Concepts

This page explains how Planning thinks. It is for planners, managers and administrators. Read it once; the task pages then make sense without repeating the rules.

Terms used in this section#

Resources, employees and materials#

A shift is planned against a resource, not directly against an employee. The employee's resource carries their working calendar, time zone, roles and default role. Materials work the same way: give a vehicle a calendar and a role and it appears on the schedule next to people.

Roles are held by resources. A shift can only be taken by someone who holds the shift's role (a shift without a role can be taken by anyone). Each resource can have one Default Planning Role; it is filled into new shifts for that resource and preferred by Auto Plan. A default role is always added to the resource's roles for you.

Shifts, open shifts and forecasts#

A shift has a Start and an End (the end must be after the start), a Role, an optional Resource, a Break, an Allocated Time %, and a free Note that the employee reads.

Leave the resource empty and you have an open shift. Its allocated time is worked out from the company's working calendar. Open shifts show in the Open Shifts list and, for planners, in the To plan panel of the schedule.

A forecast is a different Allocation Type. It books a share of someone's time, for example 50 % of a waiter over two weeks, so that capacity and project figures are realistic. A forecast always needs a resource: saving one without a resource is refused with "A forecast books someone's time: choose the employee or material." A forecast is never published or emailed, can never be taken by an employee, and never counts as a conflict.

Allocated time#

Allocated time is the number you plan against. It is computed in three steps:

1. Working hours are the hours of the shift that fall inside the resource's working calendar, after approved time off and public holidays. (For an open shift the company calendar is used.)
2. Allocated Time % (100 by default) takes a share of those working hours.
3. The Break is subtracted. The result never goes below zero.

If none of the shift is inside working time, the shift's clock duration is used instead. This is how a night shift planned for a day worker still counts as real hours.

Worked examples, for a resource who works Monday to Friday, 08:00-12:00 and 13:00-17:00:

You can edit Allocated Time instead of the percentage. Planning then changes the percentage so that both agree: asking for 6:00 on the first shift above, with no break, sets the percentage to 75. With a 30-minute break it sets 81.25, because the break is added back before dividing by the working hours.

Cost is allocated time multiplied by the Hourly Cost of the role. Only planners see it. A shift with no role costs nothing.

Draft, published and "to publish again"#

Every shift is a Draft or Published. Employees see only published shifts. Publishing also emails the employee (if they have an email address), and a newly published open shift can be broadcast to qualified people.

If you change a published shift's person, start, end, allocated time, percentage, role or break, the shift keeps its Published state but is flagged To Publish Again: its form shows "This shift changed after it was published. Publish it again so the employee sees the update." Publishing again clears the flag and notifies the employee. Changing only the note does not set the flag.

A forecast is always a draft in effect: it is skipped by every publish action.

If your company turns on Approve changes to published shifts, a change to a published shift by someone who is not a Planning Administrator also puts the shift into Waiting for Approval. A waiting shift is skipped when publishing until the shift manager approves it. See Approve changes to published shifts.

[planning-shift-status]

Conflicts, wrong roles and other warnings#

Planning warns; it does not forbid.

• Conflict: the same resource has another shift (not a forecast) overlapping in time. The shift shows a red marker, an alert on its form, and counts under the Conflicts filter.
• Wrong role: the resource does not hold the shift's role. You can still publish; the message says to assign someone who holds the role or add the role to them.
• To publish again, Waiting for approval and Switch requested flags, described on Resolve shift warnings.
• Bridge modules add On Time Off, Outside Contract and Missing Skill (with the matching bridge installed).

When an employee takes a shift, the rules are stricter than a planner's: a wrong role, an existing shift at the same time, a missing skill or a contract gap stops them. Time off only warns, because the employee knows best whether they can work.

Templates and recurrence#

A shift template saves a start hour, a length (which may run past midnight), a role, a break and a note. Choosing a template on a shift fills those in. Its generated name shows the hours, a "(+1d)" when it ends on a later day, and the role, for example 15:00 - 23:00 Waiter.

A shift can repeat: every n days, weeks, months or years, forever, until a date, or a number of times. Planning creates the copies up to the company's Recurring Shift Horizon (6 months by default) and a daily scheduled action keeps open-ended repetitions topped up. Times are kept on the same local clock hour across daylight-saving changes. When you change one occurrence you choose whether the change applies to This shift, This and following shifts or All shifts.

Workload and utilisation#

For every resource and day, Planning knows three figures:

• Available: working hours from the calendar, after time off, public holidays and (with the Contracts bridge) time outside contracts.
• Allocated: allocated time of shifts that day. A shift that crosses midnight is split between the days in proportion to the working time on each.
• Forecast: forecast hours, reduced by shifts that cover the same work on the same day, so the same work is not counted twice. With the Project bridge, "the same work" means the same project.

Utilisation is (allocated + forecast) divided by available. The schedule shows it as a dot and a figure beside each name, such as 20 / 44 h, and as a thin bar under each day. The utilisation table adds a Load Level:

The two limits are company settings, Busy From (%) (default 80) and Overloaded Above (%) (default 100). If you set the second limit below 100, nobody can be Fully booked, because anything above the limit is already Overloaded. With no available hours, planned hours make the person Overloaded and no planned hours make them Spare capacity. The schedule's own dots use the same limits but have no "Fully booked" step: grey is spare capacity, green is busy, yellow is overloaded, and red means the person has a conflict.

[planning-load-level-status]

Time zones#

Planning stores times in UTC and shows them in your time zone. Templates, recurrence and Plan with Template use the resource's time zone, so "08:00" means 08:00 where the person works, even across a daylight-saving change. Weeks on the dashboard, the default period of the planning wizards and the printed rota follow your time zone, so set Timezone in your user preferences.

What happens in the week, in one picture#

The main process, from an empty week to a published rota, is drawn on the Quick start. The open-shift and switch processes are drawn on Take an open shift and Give up or swap a shift.