With drag and drop shift templates, you can make your shift planning process hyper efficient. You can easily save your recurring or favorite combination of shift configurations like roles, locations or times etc. and easily recreate a schedule for multiple employees in a few clicks.

What are drag and drop Shift templates?

Imagine you have a team of 5 people who work morning shift every week in the same location doing the same job. For planning the shifts of these 5 people you can either copy paste a schedule from a past week. OR you can save the morning shift details as a template and easily use it for your planning each time. With shift templates you save precious time and make shift scheduling faster each time.  

The Shift templates are very easy to drag and drop. They can be used for planning in bulk at once for multiple employees. One Shiftplanner can reuse templates created by anyone in the team.

How do you use Shift templates? 

The shift templates module can be used to : 

• Create and save a new template

• Access and reuse templates created by other admins and managers from your company

• Apply a template for planning shifts using drag and drop

• Apply a template for bulk planning 

• Edit and delete a template that you have created

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Creating and saving a new template
• Planning shifts with drag and drop templates
  • In the employee layout
  • In the role layout
• Planning shifts in bulk using templates
• Edit and delete templates

Creating and saving a new template

Creating templates is an easy 3 step process. 

• Click on the top menu > Templates and the template module will appear

• Click on the (+) button in the template module to launch the add a new template dialogue box

• Fill in the details and click SAVE

  • Template name: mandatory data

  • Shift start time and end time: mandatory data

  • Location: mandatory data

  • Role: mandatory data

  • Breaktime, Working area, tags and notes: optional data

• Once you save the template, it is added to the top of the list of templates. The template also gets a highlight color of the role that is used for the template for easy recognition. 

Note: The template list also contains all other templates created by other managers and admins. You can always reuse these templates to plan your own shifts!

Planning shifts with drag and drop templates

For planning shifts you can either reuse templates created by other managers/admins/HR admins OR you can use the templates that you have created. Using drag and drop templates to plan shifts is very simple. 

In the employee layout: 

• Hover over a template around the 6 dots area, and you will see the mouse pointer change to a hand icon. You will see the shift details preview and you can confirm if this is the template you want to use.

• Once you are ready, you can click on the 6 dots and the template will be picked up for dragging and dropping.

• Keep the mouse clicked and drag that template to any employee at any date.

• Once you are sure about the location, release the click of the mouse and the template will be dropped.

• A new unpublished schedule is then created.

Note: 

• You can use drag and drop templates to create both open and scheduled shifts 

• You can drag the template to the bottom part of the screen and if you have a long list of employees then the screen will start auto-scrolling.

In the role layout: 

You can also plan shifts in the role layout using the templates. All the steps above remain the same. 

Note: If you try to plan a shift with a role which is not saved in the employee’s profile OR in other words if the role data in the template does not match the role or location where you are dropping the template, a shift is still added but it is placed in the role that matches the template role. 

Planning shifts in bulk using templates

You can use the templates to not only drag and drop and plan shifts individually, but you can also use the template data to plan shifts in bulk for many employees in a single action. 

• Click on the templates menu to open the templates module

• Hover over the templates available and click on the (+) icon saying "Add shifts using template" 

• This will open the add new shifts dialogue box and pre-fill all the data saved in the template

• You can then add as many employees as you want and click on SAVE to add many shifts in one go for many employees

Edit and delete templates

You can always edit or delete templates that you have created in Shiftplan for your use.

• To edit a template, hover over a template and click on the pencil icon

• The edit template dialogue box will appear where you will see all the details of the template available for editing

• Make your changes and now you are ready to SAVE 

• To delete a template, you can once again click on the pencil icon and click on the the red recycle bin button 

• Click on YES, DELETE and the template is removed from your list of templates

Shiftplan’s primary goal is to make your shift scheduling process faster, smoother and efficient. We hope you’ll enjoy using templates to plan recurring shifts!