How to manage shift profiles

How to manage shift profiles#

For: Manager | Admin You’ll need: Nothing beyond access to the planning pages.

A shift profile is one shift shape with a name: “Early, 06:00, 8 hours”. It carries no people and no dates. Its only job is to tell shift generation which shapes it may create.

Keep a catalog and generated weeks look like the ones you write by hand. Keep none and generation works out its own shapes from your work policy instead.

Note

A profile is not a schedule template. A template is a set of concrete shifts, often with named people, that you stamp onto a week. A profile is a shape that may or may not get used and never carries a person.

Create a profile#

  1. Go to Planning → Management → Shift profiles.

  2. Click ‘Create’.

  3. Give it a ‘Name’ — Early, Mid, Close.

  4. Set ‘Start time’ — local time at the location.

  5. Set ‘Length (hours)’ — 8 or 7.5. It must sit inside your work policy’s minimum and maximum shift length.

  6. Optionally scope it: ‘Location’, ‘Area’, and ‘Position’ each apply to everything when left empty.

  7. Tick the weekdays this shape runs on.

  8. Click ‘Save’.

Start from a schedule template#

If you have already drawn your shifts on a schedule template, you don’t need to retype them.

  1. On the profile list, click ‘Import from template’.

  2. Pick the template in the ‘Import from schedule template’ dialog.

  3. Click ‘Import’.

The distinct shapes on that template become profiles. Review them afterwards — a template often contains near-duplicates you’d rather merge.

Name the crew you’d rather have#

‘Preferred people’ on a profile lets automatic assignment favor particular people for shifts of that shape — the people who always work the close. It is a preference, never a requirement: if none of them can work it, somebody else gets it.

Retire a profile#

Clear the ‘Active’ checkbox. Inactive profiles stop being offered to generation but stay in the list, so a seasonal shape can come back without being retyped.

Verify it worked#

The profile appears in the list with an ‘Active’ badge. On the next generation preview, the ‘Profile’ column names it against the shifts it produced.