Monthly scheduling for leadership

When your organization has monthly scheduling turned on, the platform requests next month’s availability and prepares a draft on your configured run day.

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Organization Admins can change Auto-scheduling settings. Oversight can view those settings without editing them. Both roles can manage member restrictions, record unavailable dates for members, and review and publish drafts.

Set the monthly cycle

Open Settings → Scheduling → Auto-scheduling (/admin/settings/scheduling/auto-scheduling).

Choose the days

Set Request day, Follow-up day, and Run day, in that order, using days from 1 through 28. The automatic cycle uses your organization’s local calendar.

Select services

Under Auto-scheduled services, select the services to include. Selected services must use LEADERS_ONLY self-claim mode before automatic scheduling can be enabled.

Check the posts needed

Slot demand (read-only) shows each service’s required posts and counts. Change those requirements on Settings → Scheduling → Services, not on this page.

Set rules and save

Choose a Rule type, select Add rule, fill in its fields, and choose Rule strength. Select Save settings to save the configuration. Use Enable automatic scheduling when your ministry is ready to start the cycle.

The available rule types are Max shifts per day, Max shifts per month, Min shifts per month, No consecutive weeks, Even distribution, and Prefer member tag.

Use Must (blocking) for blocking rules and Try (flagged) for soft findings. Minimum monthly counts can still produce a soft finding when restrictions prevent a member from serving or the draft meets the achievable minimum across the pool; read the finding before changing assignments. Prose rules are best effort, not guaranteed checks. Typed rules take precedence over prose, and prose takes precedence over preferences.

Run the schedule now

To prepare a draft before your run day, open Settings → Scheduling → Auto-scheduling, choose the current or next month under Month, and select Run now for [month]. Only Organization Admins see this control. It works even when Enable automatic scheduling is off and does not change that setting.

When the run starts, the page shows a View draft link to the new draft. If you run a month that already has a draft, the link may not appear; open the draft from the draft-ready email instead.

Set member restrictions

Open the member’s profile from Roster (/roster/[memberId]) and find Scheduling restrictions. This card is visible to leadership only.

Include in the scheduling pool controls participation in availability requests and automatic scheduling.
Allowed services limits the services a member can serve; selecting none means any service.
Posts to exclude excludes the selected posts from automatic scheduling for that member.
Preference tags records tags used by preference rules.
Other restrictions (shown to the scheduler, applied by a person) is a note for human review, not an automatic check.

Select Save after making changes.

Record unavailable dates or send requests

Open Settings → Scheduling → Unavailability (/admin/settings/scheduling/unavailability). Turn on member unavailability to use declarations and availability requests.

Set Minimum advance notice (hours) and select Save notice to set how close to upcoming duty a declaration may remove a member. Setting it to zero allows same-day declarations.

In Declare on behalf of a member, choose a Member, enter Unavailable from and Through in your organization’s time zone, and select Declare unavailability. The same minimum notice rule applies. Overlapping future duty is removed and the member receives a notice; duty already started is left alone. Use My Availability for your own dates.

In Availability requests, choose a Month, then select Send availability request or Send follow-up. These requests target pool members who have neither declared dates off for that month nor responded that they are available all month.

Review the draft

Open Review the draft in the draft-ready email. It takes you to that draft’s page under /schedule/drafts/[id].

Review Findings, the Schedule grid, and Shifts per member, including restrictions and the full month’s totals.

For an editable slot, choose Replace with, then Replace member, or select Leave slot open to remove its proposed member. Edits re-check the draft against the rules; a replacement that introduces a blocking eligibility, availability, restriction, or rule violation is refused. Already published slots cannot be edited in the draft.

Resolve blocking findings before publishing. For each flagged member, enter a reason under Reasons for flagged members and select Save reason; the page shows the required length. One reason covers that member’s flagged slots.

Publish and handle a partial result

Select Publish schedule, read the confirmation, then select Publish now. Publishing creates assignments on the live schedule and re-checks current conditions.

If publishing stops partway through, assignments already saved remain on the live schedule. Read Skipped slots and Unpublished slots: a slot may have been removed, taken by someone else, or no longer be open.

Resolve the remaining slots and select Publish schedule again to retry, or select Finish publish and confirm Finish now to complete the draft with the live schedule as it stands. Finish does not fill the remaining slots. Member notices wait until publishing completes or is finished.

Saved skips keep the same date, service, post, and proposed member after you reload. If you free a slot and successfully publish it on retry, its skip disappears after reload. Unresolved skips remain visible after Finish publish. Recheck the live schedule after retrying or finishing.

If the underlying slot was deleted, the skip shows Removed slot and the proposed member. Skips saved before this update may still show A slot or A slot on [date]. Filling a slot by hand with the proposed member does not by itself clear its skip.

Changes after publishing

Use the live schedule for later manual assignments, floating support, and swaps. These manual changes respect active unavailability when member unavailability is turned on; they remain leadership overrides of automatic scheduling rules.

Daylight Saving Time and clock changes

When scheduling or editing events around Daylight Saving Time transitions, be aware of how the platform handles clock changes in your organization’s local time zone:

Autumn clock change (repeated hour): On the night the clock turns back in autumn (for example, 1:00 AM to 1:59 AM in US time zones), that hour occurs twice on the clock. Because a wall-clock time in this window is ambiguous, the event creation and edit forms reject times within this hour with an “Invalid date or time” error. To schedule an event during this night, choose a start and end time outside the repeated hour (such as before 1:00 AM, or 2:00 AM and later).
Spring clock change (skipped hour): In the spring when the clock jumps forward one hour (such as 2:00 AM to 2:59 AM), times in that hour do not exist on the local clock. The form will also reject these times with “Invalid date or time”. Schedule the event before 2:00 AM or at 3:00 AM and later.
Editing existing events: An event created before a transition that already falls within a repeated or skipped hour cannot be re-saved from the edit dialog until you change its start and end times to valid local times outside that hour.
Overnight shifts across clock changes: When editing an existing overnight event that crosses a clock change, the platform derives the next-day end date correctly and accounts for the clock shift in the elapsed duration, unless the start or end time falls inside the repeated or skipped hour.