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Recurring shifts

A weekly pattern saved once that the system applies to every future occurrence — “Marco does Kitchen, Mon–Fri 6 PM to 11 PM, every week”. The Templates tab is where you define and edit these patterns.

What it does

Most staff work the same days every week. Re-entering “Marco, Monday, 6 PM to 11 PM” 52 times a year is a waste; getting it slightly wrong on one of those weeks is worse. Recurring shifts let you say it once and have the system fill it in everywhere — past, present, and future — until you change the pattern.

The Week tab then renders these patterns as shifts on every matching day, automatically. The manager doesn’t see a “template entry” on the planning grid; they see the actual shifts. The only visible difference between a recurring shift and a one-off is a dashed border and a small “Template” tag.

When the manager edits a single occurrence on the Week tab (say Marco swaps Tuesday for Wednesday this week), the recurring pattern stays untouched — only that one date gets an exception. So the pattern is the normal week; the Week tab is for the exceptions.

How to use it

Open Settings → Roster and tap the Templates tab.

Adding a new recurring shift

  1. Tap + Add template at the top right of the page.
  2. Pick the employee (the dropdown lists every active staff member at this venue).
  3. Pick the day of week (Monday through Sunday).
  4. Set the start and end times. If the shift crosses midnight, tick End time is the next day (overnight shift).
  5. Tap one or more departments — Kitchen, Dining Room, Bar, etc. At least one is required.
  6. Optionally add a note (“mid-shift break 8 PM to 8:30 PM”).
  7. Tap Save.

The pattern appears immediately. From that moment on, every Monday (or whichever day) of every week — past and future — will show this shift on the Week grid for that staff member.

Editing a recurring shift

In the Templates list, find the row for the pattern you want to change. Tap Edit. Change the day, hours, departments, or notes, then save.

The change applies to all future occurrences. If you’d already created exceptions on specific dates (via the Week tab), those exceptions stay as they are — they were saved as date-specific overrides and ignore later edits to the underlying pattern.

Archiving a recurring shift

When a staff member changes their schedule (different days), or leaves, you can archive the pattern.

In the Templates list, tap Archive on the row.

The pattern stops generating shifts from that moment on. Past dates — already-shown shifts on the Week grid — disappear from the planning grid too, since the pattern that produced them is gone. (Any one-off exceptions you’d created on specific dates remain, because they’re independent records.)

To bring it back, archived templates can be restored from the same list.

One pattern per slot

The system allows multiple patterns for the same staff member — for instance “Mon 6 PM to 11 PM Kitchen” and “Sat 11 AM to 3 PM Dining Room” as two separate rows. They don’t conflict; both will appear on the Week grid on their respective days.

What you can’t have is two patterns on the same day for the same person at overlapping times. The system doesn’t actively block it, but the grid will show both shifts stacked, which is usually a sign of a mistake.

What happens behind the scenes

A recurring shift is stored as a rule, not as 52 weekly copies. The Week tab renders it on the fly: when it loads a week, it checks every active rule and computes which days fall on the rule’s day-of-week. Each computed shift appears as a dashed-border card on the grid.

Because nothing is pre-generated, changing a rule (or archiving it) instantly changes every future week — no “rebuild the schedule” button, no waiting.

The first time the manager edits a single occurrence on the Week grid, the system writes a separate, date-specific record. From that point on, the grid prefers the date-specific record over the pattern for that one date, and ignores the pattern for that date when computing the week.

If the manager later cancels a single occurrence, the same mechanism applies: a date-specific “cancelled” marker is written, and the pattern stops showing on that one date. The pattern itself is not touched — every other week stays on schedule.

Saving and editing patterns are immediate: the next time anyone in the venue refreshes the Week tab, the change is there.

Examples

🍕 The standard chef Marco is the head pizza chef. The manager opens the Templates tab, taps + Add template, picks Marco, Monday, 18:00–23:00, ticks Kitchen, saves. Then repeats for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Five rows in the Templates list. From this point on, every Mon–Fri evening on the Week grid shows Marco’s shift in red, with no further input from the manager.

🍽️ The split-shift waiter Sara works the lunch service Mon–Fri 11 AM to 3 PM, plus Sunday brunch 9 AM to 1 PM. The manager creates two patterns: one for “Monday 11 AM to 3 PM, Dining Room” (and clones it for Tue–Fri), one for “Sunday 9 AM to 1 PM, Dining Room”. Six rows total. Sara’s Saturdays stay empty.

🌙 The overnight bartender Luca closes the bar Saturdays 8 PM to 2 AM. The manager creates a pattern for Saturday 20:00–02:00, ticks End time is the next day (overnight shift), picks Bar, saves. The Week grid on Saturday shows the shift starting at 20:00 and the time bleeds into Sunday early morning naturally — the Coverage view will correctly count Luca as present on Saturday’s service day at 1 AM.

⚠️ Edge case — long-archived pattern Three months ago Marco was on Mon–Fri evening Kitchen. Two months ago he switched to Tue–Sat day Kitchen (manager updated the patterns). Now the manager scrolls back to a Monday from three months ago. The grid shows Marco’s old shift correctly because that pattern was active at that time, then archived. Wait — actually, archiving removes the pattern entirely, so a back-scroll to last-month wouldn’t show the old shift. If you need to preserve historical accuracy, edit the pattern’s effective dates rather than archiving (this is a future feature; today, archive is the only option).

  • Weekly schedule — where the recurring shifts appear on the planning grid.
  • Departments — needed first; you can’t create a recurring shift without picking at least one department.
  • Coverage view — sums recurring + one-off shifts to show how thick each department is staffed.