Volunteer Rota Builder

A chore rota rotates jobs around a household who are all there every week, so a fixed shuffle is enough. A club rota is a harder problem: people are away. This tool takes each volunteer's unavailable dates and treats them as absolute, so the rota is built only from the people who can actually turn up — and where that leaves a gap, it says so.

Because that is the list people can actually give you. Someone knows they are away for two weekends in April; nobody is going to tick forty dates they could do. Anything not listed as unavailable is treated as available.

Only within one very specific promise: if everyone is free for every slot, there are no pairing rules, and you need no more people per slot than you have volunteers, then every person's count is within one of every other person's. As soon as real unavailability is involved, no such guarantee is possible — somebody free for every date will do more than somebody free for two. That is why the tool prints a count per person, and names anyone carrying more than the rest along with how many slots they were the only one free for.

It is printed short, in a block of its own, with the reason: nobody free, not enough people free, or the pairing rules left no workable combination. It is never filled by scheduling somebody who said they could not come.

Yes — one rule per line, as "name | name | never" or "name | name | together". Where a rule cannot be honoured the tool says so plainly instead of quietly ignoring it: a group tied together that is bigger than the number needed per slot is dropped with a note, and if the same two people are listed as both "together" and "never", the "never" is kept and the "together" is dropped. Because the rota is filled slot by slot, a slot that could only work with some different combination is reported short rather than searched for.

No, and it does not try. The slots are plain labels printed in the order you typed them, so "Sunday morning", "Fixture 3" and "Sun 5 Apr" all work the same way. That also means a volunteer's unavailability has to be spelled the same as the slot — anything that does not match is listed as unmatched rather than silently dropped.

Whoever has done fewest slots so far. If two people are level, it goes to whoever is free for fewer slots overall — someone who can only manage one date should get that date rather than lose it to someone free for all of them — and anything still level is settled by the order you typed the names.

No. Same input, same rota, character for character. There is no randomness anywhere in it — a rota that reshuffles every time you press the button is one nobody will trust.