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 → All Apps. 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 → All Apps, 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 Shifts & Scheduling › Settings › Scheduling Teams (or have teams created for you: the Scheduling Teams card on Settings › Schedule Settings can make one team for each location, each department, or each department at each location). 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, turn off Include in Shift Scheduling on their profile. Only schedulable employees appear as candidates for shift assignment.
5. Create your first schedule — go to Team → Shift Scheduler, click Create, 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 on the Shift Scheduler page as Published.

Silent dependency: If you turn on Require approval before a schedule is published (see Settings below), every schedule must be approved before it is published. While it waits as Sent for Approval, employees can already see their own shifts on it, but nobody is sent the “schedule published” notice until an approver approves it.

Permissions: Admins have full access. Managers and custom roles are granted permissions in the Scheduling group at Admin → Roles & Permissions: View, Create, Edit, Delete, Publish and Approve for schedules, and View, Create, Edit and Delete for shifts. 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 → Sent for Approval (if approval is required) → Published. Employees never see shifts on a draft. Once a schedule is submitted for approval or published, employees can see their shifts on it; the “schedule published” notice goes out only when it is published. Approving a pending schedule publishes it at once — there is no separate publish step after approval.

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 three kinds of request: Day off, Extra shift (to be given additional shifts), and Schedule change. 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, staffing, and optional breaks. Add, edit or clone a template’s shifts in the side panel that opens from Add Shift or a shift’s ⋮ menu. Each shift’s staffing is either its own (a minimum number of people, plus job functions such as one Store Manager) or comes from a shift rule template, whose current numbers are used each time a schedule is built. A shift left without staffing needs its location’s minimum from Location Staffing Defaults, or 1 person if the location sets none. You can load industry-specific templates or create your own. When applied, the template generates shifts for every week in the schedule period, and each shift follows its store’s Location-Locked setting.

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, with the rules it bypassed, is recorded in the admin Compliance Audit Logs (Enterprise plans).

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 or pending-approval schedules at the same locations. This prevents double-booking an employee across schedules that overlap in time. Each schedule has its own toggle — Hide shifts from other schedules / Show shifts from other schedules in the schedule page’s menu (shown by default) — that controls whether these ghost blocks appear on it.

4. Running it

Creating and publishing a schedule

1. Go to Team → Shift Scheduler and click Create.
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.

Sharing a schedule publicly

1. Open the schedule and choose Share Schedule from its actions menu. This needs Allow public schedule share links turned on in Schedule Settings (it is off by default).
2. Enable Sharing creates a public link that opens without signing in. You choose whether the public page shows employee names (off by default, when it shows shift times and headcounts without naming anyone) and shift labels, and when the link expires — after 7 to 365 days, or never. Save link options changes them later without changing the link; Regenerate Link issues a new link, and Disable Sharing stops the link working.

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 unless you tick Also copy staff assignments. When you do, each person is checked against the new dates the same way a manual assignment is (approved leave, overlapping shifts, rest periods, hour limits); anyone who fails a check is left off, and the confirmation names them so you can fill those spots by hand.

Importing and exporting shifts

Open the ⋮ menu on the Shift Scheduler page: Import Schedules and Import Shifts bulk-import from CSV, and Export Shifts (CSV) downloads shifts for payroll or reporting. Scheduled SFTP imports and exports of shifts, run on a daily, weekly or monthly timetable, are set up on the Shift Integration Schedules admin page.

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

The app-wide switches are on Shifts & Scheduling › Settings › Schedule Settings. The page has these cards:

Card	Setting	Default	What it changes
Schedule Publishing	Require approval before a schedule is published	Off	When on, a schedule is submitted for approval and is published only when an approver approves it. Employees can see their shifts on it while it waits; the “schedule published” notice is sent on approval.
Schedule Publishing	Who is asked to approve	Managers of the schedule’s locations, then higher organizational roles (Recommended)	Managers of the schedule’s locations, then higher organizational roles notifies managers with authority over the schedule’s locations, then — when none are found — anyone whose organizational role ranks above the creator’s and who can approve schedules, with admins as the last fallback; All Eligible Managers notifies every manager and administrator who can approve schedules. Shown only while approval is required.
Scheduling Authority	Who can manage shifts and schedules beyond their own?	Managers and admins, company-wide	Narrowing it limits a manager to the locations they manage, the scheduling teams they run and the people who report to them. The two settings combine: a manager opens and publishes schedules at the stores the next setting allows, and edits or staffs a shift there only when the shift is also within this reach. Only a company administrator can change it.
Scheduling Authority	Which stores can managers schedule at?	Stores they’re assigned to	Where a manager can open schedules and add, edit, staff, copy and publish shifts: Stores they’re assigned to (their primary and secondary stores, the locations under them and any stores their role covers), All stores, or Only their primary store. Who is notified about a schedule, and who is asked to approve it, does not change with this choice, and Shift Coverage and Team Availability keep showing a manager the stores they are assigned to.
Shift Claim Approvals	How should shift claims be handled?	Require Manager Approval for All Claims	Whether a claimed shift is approved at once (Auto-Approve All Claims), decided claim by claim (Smart Approval), or always waits for a manager. When the value comes from Shift Marketplace’s settings, the page says so under the field.
Shift Claim Approvals	Who can approve shift claims?	Any Manager with Shift Permissions	Who may approve a claim and see it in the approvals queue. When Shift Marketplace has its own value saved, that one is in force and the page says so.
Public Schedule Share Links	Allow public schedule share links	Off	Lets people share read-only schedule links that open without signing in. Turning it off stops every existing link working; turning it back on restores them.
Scheduling Teams	One team for each location / One team for each department / One team for each department at each location	Off	Creates a scheduling team automatically when a location or department is added. Existing locations, departments and teams are not touched — use Quick Setup on the Scheduling Teams page for those.
Past Shift Editing	Allow managers to edit past shifts	Off	When on, managers and admins can edit a published shift after it ends, and delete one nobody clocked in to or was marked a no-show on. Changes are captured in the shift’s change history. Employees stay blocked regardless of this setting.
Default Scheduler View	Calendar view / Board view	Calendar view	The view a schedule page opens in for people who have not chosen one themselves. A user’s own choice overrides this default.
Notification Recipients	Send scheduling alerts to this group	The managers on the shift, schedule or location, then this app’s admins	A group told as well about a declined shift or a schedule still unpublished near its start (and about a coverage gap at a location with no active manager).
Notification Recipients	Who hears when a schedule is published	Everyone on the team or location	Whether the published and updated notices go to the schedule’s whole team (or everyone at its locations) plus anyone rostered on it, or Only people rostered on that schedule.

The same page also holds the Suggestion rules card for scheduling and, for business administrators, the sample-data card.

Role scheduling requirements — at Admin → Role Scheduling Requirements, you record per-role policy: expected weekly hours, maximum consecutive days, shifts-per-period targets, and rolling hour caps. A role’s expected weekly hours become the hour target for people with no contracted hours (see Hour targets above); the other rules are reference policy only — the scheduler does not check assignments against them, so nothing is blocked or warned about.

Location staffing defaults — at Shifts & Scheduling › Settings › Location Staffing Defaults, you set each location’s minimum people for shifts that don’t set their own staffing, and whether its shifts are open to other stores (Location-Locked). The lock decides who may claim or pick up a shift from another store; it does not change who a manager can assign directly. Shifts already built from a schedule template keep the values they were built with.

Break types — at Shifts & Scheduling → Settings → Break Types (also under Time & Attendance), you set the kinds of breaks shifts can plan and employees take: name, length, paid or unpaid, required or optional. A Shifts admin can also create one, or add the standard set, straight from a shift’s Breaks section without leaving the form. A break type that a schedule template uses can’t be deleted.

Shift rule templates — at Shifts & Scheduling → Settings → Shift Rule Templates, you create reusable staffing sets that a schedule template’s shifts can use. They define minimum staff and role counts; a rule has no days or times of its own and applies only where a shift chooses it. Editing one changes schedules built after you save; schedules already built keep their numbers.

Notifications — Employees are notified when a schedule is published or updated, and receive shift reminders before their shifts start. A Schedule Summary email listing the week’s shifts is sent every Monday; someone with no email address gets it as one in-app notice under Schedule Management, linking to My Shifts. In each person’s notification preferences, Schedule Management and Shift Reminders start on in-app, email and push; Open Shifts starts on in-app and email; Schedule Summary is email only. Text messages (SMS) are opt-in: once an administrator turns SMS on, an employee with a verified mobile number can switch texts on for Shift Reminders, Schedule Management and Open Shifts. Notification preferences are per-user and per-channel.

Automated background operations — Coverage status is refreshed daily, and each shift reminder is sent at the configured lead time before the shift starts (4 hours by default). 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.