Shift scheduler overview

Shifts sit on top of job entities. Open a job and go to the Shifts tab to see and assign staff for that specific job.

Adding a shift manually

If a job has no shifts yet, you’ll see an Add Shift button. Click it to add a shift row.

On that row, click the first circle to assign a user, and the second circle to assign a service or position.

A slider lets you adjust the shift’s start and end times by dragging left and right.

If someone needs to arrive early or stay late outside the event’s normal times, use the small minus or plus icons to expand the scale of the shift line, which gives you more room to set a start or end time outside the standard window.

The three dot menu on a shift lets you change its status between confirmed, declined, requested and assigned. You can also add notes to a shift, which can be pulled in later as variables, useful for things like shift reminder automations. There’s no limit to how many shifts you can add to a single job.

Automating shift creation

You don’t have to add every shift by hand. There are two ways to automate this.

You can create shifts directly through an automation, using a dedicated action for it. Or you can set it up through your services themselves, using a service type that requires both a unit and a user.

When a service is set up this way, booking it automatically assigns both a unit and a user, and once a user is assigned, a shift is created for them without anyone building it manually. Setting this up means choosing which team and which specific users are applicable to that service, and how many users are actually needed for it to run. This also controls how that service shows as available on your booking forms.

Optionally, you can let the customer choose which user they want at their event, rather than having one assigned automatically. This is a setting on the service itself, switching it from auto assigning a user to allowing selection instead.

Staff requesting to work a shift

Staff can request to work a shift themselves, provided the Request to Work button has been added to your Bookings view. Setting that button up is covered in its own article, since the steps involved are the same regardless of what happens afterward.

Once someone clicks it, they’ll see a confirmation that a shift’s been requested. Opening the job and looking at the Shifts tab shows the new shift with a yellow tinge and a warning bubble on its three dot menu, with its status set to requested. From there, an admin can confirm or decline it. Once confirmed and saved, the shift appears on that user’s own profile.

Viewing shifts as a staff member

Every user has a Shifts tab on their own profile, split into Upcoming and Past.

On Upcoming, they see every shift they’ve been assigned to, each with an accept or decline button. Accepting marks the shift as accepted. Declining marks it as declined, and the shift shows with a red tinge to flag that it’s been turned down.

Shift scheduler settings

Shift scheduler settings are split across a couple of tabs.

Positions

The Positions tab controls what staff can actually be assigned to. You can assign users to specific services, to specific products, or, once you switch on the custom roles toggle, to roles you define yourself, manager and assistant being obvious examples. Whatever you set up here becomes available to choose from when you’re building shifts.

General settings

Shift increment controls how finely the slider on the Shifts tab lets you adjust a shift’s start and end time, choosing between one, five, fifteen or thirty minute steps.

Shift assignments lets you control who’s even selectable for a shift in the first place. By default that’s every user, but if only certain teams actually work front of house, you can narrow it down to just the teams that should appear as options.

There’s also a toggle to require staff to clock in and out of their shifts, covered properly below.

Clocking in and out

Switch this setting on, and once a user has accepted a shift and it’s due to start, they get the option to clock in. They’re also sent a reminder email fifteen minutes before the shift starts, so it’s front of mind on their device at the right moment.

Clocking in requires them to allow location access on their phone or in their browser, since GPS coordinates are used to record exactly where their device was at the moment they clocked in. The same thing happens again when they clock out.

Once a shift’s finished, opening the Shifts tab on that job and looking at the staff on it shows a map of exactly where they were when they clocked in and out. This gives you a genuine audit trail, proof that staff were actually on site at the times they were meant to be, which is worth having if a customer ever raises a complaint about staff not arriving on time.