Questions
Everything people ask before they start.
The things people ask before they sign up. If yours isn't here, ask us. A real person reads it.
Common questions
What does it cost?
£79 / $99 / €89 a month for the first office seat, then £39 / $49 / €45 for each one after. A seat is somebody who works in the office, you or a coordinator. Your workers, candidates and families are free and unlimited, and every feature is included. 14 days free to start, no card.
What is Rostavo?
Rostavo is all-in-one back-office software for small in-home service agencies: booking, scheduling, staff management, invoicing, payments and more in one place.
Which types of agency is it for?
Nanny and babysitting agencies, pet-care services, household staffing and senior / home-care providers. The labels and workflows adapt to your trade.
Is there a contract, setup fee or long-term commitment?
No. Rostavo is month-to-month. Start with a free trial (no card needed) and cancel whenever you like. We would rather earn your business every month than lock you into a contract.
Will you help me move my existing data over?
Yes, and you can also do it yourself. There is an import that takes a spreadsheet of your workers or families, matches your column names to ours and shows you exactly what it will do before it does it. If you would rather we did it, we will: we are a small team that helps small agencies, and switching should not be weeks of data entry.
Do my staff and clients get their own logins?
Yes. Workers get a portal to see their schedule, accept jobs, clock in and upload documents. Families get a portal to request bookings, pay invoices and leave reviews.
Can I take payments online?
Yes. Invoicing is built in and Stripe lets your clients pay online. Completed jobs turn into invoices and accurate worker payouts automatically.
Is there an app for my team?
Yes, and it does not come from an app store. Your team opens Rostavo on their phone and adds it to their home screen. It then opens like any other app, sends them notifications when a shift comes up, and keeps working on a bad signal. Nothing to download, no updates to approve, and it works the same on iPhone and Android.
How do I get started?
Create your agency account, follow the short onboarding wizard to set your rates and invite your team, and you can take your first booking the same day.
Can I run permanent placements as well as hourly bookings?
Yes, and they are modelled separately because they are different things. A placement is a person joining a household: one fee, calculated as a percentage of salary, a flat rate or a multiple of the weekly wage, with a minimum you set. The replacement guarantee is tracked from the start date, and when a placement ends you are asked why, so you can see what your guarantee actually costs instead of guessing at it.
Is there a job board for candidates?
Yes, and it is a real page rather than only an embed. Every open shift and permanent role is listed with a town rather than an address, each links to your application form, and it updates itself as work comes and goes. Each opening carries the structured data Google Jobs reads, so your roles can turn up in a candidate's job search, which is not possible for a board that only exists inside an iframe on somebody else's domain. You can embed it in your own site as well, and it sizes itself to fit.
Can families buy a block of hours in advance?
Yes. You record what they bought, and each completed visit draws from it at the hours actually worked rather than the hours booked. Every movement is kept, so you can show a parent exactly where their hours went, and you get an email before the balance runs out at a level you set per package. A late cancellation can be charged against it too.
Can my staff send parents a photo of their day?
Yes, with the consent handled properly. A worker writes a few lines and attaches photos from their phone, and the family sees both in their own account. If you then want to use one of those photos in your own marketing, you ask for that photo specifically and the answer is stored against it. We treat "we have not asked" as a no, because it is one. Photos only at the moment, not video.
Does it show profit, or only revenue?
Profit. Most software stops at revenue, which is a turnover figure people read as earnings. You get income from invoices actually paid in the period, what you paid your team, what you spent and on what, the profit left and the margin. It is not bookkeeping and it is not trying to be; your accounting package does that and we export to it.
Do you run payroll?
No, and we are not going to. Payroll means your jurisdiction's tax, and doing that badly is worse than not doing it. What we do is the hour in between: verified hours and gross pay come out as a file your payroll system imports, with clocked hours and scheduled hours in separate columns so whoever runs it can see which is which.
Does it work with Xero or QuickBooks?
Yes, by export rather than by live sync. Your issued invoices come out in the import format each one expects, for any date range, with drafts left out. There is also a plainly labelled file with every field in it for Sage, FreeAgent, Wave or your bookkeeper. Tell us what you use and we will add it.
Can my team book time off?
Yes, from their phone, and you answer it in one tap. Approved leave takes them out of availability, so nobody is offered a shift on a day they are away and they stop appearing in the suggestions for it. If somebody asks for days they are already booked on, you are told which visits those are at the moment you approve it, rather than finding out on the morning. An unanswered request holds nothing back.
Does it track mandatory training?
Yes, and it starts from what you require rather than from what happens to be on file. You list the courses your team must hold, safeguarding, first aid, manual handling or anything else, and each worker is measured against that list. Somebody who has never done a course is flagged as missing it, not shown as a clean record, which is the failure a screen built from uploaded certificates always has. Courses that expire are chased in the same morning email as DBS and first-aid certificates, because to whoever has to ring round they are the same job.
Is my data secure and separated from other agencies?
Every agency is fully isolated. Your bookings, clients and staff are only ever visible to your own team.
How is Rostavo different from the bigger agency platforms?
The larger platforms are powerful but built and priced for big operators. Most small agencies pay for a lot they never use and face a steep learning curve. Rostavo puts scheduling, compliance tracking, messaging and billing in one place, at a price small agencies can afford, and we help set it up for you.
Have tomorrow go like that.
Set your agency up this afternoon. It costs nothing to see whether it suits you.