Welcome to the Rotageek Scheduler page! This is where the magic happens - it's the main page from which you'll draft and publish upcoming rotas, and one of the main places you'll make amendments as people swap shifts or go 'absent', or a gap needs covering.
Getting Started
The screenshot below is (more or less) what you'll see on your own account when you log in and navigate to the "Scheduler" section. It will probably open showing the rota for a particular week for your 'main' or home Location.
You'll see days across the top (one week at a time), and people’s names down the side (those who work in your Location or the Location you have selected). What goes in each box is the shift that person will work on that day.
From this page:
You can build schedules in draft and then Approve them to notify team-members.
You can use a variety of tools to build schedules, including copying/pasting, applying templates, and “Autoscheduling” based on rules and data.
You can view multiple Locations and you can staff people from other locations into the rota you’re working on and vice-versa.
There are various “totals” and alerts around the page to help you make sure you’re spending the right amount of hours, covering your gaps, and staffing your team-members legally and fairly.
The Schedule itself
Each 'box' at the intersection of a person and a day, in the main middle-area of the page, shows the shift that person is going to work that day. An empty box means no shift, or a rest day. (Before you've started building your rota, most boxes will be empty - "most", because Annual Leave you may have already approved some time ago via Leave Requests will already show here). A box with a shift in will show a start-time and an end-time, and possibly certain other information about where and what is to be worked.
You can click on an empty box to add a new shift. You can "Edit" (or Move, or Copy, or Delete) a shift you've already added. You can find fuller details on how to add and edit shifts for your team in this section.
Employee details
Under each employee's name on the left, you'll see a little summary of the key details for that person, that might help you make decisions about how best to schedule them. They will reflect the details either imported from the HR system or entered by you on the People page. If you've entered a Weekly Work Pattern (or any other Availability) for this person, that will also show across the row for this person on the relevant days.
One of the key details we show for each person is their Contracted and "Max" (maximum weekly) hours, and as you add shifts for this person, you'll see this panel count up their weekly hours and compare this to those limits (traffic-light colours will tell you if you've assigned too many or too few).
Gaps row
Most of the time, the shifts you're adding are directly to a person's row - that's the shift this person will work (on that day). But sometimes, you've identified work (a shift) that needs doing, but don't yet know who's best to do it, and you want to 'park' that shift somewhere, to assign later. That's what the Gaps row is in Rotageek. Gaps usually arise as a result of a shift previously scheduled for a person but that person is now absent/ unable to work it ("move to Gaps"), but can be created directly or arise in other ways too.
You can read more about how to use the Gaps row, and Gaps in general, here.
Totals and summaries
At the top and bottom of the page you'll find other 'running totals' and useful widgets to help you keep track of the schedule you're in the process of building.
Each day of the week shows a summary of the number of hours scheduled (and if known, how that compares to the ideal 'target' number), also viewable in Cost or in Heads by accessing the selector.
You can open up the Demand Graph to see a detailed view of each hour of the day (each day becomes a 'tab' to allow you to navigate through the whole week), in terms of number of people on-shift (again versus target, if known).
The Costs/Hours/Net Cover bar at the bottom of the page summarises the whole week for this Location, possibly comparing it to the Budget set for your Location by Head Office.
You can learn more about how these features work and how you can make best use of them in your scheduling here.
Navigating
You can open up the panel on the left-hand-side by clicking on the "Menu" button. This panel allows you to open the rotas of other Locations that you may have access to (as well as the one you yourself work at), and to filter your view of the rota by Task or by Position (which can be useful if you want to see only the Management or only the people scheduled to work Back-Of-House this week, for example).
You can navigate to other weeks' rotas by using the date-picker next to the Menu button.
Apart from adding/editing shifts in the main middle-area of this page, most of the actions you will take are via the buttons top-right of the page. Accessing the various settings and features under the Tools menu, running the Autoscheduler, and Approving the latest version of this rota, are all done from here.
That's your overview! Follow the links in the various sections above for more detail on the particular area or action you want to know more about.