Cover a call-out

Someone cannot make their shift. You need it covered in the next twenty minutes, and you need the schedule to still be true afterwards.

Reassign it, or open it up

1. Open Schedule, find the shift, and open it.
2. Either assign it to a different employee, or tick Open shift (no employee assigned) to take it off the person who called out.
3. Save, then publish the change.

Reassigning notifies the employee who gained the shift. Making a shift open sends no notification — there is no “shift available” broadcast to everyone eligible. Open shifts appear for store members when they next look at the schedule, so if you need cover in the next twenty minutes, ask someone directly and assign it to them. Opening the shift is the slower, passive option, not the fast one.

A claim is a request, not a booking

When someone claims an open shift, that is a request for you to approve. The shift is not theirs until you approve it, so until then treat it as still uncovered.

“Find cover” is the employee’s tool, not yours

If your store has shift trading turned on, employees see Find cover on their own upcoming shifts, which posts the shift to the trade pool for coworkers to pick up. It sits on the employee’s side of the app and only ever applies to their own shifts — it is not the manager’s route for covering a call-out.

Keep the record straight

Do not delete the shift and rebuild it. Reassigning keeps the history of who was originally scheduled and who ended up working, which is what you want when you look back at a pattern of call-outs a month later.

If nobody covers it and you decide the shift will not run, cancel it — do not delete it. A published shift is never deleted; cancelling keeps it in the week’s history marked as cancelled, so you can still see later that it was scheduled and why it did not happen. (Deleting is only available for shifts that are still in draft, before the week is published.)

If the shift simply passes with nobody working it, leave it alone — with no punch against it, it is recorded as a no-show, which is the accurate account of what happened.

After the shift

Nothing about a call-out changes anyone’s pay by itself; pay follows the punches. Check that the person who covered actually clocked in, and that the person who called out has no stray punch on the day — see Fix a missed punch.