Shift Planning

Caution

Beta: shift planning is still in its beta phase — features and workflows may change between releases. Check a roster before you publish it and report anything that looks wrong.

Shift planning lets admins and managers build weekly rosters from reusable shift templates, publish them to employees, and handle day-to-day changes through shift swaps — with German working-time law (ArbZG) checks built in. It is opt-in: a tenant must have it enabled, and only users on the shift-based work-time model draw their target hours from the roster.

Enabling shifts

A super-admin turns the feature on per company under Admin → Companies:

• Shift planning Beta — enables shift templates and rosters for the company.
• Roster notice period (days) — advance notice required before a roster may be published (e.g. from a collective or works agreement). 0 = none. The planner sees a “publish by” hint and a warning once the period has passed.

Once enabled, a Shifts entry appears for admins and managers, and a My shifts entry for every employee.

Work-time model

Each user’s daily target hours come from their work-time model:

• Weekly — fixed/flexible weekly hours from the work schedule (the default).
• Shift-based — target hours are derived from the published roster instead of weekly hours.
• Inherit — use the department default, then fall back to weekly.

Set it per user under Admin → Users, or as a department default under Admin → Departments. Only shift-based users are affected by the roster; weekly users keep their schedule.

Templates & roster

Templates are reusable shift definitions (e.g. “Früh 06:00–14:00”) created under Shifts. Each has a name, start and end time (if the end is not after the start, the shift crosses midnight, e.g. 22:00–06:00), a break in minutes (subtracted from the gross to give paid net time), a colour for the grid, and an active flag. Shifts in the statutory night window (23:00–06:00) are detected automatically for the ArbZG checks.

The roster is a weekly grid of employees × days. Assign a template per cell, add an optional note, and use Copy previous week to carry a recurring plan forward. Drafts are invisible to employees and do not affect target hours. When ready, choose Publish & notify: assignments become visible in My shifts, feed shift-based target hours, notify affected employees (email and/or push, per their preferences), and show each employee a precise change diff versus the last published version.

Absences. Each roster cell shows the employee’s vacation and sickness for that day — approved or still requested, including half days and sick leave without a known end. Other leave types appear as Absent; home office and business travel do not. A shift assigned on a day of approved whole-day absence is flagged as a conflict.

Staff demand. A template can say how many people a shift needs on each weekday. The roster then shows, day by day, where a shift is understaffed — absences included.

Shift swaps

• Request. From My shifts an employee picks one of their published shifts and the colleague who should take it over, optionally with a reason.
• Colleague consents. The colleague sees the request under Requests and agrees or declines.
• Manager approves. After consent a manager/admin approves or rejects it — a rejection can include a reason, which the requester sees. On approval the shift moves to the colleague; if the colleague has a shift that day, it moves to the requester in exchange.
• Statuses: awaiting colleague's consent → awaiting manager approval → approved, or declined, rejected or withdrawn. Until approval the requester can withdraw the request.

Employee view, calendar & reminders

My shifts shows the employee’s own published roster as a week or month; they can acknowledge the plan (“I have seen my shifts”) and request a shift swap from here.

Calendar subscription. Employees can enable a calendar feed and subscribe to the generated iCalendar URL (/shifts/feed/<token>) from any calendar app; it auto-updates. Renew link replaces the URL (the old one stops working), disabling revokes it. The database stores only half of the link — the other half is derived from SESSION_SECRET — and Klokk’s access log shows the feed path without the token.

Pre-shift reminders. Set SHIFT_REMINDER_HOURS (see Shift Planning under environment variables) to push a reminder that many hours before a shift starts — once per shift, to employees who enabled the “Shift plan published or changed” push notification.

ArbZG audit. Klokk checks rosters against the German Working Time Act — daily/weekly maximums, the 11-hour rest period, and night-work rules — and the Yearly ArbZG audit view gives a per-employee, full-year compliance overview.