Shift Work App for Train Drivers and Transport Workers

Train drivers, bus operators, and tram drivers work some of the most complex shift patterns. Early mornings, late nights, split duties, rotating weeks, weekends as ordinary working days. The roster changes, the pay is complicated, and most shift apps aren’t built for it.

Shift It isn’t a transport-specific app. But it handles the things that make transport shift work hard to track.

Roster import, including complex formats

Transport rosters tend to arrive as .xlsx files from a depot scheduling system. The problem is they’re rarely clean shift-date-time tables. VLine train driver rosters, for example, pack employee IDs, service codes, rolling stock identifiers, and depot references into the same sheet as the actual shift times. A standard parser sees all of that as data and gets confused about what’s actually a shift.

Shift It’s advanced Excel import lets you declare what each part of the spreadsheet is before parsing begins. You mark the columns or cells that contain shift times, dates, and labels, and tell the importer what to ignore. The algorithm then runs only on the declared shift data. VLine roster import was the specific use case that drove this feature — it handles the format directly.

For simpler spreadsheets, the automatic parser works without any declaration. AI Import (coming in v3.1) will handle PDFs and images. If your depot publishes a rotation pattern rather than individual shift files, Roster Wizard generates months of shifts from a start date without a file at all.

Once imported, your shifts are on a calendar. Coming Up shows your next few shifts with start times, durations, and live countdowns. Widgets put it on your home screen or lock screen without opening the app.

Pay calculation with custom rules

Most transport workers are covered by enterprise agreements negotiated with their operator — VLine, Metro Trains, Sydney Trains, a regional bus operator, a tram network. The rates differ by agreement and are generally more complex than a single hourly figure: weekend penalties, night loadings, overtime after a certain threshold, allowances for split duties or extended shifts.

Shift It’s custom pay rules let you configure your own rate structure if your enterprise agreement isn’t in the built-in list. You define the rules that apply to your situation — what rate applies on Saturday, what the overnight loading is, when overtime kicks in — and Pay Check applies them to your actual shift times. Each shift is split at rate-change boundaries automatically, so a split duty that crosses into a penalty period shows the right rate for each segment.

The result is compared to your payslip. If something doesn’t match, you see exactly which component is off.

Multiple jobs

Some transport workers carry multiple roles — a primary operator contract and casual or relief work with a different operator, each with different conditions. Shift It’s Jobs feature gives each employer its own award or custom rule set, its own pay period, and its own roster. Your calendar shows all of them together, colour-coded by job.

If you want to try it, download Shift It and set up your first job with custom pay rules. If your operator runs a standard spreadsheet roster, import it directly. If you’d like us to build native support for your enterprise agreement, let us know.