Xrosters

The Problem

Employee rostering seems simple until you realise that every shift interacts with labour laws. Award rates, overtime thresholds, minimum rest periods, casual vs. part-time vs. full-time rules, penalty rates for weekends and public holidays, break entitlements — all of these compose into thousands of rule combinations that determine whether a roster is legal and what each employee gets paid.

Most rostering systems ignore this. They let you schedule someone, then hope the payroll team catches the compliance breach later. That's expensive and legally dangerous.

What We Built

Xrosters is a rostering system where compliance is not an afterthought — it is the core engine. Every shift assignment is evaluated against the full rule set before it's committed. If a shift would breach a labour law rule, the system warns the manager. If it would trigger a higher pay rate, the system shows the cost impact in real time.

Key Modules

1. Roster Builder — drag-and-drop scheduling with live compliance checking. The system flags potential breaches as you assign shifts.
2. Labour Law Compliance Engine — a rules engine that models award rates, overtime, penalties, minimum breaks, and rest periods. Rules compose and conflict — the engine resolves them.
3. Facial Recognition Attendance — employees clock in and out via face scan. No buddy punching. The system computes actual hours worked, not scheduled hours.
4. Wage Computation — combines rostered shifts, actual attendance, and applicable rules to compute wages automatically. Compliant by design.
5. Employee Self-Service — casual and part-time employees can submit availability, swap shifts with colleagues, give away shifts when sick, and request leave.
6. Onboarding/Offboarding — digital employee lifecycle management with document storage and compliance tracking.
7. Notifications — the system proactively notifies managers when an employee's work hours might breach a labour law rule or trigger minimum wage adjustments.

Architecture

The compliance engine is the heart of Xrosters. It's a rule-based system where:

• Rules are composable (a single shift can trigger multiple rules simultaneously)
• Conflicts are detected and resolved (when two rules apply, the one most beneficial to the employee wins — standard Australian labour law principle)
• Rules are configurable per award, per state, per employment type
• Evaluation is real-time — the UI updates as you build the roster

The facial recognition module uses TensorFlow for face detection and embedding extraction. Face templates are stored as vectors, not images, for privacy.

What This Proves

Building a compliance engine that handles 10,000+ rule combinations in real time is not a CRUD app. It's a domain modelling challenge that requires understanding labour law at a structural level. We built it.

→ Engineering deep dive: Modelling 10,000+ rule combinations for automated wage calculation