Axis
OnCrew AI · online
Hi, I'm Axis — OnCrew's AI. Ask me anything about filling shifts, compliance, onboarding or how it all works.
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If you run a labour hire agency or dispatch crews to other people's sites, general rostering software and your business can speak slightly different languages. This page lays out what to look for in any alternative, and where OnCrew — built specifically for labour hire and crew dispatch — takes a different approach. We won't make claims about what any other product does; check every vendor's current features on their own pages.
Most workforce tools were built around one picture: a business, its own venues, its own employed staff, a repeating weekly roster. Labour hire breaks that picture. Your workers go to your clients' sites, every site has its own compliance rules, and the roster is rebuilt daily rather than repeated weekly. That mismatch is why crew businesses go looking.
The distinction that decides most evaluations. It's less about brand and more about which question your week is really made of.
Repeating weekly patterns, your own staff, your own venues. General rostering and time-and-attendance tools do this well. If that's most of your week, plenty of options will serve you.
"Who is the best-qualified, available, compliant worker for this shift at this client's site — and how fast can I get them confirmed?" Job requests at 5am, tickets to verify before anyone walks through a gate. That's the category OnCrew is built for.
Four questions separate tools that manage rosters from tools that run a labour hire desk. Run them against OnCrew too — a genuine alternative should welcome the scrutiny.
Expiry reminders are table stakes. The real question is what happens when the reminder is ignored on a busy morning. In OnCrew, a worker whose required ticket has lapsed is never surfaced for a shift that needs it — the option is removed, not flagged. Ask any vendor to show you, live, what happens when you try to allocate a non-compliant worker.
Labour hire lives on fast onboarding. A new worker should complete everything from their own phone — details, photographed tickets and licences, your induction, medical, and tax, super and bank. In OnCrew each ticket is logged with its expiry and lands in your compliance register for a quick review; approve it and they're ready to roster. If a tool still needs paper forms or an office visit, your busiest weeks will find that seam.
A crew business might dispatch to thirty client sites in a week, each with its own requirements. The software has to treat clients, sites and supervisors as real objects, with compliance attached to the site and requests raised by the supervisor. Test any tool against your messiest real scenario: three sites, three ticket sets, one morning.
Crew businesses carry large, fluctuating pools — hundreds of casuals on the books, a fraction working any week. Worker caps and per-user tiers can quietly punish the growth you're chasing. OnCrew is priced per worker with no caps, from $5/worker/month. Whatever you choose, model the cost at your current pool and at double it, and read the fine print on caps before you sign.
Rather than a feature grid making claims about other products, here's the checklist to take into each demo, with OnCrew's answer beside it. Fill the middle column in as you watch.
| What matters | What to ask for in the demo | OnCrew |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance enforcement | Show a non-compliant worker being allocated | Hard gate — the worker is never surfaced for the shift |
| Worker onboarding | Onboard a test worker start to finish | Self-serve from the worker's phone; tickets logged with expiries for review |
| Shift filling | Fill a short-notice shift live | Smart Fill ranks qualified, available workers; one-tap offers |
| Multi-site dispatch | Three sites, different ticket sets | Requirements attached per site; requests carry compliance with them |
| Client management | Where do clients, sites and supervisors live? | Built-in client CRM with sites, supervisors and shift history |
| Attendance proof | How is on-site presence verified? | Geofenced, GPS-verified clock-ins in the site's local time |
| Payroll handoff | How do approved hours reach payroll? | Payroll-ready export for Xero or Employment Hero |
| Pricing at scale | Cost at 2× your worker pool | Per-worker pricing, no worker caps |
A checklist, not a claim about any competitor. Always confirm each vendor's current capabilities on their own product pages.
Every part of the platform assumes your workers go to other people's sites and your week is unpredictable.
Reads a shift's requirements, searches your whole pool, and ranks the matching workers by how well they fit — trade match, site and client history, distance, and how recently they've worked — then sends one-tap offers to their phones. The 5am scramble becomes a two-minute review of a ranked shortlist, with your dispatcher making the final call.
Non-compliant workers aren't flagged for a shift — they're excluded from it. Tickets, licences, inductions and credentials are catalogued with expiry dates from onboarding onward, and the gate applies automatically to every allocation on every site.
Your team can ask Axis for help inside the platform — handy for new staff learning the ropes. Axis doesn't do the allocation ranking; that's Smart Fill's job. It just makes the platform faster to use day to day.
Essentials at $5/worker/month, Starter $6.50, Growth $8, and a custom Enterprise — each with a monthly minimum, none with a worker cap, so a seasonal surge never triggers a forced plan jump. Full details on pricing.
OnCrew isn't a payroll engine and it doesn't interpret awards or run STP — it captures verified hours and hands a clean, payroll-ready export to whatever pays your people. And it doesn't blindly trust a photographed ticket: credentials go into your register for a quick review, so what powers the compliance gate is checked, not guessed. If you need a pay-and-bill engine, that's a different tool. If you need to fill the shift and run the crew, that's OnCrew.
It's smaller than it sounds. Whether you're leaving another platform or a spreadsheet, the shape is the same.
Workers get an onboarding link and complete their own profiles from their phones — details, photographed tickets, induction, tax, super and bank. The pool builds itself; you review as it fills.
Enter your clients, their sites, their supervisors and each site's compliance requirements. This is the step that pays off every day afterwards.
Keep your old process alongside while your first shifts flow through Smart Fill, clock-ins and approvals. Confidence builds fast when the first 5am gap gets filled from a phone.
Once approvals are flowing, switch your pay run to the payroll-ready export for Xero or Employment Hero and retire the re-keying.
Judge candidates as dispatch software, not just rostering software. The four tests that matter: a hard compliance gate rather than reminders, phone-based end-to-end worker onboarding, multi-site dispatch with per-site requirements, and pricing without worker caps. That's where general rostering tools and labour hire businesses tend to diverge.
OnCrew covers the workforce management core — onboarding, rostering, shift filling, clock-ins, timesheets and payroll-ready exports — and adds the labour hire layer: a client CRM, per-site compliance, Smart Fill dispatch and a live dispatch map. Whether it replaces your current tool one-for-one depends on which features you actually use; a side-by-side walkthrough with your own shift data is the honest way to find out. For a feature-by-feature look, see our OnCrew vs Tanda comparison.
Per worker per month with no worker caps: Essentials $5, Starter $6.50, Growth $8, and a custom Enterprise, each with a monthly minimum ($99 / $199 / $399). When you compare on price, model your real pool size — caps and tiers elsewhere can flip the comparison as you grow. See full pricing.
No. Workers self-onboard from a link on their own phones, which spreads the work and improves the data — photographed tickets go straight into the compliance register with expiry dates. Most of the effort sits in setting up clients and sites properly, which then powers every allocation afterwards.
Yes, and we recommend it. A one-to-two week parallel run on live shifts is the fastest way to see whether the tool that looks best on paper is the one that fills your hardest Tuesday. See the platform.
The best test of any alternative is a live fill of a real, short-notice, ticketed shift. Book a 20-minute demo and we'll run Smart Fill on your own shift data.
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