How to create a staff schedule

Working on schedules will be where you spend the majority of your time in Ento, but hopefully far less time than you used to spend working on schedules!

The key parts of working on your schedule are outlined below. A complete guide can be found on the Work on schedule page of the support center.

Creating a schedule

To create a schedule, go to the Scheduling → Schedules page.

Click the + button at the top of the page. If this is your first schedule, select the  From scratch mode in the Create from… section.

Give your schedule a name. For example, ‘Bar 02/03/14 – 09/03/14‘. Select a Start date and End date for the schedule period. We recommend weekly or two weekly schedules.

Select the Locations your schedule covers. If you have different managers for different locations of your business (or you are one of those managers) we suggest selecting a single location.

Either set a Single budget for the entire schedule or Daily budgets, then click the Save button at the bottom of the page.

For more information on creating schedules, go to the Docs → Scheduling → Schedules support page. You should now be on the Scheduling → Work on schedule page looking at your first schedule!

Navigating the schedule

The employees that have been assigned roles within the location/s your schedule covers should be listed down the left hand side. If they aren’t, you might need to momentarily skip forward to the Managing employees page of this guide.

A couple of key items in the schedule navigation bar are the View changer and the link to Day in the date bar. The View changer can be used to switch your schedule from showing your employees down the left hand side, to showing the roles.

Role view is great when checking you have good coverage across your Role, and Employee view is good to check you are distributing shifts evenly between your employees and you’re not working any of them too hard!

Click on the Day button to drill your schedule down to a day-by-day view. This is a great way to put your schedule under the microscope towards the end of its creation. Before that, you need to add some shifts!

Adding shifts

To add a shift, click the + button found in every cell. This will open the Shift create form. Check one of theTop suggestions to see if the shift you are going to add is listed. If it is, click it and the shift will be created. If it hasn’t been suggested (which will be the case if this is the first shift you have added for the employee), type the shift’s start and end time separated by a hyphen in the large input box. By default, shifts longer than 5 hours will include a 30 minute unpaid break.

Press the tab button on your keyboard or click on the next field. This will open the Role or Employeedrop down (depending which view you are in).

Press tab or click in the next field to enter the Break information. Once complete, click the Save button.

You can copy a shift by clicking on it then selecting Copy. When you go to add a shift it will be the new top suggestion.

Shift status

After adding a shift you may have noticed differences in the colors shifts. The colors give you more information about the status of the shift.

Adding notes

There is always going to be bits of ‘non shift’ information you need to add to the schedule. This can be done with Notes.

To add a note, click on the + button like you were going to add a shift, but click the Notes tab.

You can also add notes to the day headings or the schedule, by clicking in the top left corner cell.

If the note pertains to a specific Employee or Role, select them. Input your Note. Because this note might be sent over SMS, try and keep it to less than ten words.

Select your Visibility setting, keeping in mind anyone with access to the schedule can see a note marked as Anyone.

If you turn Include in schedule summary on, and the note is added to a day or role, and not a specific employee, it will be added to the schedule summary of every employee working that day or role.

Publishing a schedule

Once you have finished working on your schedule, you should publish it. Publishing your schedule will send each of the employee on the schedule a summary of their shifts (if they have a notification preference turned on).

If this is the first schedule you have published for your employees, this will be the first message they get from the system. It will include a link to their employee location which should be pretty self explanatory for them, but it might help to mention Ento to them offline as well. The shifts will also be ready eligible to show on attendance screen.

To publish the schedule, click the Check and publish button in the top right corner of the schedule navigation bar.