Research notes
Sources are the vendors' own sites and pricing calculators, Companies House, published accounts, third party software directories and review platforms. Where a figure comes from a directory rather than the vendor, it is marked.
Rotaready was founded around 2014 by Carl Holloway and Jamie Harvey. True Capital invested in 2018, amount undisclosed. The Access Group acquired it on 22 August 2022, price undisclosed.
It is now sold as Rotaready Evo, within Access's Hospitality People Suite, and wired into the group's Access Evo AI and SSO layer. It is a continuation of the same product rather than a rebuild. The original Rotaready Ltd entity is now dormant, which is Access's standard pattern across roughly 96 dormant subsidiaries and not an indication the product is being retired.
The Access Group is a major UK software business: around 160,000 customers, £452m EBITDA, roughly 79 acquisitions to date, private equity owned by Hg, TA Associates and GIC, most recently valued at £9.2bn.
From Access's own calculator, set to 190 employees:
| Tier | Monthly | Yearly | Open API |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | £1,307 | £15,684 | No |
| Pro + Forecasting | £1,486 | £17,832 | No |
| Premium | On application | n/a | Yes |
The model is roughly £7 per employee per month above a £103 base that covers the first 15 employees. Setup fee is charged separately and is not published. Minimum term is reported as 12 months (directory and review sources, not the vendor).
Free integrations, included on all three tiers: EPOS, reservations, payroll, applicant tracking, property management, training and communications. Access labels these "free" explicitly, and separately labels their payroll bureau "at extra cost", so the wording appears deliberate.
Three items sit on the Premium tier only:
There is no Famly connector, and no childcare connector of any kind. Since Famly is not a supported integration, the Open API is the only route by which booked attendance could reach the rota. That capability is not present on either priced tier.
Multi site is the design centre: central control across locations, site level permissions, cross site staff pooling, wage cost by site. UK payroll coverage is the strongest of any tool reviewed, with BrightPay, Sage and Xero all native. Mobile apps for staff with shift swaps, availability and clock in.
Automated compliance checks cover working time rules, rest breaks, minimum wage and contracted hours. These are employment law checks. No sector specific rule types were found.
With a reservations integration, the system displays covers booked against scheduled headcount at 15 minute intervals.
The Forecasting tier predicts sales, using aggregated weather data, reservations, notable events, historical sales and transactions, pooled industry peer data and deep learning trend detection. It has no mechanism for reading booked attendance.
Staffing levels can be set manually rather than only derived from the forecasting engine. Beyond that, the depth of the rules engine could not be established: help.rotaready.com moved behind a login after the Access migration, and archived copies were also inaccessible. Whether a rule can enforce a minimum number of staff holding a given qualification in a time period is therefore unresolved. One credible reviewer rated its staff requirement forecasting below a specialist hospitality competitor, S4labour.
Hospitality, leisure and retail, exclusively. Restaurant chains, hotel groups, pub groups, gyms and retail chains. Reviews are positive and numerous, over a hundred on Capterra alone, and uniformly from these sectors.
None found. Searches covered the vendor site, 108 Capterra reviews, G2, Trustpilot, trade press, trade shows, job adverts, and a full text search of Access's own 129 page FY25 annual report, which returns zero occurrences of "nursery", "childcare" or "early years" across a 160,000 customer base.
The nearest adjacent evidence is a single 2016 blog post about adult supported living, published six years before the acquisition and never repeated.
Access does hold early years products elsewhere in the group: Synergy Early Years Funding and Family Information Services. Both sit in the Education division, are sold to local authorities rather than nursery operators, and concern funding and directories rather than workforce or occupancy. Access's regulated care product, Access Evo for Care, covers adult social care only. No relationship between Access and Famly was found.
Incorporated around 2015 per Companies House, although the company's own marketing dates itself to 2009; the two have not been reconciled. Held through a UK holding company, previously a BVI vehicle. Backed by the William Currie Group, associated with Bill Currie and Sir Terry Leahy, rather than by private equity.
Around 27 employees (Tracxn). No published turnover figures.
Published on the company's own blog rather than a pricing page:
| Tier | Monthly | Yearly |
|---|---|---|
| Lite | From £1,500 | From £18,000 |
| Enterprise | From £3,000 | From £36,000 |
Implementation is charged separately, from £1,500. Contracts run for three years, with RPI increases built in. No free trial. Third party directories report "from £1,500/month", consistent with the Lite figure.
Rota scheduling across a whole estate, AI built rotas, staffing demand, working time compliance, absence and holiday, time and attendance, and integration into HR and payroll systems. Their stated compliance coverage is EWTD and working time. No qualification based minimum staffing rule type is mentioned in any source.
Integrations and API work are delivered as bespoke professional services builds rather than self serve connectors.
Stated range is companies with 200 to 10,000+ employees. The delivery model is high touch, which is a plausible reason for the floor. The smallest deployment published anywhere is Victoria Gate Casino, described in 2017 as "over 200 employees".
Named customers with public evidence: Holland and Barrett, Starbucks, Boots, Euro Garages, Rank Group and Grosvenor Casinos. The sectors with genuine evidence behind them are retail, hospitality, leisure, gaming and forecourts.
Their site also lists care and healthcare. No named customer, case study or review was found for either. On present evidence these are sector labels rather than a track record.
4.7 out of 5, across 18 reviews in total spanning Capterra, G2, GetApp and SoftwareAdvice combined. The count has been broadly static for over two and a half years. No Trustpilot presence. For a product starting at £18,000 a year on a three year term, independent evidence is thin.
None found. Searches covered the vendor site, press, LinkedIn, job adverts and all review platforms. No case study, customer, logo or job advert in the sector.
Neither vendor documents EYFS ratios, room based age bands or Ofsted evidence. Neither lists Famly as a supported integration. Neither publishes a childcare customer or case study.
That is not proof that nobody in the sector has bought either product. Many deals never become case studies. It does mean there is no public reference customer doing the job, and nothing published to learn from.
Both products are built for settings where staffing is a commercial judgement about service and cost. Demand is forecast, and the forecast is a suggestion. In a nursery, required headcount is derived from booked attendance by age band and room, it carries qualification mix rules, and it is a legal minimum rather than a target. These are different computations, and neither vendor has had cause to build the second.
Item 4 governs the others. Without booked attendance reaching the rota, none of the ratio questions arise.
Prepared 15 July 2026.