This page outlines how rota management works for ministry leaders in ChurchSuite.
Video Introduction
A short video introducing how ministry leaders can setup the rotas.
Rota functionality for rota overseers
Overseers have full rota management functionality within My Churchsuite. If you’re an overseer you’ll be able to: –
- Manage teams, team members and roles within your ministry, including adding/removing members to teams and assigning roles to team members.
- Create draft rotas, publish and distribute them.
- Manage rota members on the rota page, including adding/removing people from rota dates, swapping people, and adding/removing dates on the rota.
- Add notes to dates on the rota, to communicate important information for rota members about something happening on that date.
- Enable rota sign-up and manage maximum sign-up numbers for individual dates or the entire rota.
- Add and manage unavailability for all serving team members and themselves.
- Receive clash notifications and manage responses.
Rota / Ministry / Service – Important Terminology
In ChurchSuite, a rota is a schedule that outlines who will serve in a particular ministry during a specific service. Ministry refers to the various areas or roles within a church that require people to volunteer. A service is a specific gathering or event where people serve in a team for those ministries.
Example:
- 09:30 Service has multiple ministries (audio, coffee, music, preaching)
- Audio (and other) ministry has:
- a team setup for each of 09:30 Service, 11:30 Service and 18:00 Service. The team on each service within the ministry can have different members (i.e. due to family commitments I only serve on 09:30 and 18:00 audio team).
- 3 rotas that run for a defined period (from May – June 2025). There are 3 rotas for covering each of the 09:30 Service, 11:30 Service and 18:00 Service.
- Multiple roles, and each person can have 1 or more roles within the team.
Adding a new Rota
Overseers can add new rotas set with a “Draft” status while they are being set up; after which they can be set as active by changing their status to “Published”, and then distributed. Draft rotas can only be seen by Overseers; Published rotas can be seen by all rota team members.
To add a new rota for a Ministry, select “+ Add Rota” on the My Rotas page (in the ‘Rotas’ section).
Next, select:
- the Ministry,
- the Service,
- the Start and End Dates the rota will run from and to,
- the Day(s) that the rota runs on, and
- the Times in which team members will serve.
ℹ️ You can minimise rota ‘clash’ occurrences by setting accurate times that reflect when your teams are actually serving – for example, it’s entirely possible for people to serve in more than one Ministry on a Sunday and for there not to be a rota clash – as long as the rota serving times are set accordingly.
Now set the ‘Team Rotation’ – we recommend Ad Hoc (your Ministry does not follow a specific serving pattern – when you add a new rota, you’ll be able to manually assign individuals or teams to each date).
Saving your changes will now create your Draft rota (with the teams, members and roles you have set). Once a rota is created, it is not possible to change the rotation; however you can still make ad hoc changes to your rota e.g. adding additional team members, amending roles etc.
Adding teams and members, ordering and removing teams
Select a rota from the list in My Rotas – Rotas. Click “Teams” to view any pre-existing teams, members and roles.
For a new Ministry it may be that no teams have been added yet. You can do that now. To add a new team, select “+ Add Team” at the top of the page.
You can also add new members to your team here, if you wish, using the “+ Add Member” option. Only contacts whose personal visibility settings have their name set as ‘visible’ can be searched. See note on ChurchSuite Rotas about under 18s if they are on your rota. Depending on the roles that may already exist for the Ministry, you can also assign a role to your new team member.
Roles
In ChurchSuite, roles define the specific responsibilities or positions a person holds on a rota. Roles are specific to a rota (e.g. “Children’s Church Helper” in the Children’s Ministry rota). They help clarify responsibilities and ensure the right people are assigned to the right tasks.
💡 Tip: A person can hold multiple roles within one or more ministries.
Setup Roles
Rota overseers manage their ministry roles in the roles section of the rota. We strongly recommend you use the same roles across services in the the ministry, despite being different rotas – this will help the users.
Assign User To Role
Setting the roles people are assigned in your rota is done through “Teams” in your rota. Select the person, click … and “Edit roles”.
Assign the user the roles they perform in your ministry and click Save.
Building Rota With Roles
If using roles, when creating or editing your rota – set the “Order By” to be Role.
You will then be able to add people to the rota based on their role. In the example “Welcoming” rota, we might specify a role for each position as some people only serve on the front door, and others only serve in the hall.
Clicking on the “Main Hall” role only shows people with this role, and not other people on the rota serving on other roles.
Special Arrangements
The admin team will make you aware of special arrangements (all age, baptism service, prayer service etc.) by adding “Service Notes”.
To ensure you see this, please make sure your rota is linked to the relevant service when creating the rota.
For the these services, if the time is different from usual (i.e. baptism service), you will need to update the time of that specific service in your rota.
Click the … to edit the service
Click “Edit date”
Change the start time and click save.
💡 Tip: You can use this dialogue on any date to add rota specific notes that are visible to people serving on this rota/service. This could be used for giving them additional information that’s specific to this rota.
Publishing a draft rota
Whenever you’re working with a Draft rota, an information message is displayed at the top of the rota page.
Click “Publish rota” to make it visible.
Once published you can inform the team by clicking “Send rota” and completing the form.
Adding Notes to highlight special dates on your rota
Those special occasions, like Baptism services, that can often catch us out on rotas – extra visitors, so we might need more serving team members that week. Rota notes are rota-specific and allow you to add custom messages to a rota date as a reminder to rota members and overseers – like, “Baptism Service more chairs needed” for your set-up team rota.
To add a Note, select “Edit Date”
Type your note in the Notes field. You can add multi-line notes and even include short URL links if you wish. Click ‘Save Changes’ when finished.
Using the rota group email
Each rota has its own unique Rota email address. Rota group emails are “closed group” emails. Only rota or ministry members will receive emails or be able to send emails to the other group members. Rota group email is ideal for circulating updates or organising swaps.
New emails are sent to all rota team members. Note that you can set whether replies are sent just to the originator of the message (default), or to all members. Note that closed group emails are logged in My Communications section for all recipients and the author.
Additional Information
This page gives a quick overview of the main functions. ChurchSuite have published significant support material which goes into far more detail than we do here.
This can be accessed here: https://support.churchsuite.com/article/361-managing-my-rotas-in-my-churchsuite
