What Culture does
Culture is an HRIS built for shift-based operators. It manages onboarding, rostering, leave, timesheets and payroll export for teams that work in shifts across multiple locations. If you are looking for HR and payroll software, an HRIS or a workforce management system that understands rosters rather than a nine-to-five office, Culture is the Cohiva product for that.
Rather than a generic HR tool retrofitted to shift work, Culture is designed around rosters, availability and the timesheet-to-pay flow that multi-location operators deal with every week. The lifecycle it follows is the real one: bring a casual or part-time team member on, schedule them across venues, capture the hours they actually worked, handle their leave, and turn that into pay.
Explore Culture for the full product, or read on for how it fits a shift-based operation.
The category Culture wins
The HRIS category is crowded with products built for salaried, single-site teams. They struggle the moment a workforce becomes shift-based and spread across locations, because rostering, availability and timesheet accuracy become the daily work, and award interpretation and casual loadings become the hard part of pay.
Culture is built for that shape of workforce. It is HR and payroll software for operators who roster people across several sites, manage a mix of casual, part-time and full-time staff, and need the hours on the timesheet to be the hours that flow into pay. For an aquatic centre, a gym chain or a swim school, that is the difference between an HR product that gets in the way and one that matches how the operation actually runs.
Key capabilities
- Onboarding. Bring new starters on with the records, documents and details you need before their first shift, so a casual is ready to be rostered without a paper chase.
- Rostering. Build rosters across venues, manage availability, and give managers a clear view of who is scheduled where. Because staff records are shared with Complex, the people on the roster are the people on the venue timetable.
- Leave. Manage leave requests, approvals and balances in one place, visible to the managers who build the rosters.
- Timesheets. Capture worked hours and reconcile them against the roster, so pay reflects what happened rather than what was planned.
- Payroll export. Produce payroll export from approved timesheets and feed the figures into Crunch, so HR and finance work from the same numbers.
Connected to operations and finance
Culture connects natively to the rest of the Cohiva suite. Staff records flow into Complex for venue rostering, so the person scheduled on the learn-to-swim timetable is the person HR onboarded. Payroll figures feed into Crunch for finance, so labour cost lands in the books without a separate import. One employee record serves HR, operations and the books.
This matters most when an operation runs across several sites and entities. The same team member might work shifts at two venues that sit in different legal entities, and the hours, the roster and the cost all need to land in the right place. Because Culture sits on one shared data layer with Complex and Crunch, that joining-up happens by default rather than through a nightly export.
The timesheet-to-pay flow
The weekly rhythm of a shift-based operator is a loop: build the roster, work the shifts, capture the hours, approve them, and pay. Where that loop runs across separate tools, each handover is a chance for error. Hours typed from a paper sheet into payroll, a roster that does not match what was actually worked, a leave request that never reached the manager building next week's roster: these are the small failures that cost an operator money and goodwill.
Culture keeps the loop in one place. The roster, the worked hours, the leave and the payroll export are stages of the same record, so the hours approved are the hours paid, and the roster reflects who is available and who is on leave. For an operator with a large casual and part-time workforce, getting this loop right every week is most of the HR job, and it is the job Culture is built around.
Who it is for
Culture suits multi-location and franchise operators with shift-based workforces, including aquatic centres, gyms and swim schools that need rostering and timesheets connected to the rest of their operation. It is a good fit when your people are the largest part of your cost base and your roster changes every week.
If you run a single salaried office team, a general HRIS may be enough. If you roster casual and part-time staff across several venues and want HR, the roster and pay to share one source of truth, Culture is built for that.
Getting started
Culture is part of the Cohiva platform, so you can run HR and payroll on the same identity and data layer as facility operations and finance. To see capabilities and a closer look at how Culture handles shift-based HR and payroll, visit culture.cohiva.app.