Bush Kids is a fast-growing childcare group (six centres, with a seventh on the way). Below are full quotes from CEO Oliver Wood on their RosterElf experience—covering the fears that come with scaling rosters across multiple sites, making sure staff are paid correctly, and why responsive local support matters.

If you haven't already you can watch the full interview here 👉 Bushkids Childcare Customer Success Interview | RosterElf

The Challenge

“The biggest fear for me was: are the rosters being done properly? Are we paying people the right amounts? We’re probably open to a little bit of fraud. That was my fear. But I always had aspirations to scale to multiple centres—we’re now at three and about to do number four—and of course the problem just gets bigger and bigger.”

Why We Looked Beyond the Centre System

“The centre management system we use does have a very rudimentary rostering system built into it, but it is just that—rudimentary—and it didn’t integrate into Xero or anything like that to produce pays. Hence we started looking out into the market. RosterElf quickly became top of the pack.”

Ease of Use for Non-Technical Teams

“A lot of the childcare staff we work with aren’t the most computer-literate people. The way you can probably judge how easy it is to use is how much support I’ve been asked for. When we’ve onboarded new centres and new centre directors, we haven’t had a huge amount of training or help that they’ve needed. We’ve given them a bit of a demo. If they’ve needed it, they’ve contacted RosterElf support and they’ve jumped on and given them a bit of a whizz-bang run-through—and that’s been incredible.”

Support That “Gets You”

“The support we’ve had from RosterElf is that they’re incredibly willing and patient. As a company that provides support myself, having local support—a local telephone number—is important for my clients. I feel some bigger tech companies have probably gone too far with offshoring to the Philippines and India. I get that organisations might want that because it’s cheaper per hour, but it can be incredibly frustrating as a customer. You just want somebody that gets you, understands you, and is going to help you work through the problem and get it solved. Every time we’ve leaned on your support, it’s been dealt with quickly.”

UX That Makes Sense

“The key thing I look at is the user interface and the user experience—and are things in a logical manner. I think that’s been very well thought-out, and there’s obviously been user testing or user feedback that’s gone into that user design, because it is very intuitive.”

Xero Integration & Pay Runs

“The integration with Xero—actually doing the fundamental connection—took a matter of minutes. Processing pays and then having them ready to be approved in payroll (we do those on a fortnightly basis) also seems to be pretty bang-on and quick.”

Handling Exceptions & Accuracy

“The only time it falls outside of that is where there are anomalies, and that’s usually down to human error—where they haven’t put in, you know, there’s half an hour that hasn’t been accounted for. But that’s user error or the centre manager’s error. The software itself often is more accurate than perhaps my staff have been.”

Time Saved & Discipline

“Payroll used to be a bit of a nightmare, to be honest, and something that nobody looked forward to. It used to be a two–three day ordeal—pretty much a day per centre. Now that the system is embedded and in process—and staff know that if their timesheets aren’t in RosterElf and they haven’t done it properly, that’s that—we’ve stopped people trying to circumvent the system (which we had a bit at the start; something to look out for). It’s cut that processing time down by 90–95%. What was three days—six to seven hours a day for my CFO to work out, and she’s on about $100 an hour—you can kind of do the math there.”

Do Your Due Diligence (and Why AU-Fit Matters)

“Do your own due diligence. There are platforms out there that I’m sure RosterElf competes with, but you’ve really got to weigh up local support; how fast it’s moving; how tailored it is to the Australian market. Being an Australian product, it seems a lot more tailored to Australian businesses for sure.”

Commitment & Recommendation

“More recently, we’ve become a lot more committed. We’ve said yes—we’re going to stick with RosterElf for the next 36 months, so we agreed to go on a plan as such. I’d be the first person to say it’s been a great product, great experience; certainly one that we’re very pleased we made. There’s other software we’ve regretted purchasing and wanted to put in the bin afterwards. If you’re considering it, certainly put it at the top of your list.”