Shifts are periods of time on the roster which indicate hours that a carer will be working. These will show on a carer's rota but you will still need to allocate bookings to show them where they need to be. Shifts can be paid instead of bookings, as well as, or not at all depending on how your carer contracts work. See Shift Payment Strategy for more information on this.

It is possible to create a shift for a carer in the Roster or Agenda screen. These will all be on an ad hoc basis, if your carers do not have regular shift patterns or lengths then this can be a really useful tool.

To create a shift, head to either the agenda or the roster screen, choose a carer's row and click and drag for the time you want to create for. Click on the green box that appears. In the resulting menu, you can adjust the time and duration if necessary.

You will need to assign a contract to each shift regardless of whether you will be paying carers for it as it is a payable rostering option. The contract will allow the system to determine whether it is payable or not using the shift payment strategy setting.

Once the date and time and contract have been input, click create and the shift will appear on the roster screen. This is shown by an orange bar at the top of the carer's row, any bookings assigned to the carer will fit in neatly beneath this bar.

The above image shows a 7 hour shift containing 5 bookings.

If your carers have a regular shifts, or a regular shift pattern, then it is possible to create this in a carer's schedule. Creating shifts this way is similar to creating bookings from a client's schedule in that the shifts will need to be generated afterwards from the schedule.

To do this, head to Carers > [Choose a carer] > Schedule and click and drag to create a time slot. Clicking on this will bring up the schedule entry creation form. Here you can choose the day, time and duration of the shift and also choose which contract the shift should be created on.

It is possible to create multiple scheduled shifts using the repeat option, which allows you to select either the days the shift should occur on, or create a shift pattern. (See below for more information).

Once the shift is scheduled in, you will see it in the Agenda or Roster but as a grey block that fills the entire row, this indicates that it is still a scheduled shift and that it will not appear on a carer's rota or count towards payroll where applicable.

To create the shift from the schedule entry, go to Rostering > Shifts > Scheduled. This will bring up all the scheduled shifts for the day but you can use the select dates option in the top right corner. Click "Create Shifts" to bring up the preview and then "Create # shifts" to create them on to the roster screen.

If certain shifts are at the same time and for the same length then you can create repeated entries, either for certain days of the week or create a pattern of days on/days off. To do this, click on the "Repeat?" tick box and select on the right hand side whether you want set days or a pattern.

Where a pattern is selected, the carer's schedule cycle will automatically update to allow for the pattern selected. Using the above example, the carer's shifts are scheduled for 3 days on and 1 day off starting on a Monday.