Scheduler & Planner

The Scheduler is where you decide who is working, when, and where, before the week starts rather than while it is happening. It exists because most businesses that run on shift work carry a core team plus casual staff, and the cost of getting that mix wrong is paid twice: once in overtime nobody planned, and once in a site that was short-handed on the busiest day.

Everything here is built by dragging, not typing. You lay patterns onto a grid, colour them so a supervisor can read the week at a glance, and publish. Once published, the roster is what the app shows employees, what the terminal expects, and what Attendance compares the real punches against.

The Scheduler is the working grid. Rows are people or teams, columns are days, and you drag a shift onto the cell where you want it. Copy and paste works the way you would expect, so building a second week from the first is a matter of seconds.

Nothing is visible to employees until you publish. That gap is deliberate: it lets you build a messy draft, move things around and resolve the gaps before anyone starts planning their week around it.

A Roster is a named block of working hours with a colour attached. Defining them once means the grid stays readable at a glance, which matters more than it sounds when you are looking at forty people across seven days.

Use colour for meaning rather than decoration. One colour per site, or one per shift type, is legible. A different colour for every roster is not.

The Planner is the view that looks ahead rather than at the current week. It pulls together approved leave, availability and existing assignments so you can see where the holes are before you start filling them, rather than discovering a clash after you have published.

Bulk Schedule repeats a roster daily, weekly, or on named days of the week, across as many employees as you select. It is the difference between building a month for a team of twenty in a minute and building it one cell at a time.

Check the date range before you confirm. Bulk actions are quick to apply and tedious to unpick, so it is worth reading the summary line twice.

Some shifts are better offered than assigned. Publishing a roster as available pushes it to Communicator Pro, where casual workers can see it and take it. You keep control of who is eligible, they get first refusal, and the shift fills without a round of phone calls.

It works best where you have a pool of people who genuinely want extra hours. If a shift keeps going unclaimed, that is useful information about how the shift is priced or timed.

Notes attach context to a specific day or shift: a delivery arriving, a site closure, a reason someone was moved. The next manager who opens that week sees why the roster looks the way it does instead of guessing or undoing it.

The same grid can be filtered by department, by roster, by leave, by clock-ins and more. Filtering is not cosmetic here: on a large workforce the unfiltered grid is unreadable, and the view you save is the one you will actually use every week.

Total Hours keeps a running count of what you have assigned each person, so you see the cost of the week as you build it rather than after payroll has run. It is the single most useful number on the screen if labour budget is a constraint, and it is the reason to build the roster here rather than in a spreadsheet.