The workforce stack, bought once: rota, timesheet, leave, onboarding and training records that agree with each other

The workforce tools a small business rents are sold per employee per month, and there are usually four or five of them. The Workforce Suite is the owned answer: five self-hosted products, one payment, each doing one job and refusing the rest. This page is about the refusals as much as the features, because the reason five small tools beat one large one is that each knows exactly where it stops.

The five, and where each stops

Rostera plans and publishes the rota: a weekly grid, assigned or open shifts, exact weekly hours, double-booking detection, DST-safe shift lengths, a PDF and a hardened CSV, and calendar feeds staff subscribe to. Since 3.1, publishing a rota can tell the staff. It is not a time clock — it plans shifts, it does not capture attendance — and it never holds a pay rate. Swaps are requested by staff and approved by a person; there is no automated swap engine.

Clockora is the time clock Rostera is not: clock or manual entries, overlap detection, a timesheet per period, a submit-then-approve workflow, an overtime flag, and a weekly nudge for unsubmitted time. Hours only — no rates, no wages, no invoicing. No email it sends can contain a pay figure, because the product stores none.

Leavora tracks leave and time off: leave types with rules, accrual, holiday-aware working days, requests with approvals, live exact balances, a who's-off calendar feed, and employee self-service login. Approving is always an administrator's act; an employee can request but never decide, including on their own request. It records leave only — no payroll, no HRIS integration.

Onboardora turns a checklist into every new starter's plan: day −7 to day 90 in the phrases people actually use, every due date derived from the start date rather than stored, lateness derived too, one tap to tick and one to hand a task over, equipment issued and returned. It is not an HR system of record — no contracts, no salaries, no holiday tracking (that is Leavora's job) — and it does not perform right-to-work checks; you tick that one happened.

Trainora is the training matrix: who holds which competency, when it expires, and — the state a spreadsheet cannot hold — never recorded, which is not the same as expired. Evidence attaches to each record, sessions and attendance are logged, reminders and a calendar feed cover what runs out next. It does not issue certificates and it is not a learning platform: no courses, no quizzes, no SCORM.

Every one of the five is a self-hosted PHP application with the data in your own database, an append-only audit trail, two-factor authentication, backup and restore, and — since the 3.0 release — a REST API and an MCP endpoint behind a scoped key. Letting an AI agent touch the rota is the honest account of what that means in practice.

How they hand off

The point of the suite is not that the five share a login; each is its own installation. The point is that their boundaries meet cleanly. Rostera says who is meant to be in on Tuesday; Clockora says who was; Leavora says who was on leave and so should not appear in either; Onboardora says that the new starter's induction is due on day three and their equipment was issued on day one; Trainora says the forklift competency that starter needs runs out in November. None of them computes a wage, which is why none of them can disagree with the payroll about one. When a business asks for "one system" for all of this, what it usually gets is one system that also does payroll badly; the five registers leave payroll to the payroll.

The arithmetic, labelled as arithmetic

At the single-licence prices on the product pages today, 2 September 2026 — Leavora $99, Rostera $69, Clockora $69, Onboardora $69, Trainora $79 — the five bought separately are $385. The Workforce Suite is $249, and the suite page computes the saving live from the current prices, so trust it over this paragraph if they ever differ. For the rented side by the vendors' own pages, the Deputy cost breakdown and timesheet software without per-seat pricing carry the dated figures; the 2026 SaaS rent index puts the whole stack in one table.

The refusals, once more

No payroll. No wages anywhere in the five. No automated swaps. No leave decisions by the person requesting. No certificates issued. No courses. Read those before the features: a buyer who needs any of them needs a different product, and the own the stack overview names the other eleven suites. All five demos are open without a sign-up — Rostera, Clockora, Leavora, Onboardora, Trainora.