Shift planning

Shift Plan is where a manager builds the restaurant’s schedule: deciding how many people are needed for each role and time of day, then assigning specific employees to fill those needs. This guide covers the single-day view, the week view, and the planning-period workflow that sits behind both of them.

You’ll find Shift Plan under People in the left-hand navigation. From its monthly calendar you can open any single day, or switch to a week-at-a-time grid.

The two schedule views

• Day view (click any date on the calendar) shows one day as a timeline, with hours running left to right. It’s the best place for fine-grained work: dragging shift blocks to exact times, and comparing “who’s needed” against “who’s available” at a glance.
• Week view (Shift Plan → range, or “Plan shifts → Single week”) shows a Monday-to-Sunday grid, one row per department and one column per day. It’s the best place for a wide view of the whole week and for quickly opening any day’s or department’s shifts.

Both views show the same underlying data and both let a manager add staffing needs, assign employees, and remove shifts - they just present it differently. Anything you do in one is immediately visible in the other.

Adding a role requirement (a staffing need)

A “role requirement” is how you tell Shift Plan a shift needs to be filled - for example, “2 servers, 5pm to 11pm” - before you’ve decided who will actually work it.

From the day view

1. Open the day you want to staff.
2. Click Add Role Requirement above the “Roles Needed” section (or use the small + button next to a department’s name in the timeline - see Quick-adding a shift for a department below).
3. In the form, choose:
   • Department - optional, just narrows the Job Role dropdown to that department’s roles.
   • Job Role - the specific role needed (e.g. “Server”, “Line Cook”), or leave it as “No specific role” for an open slot any employee can fill.
   • Count - how many people are needed for this role at this time.
   • Start and End time.
4. Click Add Role Requirement to save it.

The new staffing need appears both as a card in the “Roles Needed” list and as a block on the day’s timeline. A brief toast confirms it was added and lets you undo it for a few seconds.

From the week view

1. Click the + in the header of the day column you want to add to, or the + next to a department’s row label.
2. The same Add Role Requirement form opens, pre-filled with that date (and department, if you clicked a department row).
3. Fill in the role, count, and times, then save.

Editing or deleting a staffing need

• Day view: turn on Edit mode (the pencil icon, top right) to reveal a delete button on each requirement card, and resize handles on its timeline block (see below). Deleting shows an undo toast for a few seconds before it’s actually removed.
• Week view: click any shift block to open its Edit shift popup (see the next section), where you can change its role, headcount, and times, or delete it. The small inline delete/remove icons on each card only appear in edit mode; clicking the block to open the full popup works regardless of edit mode.

Assigning an employee to a shift

Once a role requirement exists, you fill it by assigning employees to it. There are three ways to do this, depending on the view.

Day view: the dropdown

Under each “Roles Needed” card that still has open spots, there’s a Select employee… dropdown and an Assign button. The dropdown groups employees into:

• Recommended (marked with a star) - employees who hold the exact job role and have submitted availability that covers the whole shift.
• The role’s department - employees who hold some role in the same department, even if they haven’t submitted matching availability.
• All employees - everyone else.

Pick a name and click Assign.

Day view: drag and drop

Below the “Shift blocks” timeline, employees who’ve submitted availability for that day appear as their own row, positioned at the times they said they’re free. Anyone recommended for an open role is marked with a star (★) next to their name and highlighted with a gold left border on their availability block.

Drag an employee’s availability block onto an open role’s block on the timeline above to assign them. By default, once someone’s assigned to any shift that day their availability row disappears from view (assuming one role per person per day); toggle One role / Multiple roles near the top of the timeline if you want people to stay visible so you can drag them onto a second shift the same day.

Week view: the Edit shift popup

Click any shift block in the week grid - filled or unfilled - to open its Edit shift popup. It shows:

• A fill-status badge (e.g. “1/2 filled”), the time range, and total shift duration.
• Editable department, job role, headcount, and start/end time fields (for staffing-need-backed shifts).
• A searchable employee list on the right, grouped into Assigned, the role’s own department, and Other employees.

Type in the search box to filter the list, then click any employee’s row to assign them. Clicking someone who’s already assigned removes them instead. There’s no separate “Assign” button - the click does it immediately, with an undo toast afterward.

Ad-hoc shifts that aren’t tied to a staffing need (for example, ones created by department quick-add - see below) open a lighter version of this popup instead: just who’s currently working it and a list to reassign to someone else, since there’s no role or headcount to edit.

Understanding the colored dots

In the week view’s Edit shift popup, every employee in the sidebar list has a small colored dot on their avatar:

• Green - they submitted availability that covers this shift’s time window.
• Red - they didn’t (either they marked themselves unavailable, or never responded).
• Grey - they’re full-time. Full-time employees follow a fixed default weekly schedule rather than submitting availability each period, so they’re never judged against availability data - grey just means “not applicable.”

The day view uses the same idea in a simpler form: a star (★) next to an employee’s name in the Available row means they’re recommended - they hold the matching job role and their availability covers an open shift.

Assignment mismatch warnings

If you click on (or drag) an employee who doesn’t match a shift’s requirements, you may be asked to confirm before the assignment goes through. There are two independent checks:

• Skill mismatch - the employee doesn’t hold the job role the shift needs.
• Availability mismatch - the assignment falls outside the employee’s submitted availability.

When either check is triggered, an “Assign anyway?” popup lists the specific reason(s) before you can confirm. Whether these checks run at all is controlled per restaurant - see Shift Plan settings below. Separately, if an assignment overlaps a shift the employee already has that day, or falls on a day they have approved leave, the assignment still goes through but you’ll see a warning banner afterward.

Resizing a shift block (day view)

On the day view’s timeline, an unfilled staffing need’s block can be resized directly:

1. Turn on Edit mode.
2. Hover the left or right edge of an unfilled block until you see the resize cursor.
3. Drag the edge to a new time. The block snaps to 15-minute increments, and the time label on the block updates live as you drag.
4. Release to save the new time. An undo toast appears for a few seconds.

Resize handles only appear on blocks with nobody assigned yet - once at least one person is on a shift, remove them first if you need to change its time. In the week view, editing a shift’s time instead happens through the Edit shift popup’s start/end time fields, since week-view cards are fixed size rather than a draggable timeline.

What “Edit mode” toggles

Both the day view and the week view have an Edit mode toggle (the pencil icon near the top of the page, off by default). Turning it on reveals the occasional destructive or fine-tuning actions that would otherwise clutter the normal browsing view:

• Delete buttons on role-requirement cards and blocks.
• Remove buttons next to each assigned employee’s name.
• Resize handles on unfilled day-view timeline blocks.

Edit mode does not gate the ability to click a shift block to open its Edit/assign popup in the week view, or to use the assign dropdown/drag-and-drop in the day view - those work at all times for anyone who can manage the schedule.

Deleting and undoing changes

Deleting a role requirement, removing an assigned employee, or resizing a block doesn’t happen immediately - it shows a toast at the bottom of the screen with an Undo option for a few seconds first. If you don’t click Undo, the change is committed once the toast disappears. This also works with Ctrl+Z right after making the change. Assigning, adding a requirement, editing a requirement’s details, and reassigning an ad-hoc shift are all undoable the same way - the toast just reverses the action if you click Undo.

Shift Plan settings: the two warning toggles

Managers who can open planning periods also see a gear icon near the top of the main Shift Plan calendar page. Clicking it opens Shift plan settings, with two independent toggles:

• Warn on skill mismatch - “Ask for confirmation before assigning someone who isn’t skilled for that role.”
• Warn on availability mismatch - “Ask for confirmation before assigning someone outside their submitted availability.”

Each toggle applies restaurant-wide and takes effect immediately - it decides whether the “Assign anyway?” confirmation described above appears at all. Turning a toggle off lets managers assign freely without a pause; turning it on adds a safety check before an unskilled or out-of-availability assignment is confirmed. Both default to on.

Opening a new planning period

Before employees can submit their availability for a date range, a manager needs to open a planning period for it.

1. On the main Shift Plan page, click + Open planning period.
2. Choose a start and end date for the period.
3. Submit the form.

Opening a period does two things:

• It lets employees submit their availability for any date inside that range (from their own shift/availability screen).
• It automatically pre-fills availability for every employee who has a standard default weekly schedule set on their profile - so nobody has to start from a completely blank slate. For each day inside the new period, if an employee’s default schedule says they normally work that day of the week, a matching availability entry (including split-shift blocks, if their default schedule has more than one block a day) is created for them automatically. Employees can still adjust it from there if their availability for that particular week is different from usual.

Only one planning period can be open per branch at a time - you’ll need to close the current one before opening another. A chip near the top of the page shows the currently open period’s date range; click Close planning to close it. A closed period can be reopened later if needed, which doesn’t touch any shifts that were already scheduled for its dates.

After closing a period, if you haven’t yet built out its schedule, a “Plan last opened week” shortcut appears to jump straight into scheduling those dates.

Quick-adding a shift for a department

On the day view’s timeline, every department heading has a small + button next to its name. Clicking it opens the same Add Role Requirement form used everywhere else, except the Department field is already set to that department - so you can add a staffing need for, say, the Kitchen department without first picking it from the dropdown. This is the fastest way to add a shift when you already know which department needs it; you still choose the specific job role, headcount, and time inside the form.

The week view has the equivalent + button on each department’s row, which opens the same pre-filled form for that day and department.

Copying a schedule

Rather than rebuilding a similar day from scratch, you can copy one day’s whole schedule - its role requirements and any shifts already assigned to them - onto another date.

1. From the day view, click Copy Schedule near the top of the page.
2. Choose the date to copy to.
3. Choose whether this is a single day copy, or a repeating copy - if repeating, set how many occurrences and the interval in days between them (e.g. every 7 days, 4 times, to fill in the next four weeks).
4. Click Copy Schedule.

Copying skips anything that already exists on the destination date with the same role, start time, and end time, so re-running a copy won’t create duplicates. A summary banner reports how many days, staffing needs, and shifts were copied, plus how many were skipped as already present.