The Free Tool That Gives Hastings Retailers Their Fridays Back

Annual leave tracking. Three words that shouldn't keep anyone up at night. And yet... somewhere in the back office of a WestSide retail store right now, someone is staring at a spreadsheet, trying to remember whether Jess took that week in March before Easter or after it. Whether the part timer who covers Saturday mornings has accrued enough to take school holidays. Whether anyone has actually checked.

Steve Nathan noticed. He usually does.

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Two Time Founder. One Quiet Fixer.

Nathan is one of those quietly formidable Hawke's Bay operators who builds things that work and then gets back to the work itself. Two time high-tech founder. Owner of Salvare wine... which means he understands intimately what it means to run a seasonal business where people are your product and your complexity in equal measure.

His company TimeHub has spent years solving the foundational problem underneath all of retail scheduling: knowing, in real time, who worked when, where they were, and making sure the payroll reflects reality. No paper. No keying errors. No stress in the back office on a Thursday afternoon when you should be on the floor.

The pitch is almost irritatingly simple. TimeHub captures accurate employee time data automatically and feeds it directly to your payroll. That's it. Except it keeps growing... because the people using it keep asking for more. Which is exactly how the annual leave app came to exist.

"Annual leave management is an admin role that can get complex but doesn't need to be," Nathan says. "We built the annual leave app after feedback from our TimeHub customers who wanted more than managing hours worked."

So he built it. And then he made it free.

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Your Roster. Finally Making Sense.

For WestSide retailers, this matters in ways that are specific and immediate. Think about your roster for a moment. If you're running a shop on or around Heretaunga Street West, you're probably carrying a core team and a constellation of part timers who orbit around the busy periods... school holidays, long weekends, summer, the Christmas sprint. Managing leave across that mix is genuinely fiddly.

Full timers accrue differently. Part timers accrue differently. Someone wants two weeks in July. Someone else has been quietly accumulating leave for eighteen months and is about to take three weeks at the worst possible moment. You find out when they hand you the form.

There's a broader philosophy underneath this, and it's one Nathan has carried across everything he builds. The administrative weight of running a small business shouldn't fall on the person who should be running the business. Every hour a Hastings retailer spends untangling leave records is an hour not spent on the floor... not spent with a customer... not spent doing the revenue generating work that actually moves the needle. The back office should be nearly invisible. It should just work.

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Tight Systems. Warm Floor.

WestSide has always rewarded the retailers who stayed sharp on operations while staying generous with their customers. That combination... tight systems, warm floor presence... is harder to maintain than it looks. Tools like this are part of how you hold both.

TimeHub captures the data. It feeds the payroll. It tracks the leave. It removes the friction that accumulates in small businesses like dust... slowly, until one day you realise you're spending half your week on administration and wondering why the margins feel tight.

Steve Nathan has been building software that makes work more human for long enough to know what the actual problem is. The annual leave app isn't a headline feature. It's not going to win awards. It is going to mean that someone in a Hastings back office gets their Friday afternoon back.

Sometimes that's the whole point.

Free to use. No catch. Cleaner Fridays and a roster that finally makes sense... find it at timehub.co.nz.