Schedule

The Schedule page (/schedule) is the central surface for shift planning, amendment, and approval. It's organised into seven tabs.

Periods

A schedule period is a named block of dates with a timezone. Periods move through draft → published → archived. The list shows status, date range, timezone, and a publish action for drafts. Once published, a period is what employees see on their schedule and what acknowledgements track against.

Swaps

Employees request shift trades; supervisors approve or reject. Each swap shows the requester, the partner, the affected shifts, and an optional reason code. Approval is single-step and audited.

Exceptions

The Exceptions tab tracks deviations from the published schedule — absences, late starts, overtime, manual overrides. Each exception has a reason code, a multi-stage approval state, and a detail drawer for review notes. Auto-exception rules can pre-populate the queue for system-detected events (see Settings → Exception rules).

Availability

Employees declare weekly time preferences (recurring availability windows) and submit blackout date requests. Supervisors approve. The optimiser reads availability when generating drafts.

Acknowledgements

After a period publishes, employees acknowledge their shifts. The Acknowledgements tab shows who has and hasn't acknowledged per period — used for compliance follow-up.

Shift patterns

Reusable shift templates with day-of-week bitmasks. A pattern names the shift, sets start/end times, and toggles which days it applies to. Patterns get reused when building period drafts so common shapes (e.g., "M–F 9–5", "weekend nights") don't have to be redrawn each time.

Drafts

The Drafts tab shows the output of the schedule optimiser. Each draft includes:

• Fitness score — the optimiser's overall quality measure
• Coverage % — share of forecast demand met by the draft
• Compliance violations — count of labour-rule violations (max hours, rest, etc.)
• Availability conflicts — shifts assigned to unavailable employees
• Contract hours deviation — over/under guaranteed weekly hours
• Unassigned agents — employees with no shifts in the draft

Actions: Promote turns a draft into a published period; Discard removes it. Multiple drafts per period let analysts try alternative configurations side by side.

Approval gating

Action	Who can do it
Publish a period	WFM analyst / scheduler
Approve / reject swap	Supervisor or team lead of either party
Approve exception	Supervisor (own team), then HR for some reason codes
Approve availability change	Supervisor