Repeat a shift

Make a shift repeat every few days, weeks, months or years, and change or stop the series later.

This page is for planners. You need to be a Planning Administrator, or a project manager for the shift's project. A repeating shift saves you from creating the same shift every week.

Make a shift repeat#

Open the shift, or create a new one. The shift cannot be a forecast: the Repeat box is not offered for forecasts.
Tick Repeat. A Recurrence section appears.
In Repeat Every, type a number and choose Days, Weeks, Months or Years.
Choose Repeat Type:
- Forever: the series has no end. Planning creates shifts up to the company's horizon (6 months by default) and a daily job adds more as time passes.
- Until: type Repeat Until. Required for this type.
- Number of Repetitions: type Repetitions, counting the first shift. Three repetitions means three shifts in all.
Save.

[planning-shift-recurrence]

Planning creates the other occurrences as copies of the latest shift in the series: same person, role, break, note and project. Each copy keeps the same local clock time, even across a daylight-saving change.

New occurrences copy the state of the latest shift

A copy keeps the Draft or Published state of the shift it was copied from. If the latest shift of the series is published, the new occurrences are created as published, and no email is sent for them. Unpublish the latest shift first if you do not want that.

Where the series stops#

Occurrences are never created beyond the Recurring Shift Horizon, which an administrator sets in the Planning settings (Recurring shifts, in months).
The daily job Planning: generate recurring shifts extends Forever series and Until series that have not reached their date. It does not extend Number of Repetitions series. A series of 100 weekly repetitions therefore stops at the horizon (about 26 weeks) and does not reach 100 later.

Change one shift or the whole series#

When a shift belongs to a series, the form shows Apply Changes To with three choices:

Choice	Effect of your change
This shift	Only this occurrence.
This and following shifts	This one and every later one.
All shifts	Every occurrence.

Changing the time moves the others by the same difference: moving one Monday shift from 09:00 to 10:00 moves every other occurrence in the choice to 10:00 on its own day.

Choose the option before you change the field, then save.

Changing the repetition deletes later shifts

If you change Repeat Every, Repeat Type, Repeat Until or Repetitions of a shift in a series, Planning deletes every later occurrence of the series and creates them again from this shift. This includes published shifts, assigned people and notes you edited on those occurrences. Untick Repeat with This and following shifts or All shifts and every other occurrence (the later ones, or all of them) is deleted too. With This shift, only this shift leaves the series.

Stop a series#

Open the shift from which the series should stop.
Set Apply Changes To to This and following shifts.
Untick Repeat and save.

The following shifts are deleted and this one stays as a normal shift.

Messages you may see#

Message	Meaning
Choose the date until which the shift repeats.	Repeat Type is Until but Repeat Until is empty.
A shift must repeat at least once.	Repetitions is below 1.
A shift must repeat at least every 1 unit.	Repeat Every is zero or negative.