Publish and edit shifts

Publishing is the line between a draft you are still thinking about and a schedule your team is planning their week around.

What publishing does

When you publish a week:

• Every assigned employee sees their shifts in the app.
• Employees are notified of the shifts that are theirs — not of the whole schedule.
• Open shifts become visible to everyone at that store. If a shift is tagged with a job role, the role decides who can claim it, not who can see it.

Nothing you do before publishing is visible to the team, so build the week however you like — copy last week, delete half of it, start over.

Editing after publishing

You can edit a published week. Each change notifies only the people it affects:

• Changing a time notifies the assigned employee.
• Reassigning a shift notifies the person who gained it. The person who lost it is not notified — reassignment is silent on their side, so tell them yourself.
• Cancelling a shift notifies the person who had it. This is the one edit that reaches the previous holder. Published shifts are cancelled rather than deleted, so the week keeps a record of what was scheduled — see Cover a call-out.

Because most edits send a notification, batch your changes rather than nudging a start time five minutes at a time.

Late-week changes

Once a shift has started, editing it stops being a scheduling question and becomes a timecard question — what someone was scheduled for and what they actually worked are tracked separately, and payroll pays the second one. If someone stays late, leave the schedule alone and let the punch record it. See Approve timecards.

Shifts nobody picked up

Open shifts left unassigned at the start of the week are the ones that turn into a scramble on the day. Check them on your last pass before publishing, and again mid-week. When someone calls out, see Cover a call-out.