The Schedule builder

Schedules → Builder opens the builder on the current week; the ‹ › arrows step to any week. Everything autosaves as you work — there is no save button.

Anatomy of a day card

• Event lanes (top) — events are demand markers: a party or class that makes the day busier, with no staffing number of its own. ＋ add lane stacks concurrent events.
• Shift lanes — the actual work shifts. Double-tap an empty spot to create a shift; drag its edges to resize. ＋ add lane adds parallel lanes — a shift bar holds one person, so multi-person coverage is parallel shifts in separate lanes.
• The availability band — everyone available that day, colour-coded by what they painted. Each name is a draggable chip (it carries a grip on the left): drag a name onto a shift to assign it. People with no painted hours that day are hidden (show all reveals everyone). The band keeps itself current: if staff paint availability while you have the builder open, it appears on its own within about half a minute — an "Availability updated" note confirms the change. No reload needed.
• Click a shift to edit it: a note, required roles, Duplicate, Unassign, Delete.
• Clear day / Unassign day — start the day over, or keep its shifts and clear the names.

The how-to tip

A 💡 tip above the day cards spells out the three gestures: double-click an empty spot on a lane to create a shift, drag its edges to resize, and drag a name from the availability list onto a shift to assign. It stays until you dismiss it with its ✕ — including on a published week, where the read-only note sits alongside it.

Dismissing it is a fact about you, not about the browser you happened to use, so it follows you between your laptop and your phone and does not hide the tip from anyone else sharing a back-office computer. If you dismiss it by mistake, Settings → Builder → Show it again brings it back.

Warnings — never blocks

The builder always lets you decide; it just makes sure you know:

• Red outline — the person is unavailable then, or on approved time off.
• Amber outline — the hours include time they painted Dislike.
• Assigning the same person to overlapping shifts is flagged when you publish.

A shift that requires a role (opener, closer, …) can only be filled by someone who holds that role — that's the one hard rule, and it applies on the tradeboard too.

Week totals and the staff message

Week totals lists every staff member's shifts and hours this week beside last week's — balance workloads at a glance. The Staff message box is a note included in the publish email.

On a small screen

The day card's timeline fits the window: narrow the browser and the grid narrows with it, so a whole day stays visible. Below a point it stops shrinking — squeezing further would make the bars too small to grab — and the card scrolls sideways instead. On a phone that means portrait scrolls and landscape usually does not, so turn the phone for schedule building.

Pro tools: ✨ Assignment assist drafts the week for you; ▤ Templates save and recall whole layouts. When you're happy: publish.