How do I create a shift roster?

Before you plan: three conditions

Shift and duty planning is not part of the time tracking. Anyone who only documents working time sets none of it up and sees none of it in the application. Terms such as area, pool or day plan only arise with the module.

Three things have to come together before any planning happens. If one is missing, the area is unreachable.

• The Professional plan. On the Team plan the module is unreachable.
• The business has not switched it off. Shift planning is the only feature a business can deactivate itself.
• The setup has been done. Without areas, pools and shift definitions there is nothing to plan.

The setup wizard

The wizard asks for the industry and creates from it a complete, named starting set: shifts or activities, areas, pools, staffing rules and a matching working-time model. Instead of empty lists, concrete examples are there from the first call.

Thirteen industries are available. Five of them plan not in shifts but in the day plan and therefore come with an activity catalogue: veterinary, doctors' practice, dental, pharmacy and physiotherapy. For them the guide to the day plan is the right one.

What the wizard creates is afterwards perfectly normal to change and delete. It is starting data and not a branch in the program.

1. 1Choose the industry.
2. 2Review the suggestions for the operating mode, areas, pools and shifts or activities.
3. 3Change what does not fit. The suggestions can be edited before they are applied.
4. 4Finish. After that a workable set is in place, and the setup is recorded on the business.

• The wizard does not plan. It creates master data; the first plan comes afterwards, by hand or from a pattern.
• Care, for example, gets early, late and night shifts, the areas Ward 1, Ward 2 and Intensive Care and the pools care worker, specialist nurse and trainee.
• Hospitality gets early and late shifts, the area Main restaurant and the pools chef, waiter and bartender.

The three master data lists

Everything else hangs on these three lists. Management and HR maintain them, even where further people are allowed to plan: the right to plan is not the right to master data.

Creating and staffing shifts

A single shift can be created, changed, moved to another day or area, duplicated, and deleted individually or in bulk. Staffing is done out of the pools, and one of the assigned people can be marked as shift lead.

Six checks run in a fixed order before every assignment. They are the reason an assignment is sometimes rejected even though someone looks available.

1. 1Shift and person must both be specified.
2. 2The right to plan is checked for this specific shift, not for the business as a whole.
3. 3The shift must exist and must not be archived.
4. 4Person and pool must belong to your own business.
5. 5If a pool is specified, the person must be a member of it.
6. 6There must be no time overlap on the same day. The message names the conflicting shift.

• The same person twice on the same shift is rejected.
• What is checked is availability and qualification via the pool, not occupational safety. More on that below.
• Outside their period of employment, a person is not listed as schedulable.

Rotation patterns instead of typing

A rotation pattern is a recurring sequence of shifts across several weeks, with slots per day and pool. Applied to a period, it generates the shifts in one go.

The pattern does not plan optimally. It fills its slots and reports what remains open. It looks for no alternative, moves nothing and considers no preferences beyond pool membership.

1. 1Choose the pattern and the period.
2. 2Read the preview. It shows which shifts will be created and why a slot could not be filled.
3. 3Confirm. The shifts are created as drafts, not published.
4. 4A misstep can be deleted as a group, because the generated shifts remain recognisable as belonging together.

Publish

A shift has three states, and only one of them has any outward effect. As long as the plan is a draft, the workforce sees nothing and no reminder goes out.

The actions work on a list of shifts rather than on a single one. The right to plan is checked separately for each affected shift.

Swaps, open shifts and the shift market

Three routes lead to a shift changing hands. They differ in who sets things in motion.

All three have one thing in common: an application or a request is not a commitment. The assignment only comes about with the decision, and several people may apply for the same shift.

When someone drops out

If a sick note frees up a staffed shift, the application determines the eligible pool members and sends each of them a cover request. The planning team is informed separately, and additionally by email.

The number of people asked appears in the message to the planning team. Zero people asked means there is nobody who could step in, and the planning team has to learn that immediately.

The escalation does not staff anything itself. It asks, and one person's acceptance creates the assignment. There is no order of precedence, no deadline and no automatic handover to a next circle.

What the workforce can contribute

Four pieces of information come from the employees themselves. They are visible to the planning team, but they decide nothing: the scheduling remains an act of human judgement.

• Shift preferences: preferred and blocked times per shift type or day. The business can switch this feature off entirely.
• Preferred partners: colleagues someone would rather be scheduled alongside.
• Availability windows: periods in which a person can be scheduled at all.
• On-call duty is activated for the whole business and then assigned day by day. Assignment and withdrawal each trigger a notification.

Reminders and output

Every published shift comes with two reminders on their own intervals: one before the start and one after the end asking for the times to be recorded. The second is skipped if time has already been recorded. It only chases genuine gaps.

The run fires every ten minutes and works with a catch-up window rather than a point in time. A missed run therefore loses no reminder, and two simultaneous runs cannot send the same reminder twice.

• Reminders go out for published shifts. Drafts trigger nothing.
• Both reminders can be unsubscribed from personally and independently of each other.
• Your own schedule is available as a calendar subscription via a personal token and as a PDF.

Occupational safety: the check warns, it does not block

While planning, rest periods, maximum working hours and the protection of young workers are checked. The limits come from two sources: from the working time model and from the business's employee protection settings, which keep a separate set of rules for minors.

What is assessed is the plan, not the individual operation. The evaluation sees the surrounding shifts; otherwise a rest period check would not be possible at all.

A shift with a violation can still be assigned and published. There is no sign-off by a second person and no block that could only be overridden with a justification. The violations are kept as a list, and the day plan records in the publication log which ones were known at the time of publication.

Who is allowed to plan

The right to plan comes from two sources: from whole roles and from individually named people. Together they form the circle of planners, and the check runs per shift rather than once for everything.

Planning and deciding are two different rights. Those who approve shift requests form a circle of their own.

• The master data pages remain restricted to management and HR, even for named planners.
• The right to plan is not access to personnel data. It permits planning and staffing, not viewing contracts or time accounts.
• Target against actual can be evaluated per person and period: planned shift time against time actually recorded.