About us
Started by someone who wrote the rota for nine years.
Midshift began in 2019 on the back of a café rota in Leith. It is now 1,400 teams, 22 of us, and one office above a bakery on Constitution Street.
Why a café manager built a rota app
Ailsa Robertson managed cafés in Edinburgh for nine years. Every Sunday evening went on the rota, every Monday morning on turning paper sign-in sheets into hours for payroll, and most of the week in between on answering “what time am I on?”.
The software she tried was built for companies with an HR department: priced per seat per month for every login, sold on annual contracts, and full of features she did not need. So in 2019 she and Tom Achebe, a payroll engineer she met through a customer, built the thing she had wanted — a rota that staff actually read, with hours that go to payroll without retyping.
Midshift is still independent and still run from Leith. Most of our support team have worked shifts themselves, which is why you get an answer from a person, seven days a week.
- Founded in Edinburgh
- 2019
- Teams on Midshift
- 1,400
- Shifts published a month
- 310,000
- People on our own team
- 22
What we will not change
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A rota, not an HR suite
No applicant tracking, no engagement scores. The rota and what hangs off it, done properly, at a price a small business can say yes to.
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Staff are users too
Staff accounts are free and always will be. A rota nobody reads is not a rota, so the staff app gets as much of our time as the manager’s screen.
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Two numbers, always
Rostered time and clocked time are both kept, never one overwriting the other. It is the only honest way to pay people.
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Your data is yours
Export everything as CSV whenever you ask, without asking us. Leaving should be as easy as joining.
Come and see us in Leith
We are at 14 Constitution Street, EH6 7BT. Coffee is downstairs; the rota is on the wall.