Auto-assign and matching

The Shift Planner can propose workers for your open shifts in a single run, so you don't have to fill each one by hand. This is auto-assign — you trigger it, review what it suggests, and decide what to accept.

The most important thing to know up front: auto-assign never commits an assignment on its own. Every run produces a proposal that you review, and nothing reaches a worker until you accept it.

Auto-assign is off by default. Turn it on in Settings → Assignment before it appears in the planner.

Running auto-assign

Open the Shift Planner from the sidebar (under the Bookings group). When auto-assign is enabled and the visible week has open shifts, the command bar shows an Auto-assign week button.

• Click Auto-assign week to match every open shift in the week.
• To limit the run, select specific days or shifts first — the button changes to Auto-assign selection, and a blue scope pill shows what's included (clear it with the ×).

Auto-assign works from your saved rota, so save any pending changes before you run it — otherwise the planner warns you that unsaved shifts would be ignored and their workers could be double-booked.

While it works, the button shows Solving….

📷 Screenshot: The Shift Planner command bar with the Auto-assign week button.

Reviewing the proposal

When the run finishes, a review strip appears across the top of the planner:

Auto-assign proposal — N shifts matched · M could not be filled

Proposed assignments show as dashed blue chips on the grid, each with a match score. Shifts it couldn't fill are flagged with the reason. From the review strip you can:

• Accept all (N) — commit every proposed assignment.
• Accept selected (M) — commit only the proposals you've ticked.
• Discard — throw the whole proposal away and change nothing.

Nothing is saved until you accept, and accepting still leaves the shifts hidden from workers until you publish the rota as usual.

📷 Screenshot: The auto-assign review strip with proposal chips on the grid.

How matching works

Auto-assign only ever proposes an eligible worker — someone who's available, qualified for the service, and not already committed elsewhere. Among the eligible workers it ranks candidates on a few signals:

• Whether the client marked the worker as preferred.
• Whether the worker marked the client as preferred.
• Familiarity — how many past shifts they've worked at that client.
• Recency — whether they worked there recently.

The best-ranked eligible worker becomes the proposal for that shift.

Tuning auto-assign

Two Settings tabs control the behaviour:

Settings → Assignment

• Enable auto-assign — the master switch for the planner button.
• Score floor and Minimum margin — how confident a match has to be before it's proposed.
• Max shifts per worker per day and per run, and Max weekly hours — caps that stop the run overloading anyone.
• Fairness spread — spreads work more evenly across your staff.

Settings → Constraints

A registry of the scheduling rules auto-assign enforces, grouped into Eligibility, Hard limits, Soft preferences, Ranker signals and Monitoring. Each rule shows an at-a-glance on/off status; select one to edit it in the right-hand pane, then Save changes to apply your overrides in one go. Filter the list by category or by All / On / Off / Changed. Rules you haven't touched sit at the platform default.

📷 Screenshot: Settings → Constraints, with a rule selected in the detail pane.

Related

• Bookings overview — the Bookings list and all statuses.
• Managing a booking — assign staff and notify workers yourself.