the copy for the file. Blank template prints the tick columns empty whatever is recorded; that is the copy for the clipboard, and pre-filling it would be handing somebody a form that already agrees with itself.
The colours come from your school's own accent, set once, so a rota and a timetable look like they came from the same place.
It is in the free tool too
Monospace Timetable — our free, open-source, offline timetable generator — has Rota as a second tab, with the same eight presets and the same workbook.
And the file moves both ways. Type a whole year into the free tool — the list, the weights, the columns, the wording — and bring it into Monospace without typing any of it twice. Or take a rota out of Monospace to build the workbook on a laptop with no login, and the checks already recorded against it come with it.
One honest difference, because it is the line between the two: the free tool builds the sheet and does not tick it off. You print it and fill it in, which is what a clipboard rota is for. Recording against a rota — the ticks, who did it, when, and the record that a room really was checked in the week it was due — is the Monospace half.
If your school never buys anything from us, the free half is still yours, for ever, and it still replaces the spreadsheet.
Availability
Rota is on Max and on the Business, Business Plus, Corporate and Enterprise plans — the same tiers as Maintenance, because it is the same audience and the same estate.
Below that line, the free tool does the rota and the workbook and costs nothing.