Shifts & Scheduling App Overview

Shifts & Scheduling

1. What it is

Shifts & Scheduling is where you build, publish, and manage your workforce schedules. You create schedules for a date range, add shifts with times and locations, assign employees, and publish — employees see their upcoming shifts and can submit availability and time-off requests.

• Enablement: Requires a license. An admin enables it from Admin → Apps Marketplace. It is not turned on automatically.
• What it is not: Shifts & Scheduling handles the plan — who works where and when. Time tracking (clock-in/out, punch records) lives in Time & Attendance; leave accruals and balances live in Leave Management; open-shift bidding lives in Shift Marketplace. Those are separate apps that integrate with this one.

2. Standing it up

1. Enable the app — go to Admin → Apps Marketplace, find Shifts & Scheduling, and enable it.
2. Set up locations — go to Admin → Locations. Every shift belongs to a location (or is marked non-location-specific). At least one location must exist before you can create shifts.
3. Create scheduling teams — go to Admin → Scheduling Teams (or turn on automatic team creation under Schedule Settings → Scheduling Teams). A scheduling team defines which employees appear in the scheduler for a given location, department, or custom group.
4. Mark employees as schedulable — new employees are schedulable by default. To exclude someone, clear the Schedulable flag on their profile. Only schedulable employees appear as candidates for shift assignment.
5. Create your first schedule — go to Schedules, click New Schedule, pick a team, set the date range, and add shifts. Publish when ready — employees are notified automatically.
6. Confirm it worked — after publishing, employees see their upcoming shifts on their dashboard and in the mobile app. The schedule appears under Schedules in Published status.

Silent dependency: If you enable approval-required publishing (see Settings below), every schedule must be approved before employees see it. Until an approver acts, the schedule sits in Pending Approval and employees see nothing new.

Permissions: Admins have full access. Managers and custom roles can be granted Create, Edit, Delete, and Approve permissions for shifts and schedules through Admin → Roles. Employees without management permissions can view their own shifts, submit schedule requests, and claim open shifts — but cannot create or modify shifts.

3. How it fits together

Schedules and shifts — A schedule is a named container for a date range (e.g. “Week of Aug 11”). It holds shifts — individual time blocks with a start time, end time, and location. Shifts are assigned to one or more employees. A schedule moves through three statuses: Draft → Pending Approval (if approval is required) → Published. Only published schedules are visible to employees.

Scheduling teams — A scheduling team controls who is eligible for shifts on a schedule. There are three types:

• Location teams — automatically include employees assigned to that location.
• Department teams — include employees in a specific organizational department, optionally scoped to certain locations.
• Custom teams — you pick the members manually, or define criteria (department, location, skills, roles) that resolve membership dynamically.

Each team can have a designated manager and co-managers. Teams also govern swap scope (whether shift swaps are limited to the same team, same location, or unrestricted) and contracted-hours tracking periods.

Coverage and requirements — Each shift tracks whether its staffing requirements are met. You can set a minimum staff count per shift, define role-based requirements per location (e.g. “at least 1 Lead and 2 Crew”), and attach skill requirements. The scheduler shows coverage status in real time — green when met, flagged when short. When a shift needs coverage, it can be posted as an open shift for employees to claim.

Schedule requests — Employees submit requests for days off, shift-on preferences, or schedule changes. Requests go to their manager for approval. Approved day-off requests automatically remove the employee from conflicting shifts. Requests can be one-time, half-day, partial-day, or recurring (weekly, bi-weekly, or every four weeks).

Schedule templates — Reusable shift patterns that you apply to new schedules. A template defines shift names, times, days of the week, and optional break patterns. You can load industry-specific templates or create your own. When applied, the template generates shifts for every week in the schedule period.

Assignment compliance — When you assign an employee to a shift, the system checks a layered set of rules before allowing the assignment:

• Hard blocks (prevent the assignment): daily and weekly hour limits, minimum rest-period violations, overlapping shifts, approved leave conflicts, missing critical skills, and role-based prohibited pairings. These are enforced automatically — the assignment is rejected with a specific reason.
• Warnings (shown but do not block): approaching hour limits, tight rest periods, pending leave requests, contracted day-off conflicts, and contracted-hours budget overages in soft-enforcement mode. The scheduler sees the warning and can proceed.

Admins can override hard blocks when necessary (e.g. emergency coverage). An admin override is recorded in the shift’s change history.

Hour targets — Each employee on a schedule gets an hour target derived in priority order: their contracted hours, the role-based default, or 40 hours per week. The scheduler shows how each employee is tracking against their target across the schedule period, so you can balance workload before publishing.

Cross-schedule visibility — When you open a schedule, you can see read-only “ghost” shifts from other published schedules at the same locations. This prevents double-booking an employee across schedules that overlap in time. The setting Show external shifts (on by default) controls whether these ghost blocks appear.

4. Running it

Creating and publishing a schedule

1. Go to Schedules and click New Schedule.
2. Select a scheduling team (or locations), set the period start and end dates, and give the schedule a name.
3. Add shifts — set the time, location, and required staff. Use the Calendar view for a day-by-day layout or the Board view for a person-by-day grid with drag-and-drop.
4. Assign employees to shifts — the system recommends candidates ranked by availability, skills, role fit, and fairness (fewest upcoming shifts first). Compliance violations (daily/weekly hour limits, rest-period rules, leave conflicts) block the assignment; warnings appear for softer issues.
5. When ready, click Publish (or Submit for Approval if approval is required). Employees receive a notification with their new schedule.

Applying a template

1. Open a draft schedule and choose Apply Template.
2. Select the template and, for multi-location teams, map each shift row to a location.
3. The template generates shifts for each week in the schedule. You can then adjust individual shifts before publishing.

Reviewing schedule requests

1. Go to Schedule Requests. Pending requests appear with the employee name, request type, dates, and priority.
2. Approve or deny each request. Approving a day-off request automatically unassigns the employee from any shifts that conflict with the requested dates.

Splitting a shift

1. Open a shift and choose Split Shift.
2. Pick the split time. The original shift is replaced by two segments (Part 1 and Part 2). Existing assignments transfer to Part 1; Part 2 starts unassigned.

Sharing a schedule publicly

1. Open a published schedule and choose Share.
2. A token-based public link is generated. You can control whether the public view shows employee names, employee counts, or only shift times. The link can be set to expire on a specific date.

Copying a schedule

1. Open an existing schedule and choose Copy Schedule.
2. Set the new date range. Shifts are duplicated with dates adjusted by the offset between the source and target periods.
3. Shift assignments are not copied — the new schedule starts with unassigned shifts so you can reassign based on current availability.

Importing and exporting shifts

Go to Admin → Shift Import/Export to bulk-import shifts from CSV or export published schedules for payroll or reporting. Scheduled SFTP imports and exports can run automatically on a configured timetable.

Reviewing the audit trail

Every shift and schedule is versioned. Open a shift and view its change history to see who changed what and when, including the optional reason-for-change note. Schedule-level changes (publishing, approval, rejection) are also tracked.

5. Settings

All scheduling settings are at Admin → Schedule Settings (inside the Shifts & Scheduling app).

Setting	Default	What it changes
Require Approval for Schedule Publishing	Off	When on, schedules must be approved before they become visible to employees.
Approval Strategy	Location-Based Hierarchy	Determines who is notified to approve: location managers with the schedule-approve permission, or all eligible managers. Only visible when approval is required.
Automatically create scheduling teams for each location	Off	When on, a scheduling team is created and kept in sync for every location. When off, you manage teams manually.
Allow managers to edit past shifts	Off	When on, managers and admins can edit or delete shifts that have already ended. Changes are captured in the shift’s change history. Non-manager employees cannot edit past shifts regardless of this setting.
Default Scheduler View	Calendar	The view a schedule page opens in for people who have not chosen one themselves. Options are Calendar (day-by-day columns) or Board (person-by-day grid). A user’s own choice overrides this default.

Role scheduling requirements — at Admin → Role Scheduling Requirements, you can define per-role rules: expected weekly hours, maximum consecutive days, shifts-per-period targets, and rolling hour caps. These produce warnings or hard blocks when assignments would violate the rule.

Shift requirements — at Admin → Shift Requirements, you configure per-location staffing rules: minimum total staff, required counts by role, and skill requirements.

Shift rule templates — at Admin → Shift Rules, you create reusable staffing-rule templates that can be applied to locations. Templates define minimum staff, role counts, time-of-day applicability, and break-coverage rules.

Notifications — Employees are notified when a schedule is published or updated, and receive shift reminders before their shifts start. A weekly schedule digest is sent every Monday summarizing the upcoming week’s shifts. Notifications go through in-app, email, and push channels; SMS is reserved for urgent shift reminders only. Notification preferences are per-user and per-channel.

Automated background operations — Coverage status is refreshed daily and shift reminders are sent every four hours. Scheduling team membership is re-materialized every four hours so that employee changes (new hires, transfers, deactivations) are reflected automatically.

6. More help

• Shifts & Scheduling FAQ — specific setup and operating questions.
• Ask AI — the assistant answers questions about Shifts & Scheduling from these articles.