Building a Schedule

The Schedule tab turns your staffing requirements into a practical shift plan. You define reusable shift templates, assign headcount to each day, and instantly see whether your plan covers the requirements — interval by interval.

Shift Templates

A shift template defines a reusable shift pattern: a name, start time, end time, break duration, and which days it runs. You can have as many templates as your operation needs.

Creating a shift

1. Click Add shift on the Schedule tab.
2. Enter the shift name (e.g., "Early — 07:00–15:00").
3. Set start time, end time, and break minutes (e.g., 45 minutes for a standard lunch break).
4. Choose which days of the week this shift runs (checkboxes for Mon–Sun).
5. Set the headcount: how many agents are on this shift each day it runs.
6. Optionally, assign a role (e.g., "Team Lead", "Agent") or a custom hourly rate if this shift is paid differently.
7. Click Save.

Headcount suggestion

When you click into the headcount field, Turnella shows a suggested headcount — the number of agents that would best cover the unstaffed gap during this shift's hours. This is a starting point; adjust it to match your actual roster availability.

Break deduction

The model deducts break time from coverage. A 08:00–16:00 shift with a 45-minute break does not provide 8 hours of coverage — each agent is only available for 7 hours 15 minutes. The coverage chart reflects this automatically. Do not forget to account for breaks when comparing scheduled FTE to your requirement.

Reading the Coverage Chart

The coverage chart is the central view of the Schedule tab. It shows:

• Blue line — scheduled agents at each interval (sum of all shift headcounts)
• Grey line — required agents at each interval (from the Staffing needs tab)
• Green shading — intervals where scheduled ≥ required (properly staffed)
• Red shading — intervals where scheduled < required (gap)

The coverage percentage in the summary card tells you the share of intervals that are green. Aim for 95%+ for critical queues.

Closing Coverage Gaps

Below the coverage chart, the gap recommendations panel lists the largest understaffed periods with suggested fixes:

• Which shift to extend or add headcount to
• How many extra agents would close the gap
• The cost impact of adding those agents
• Whether the same gap recurs at the same time each week

Common gap-closing strategies

Named Schedule Plans

A schedule plan is a named snapshot of your shift headcounts for a specific week or date range. This lets you maintain separate plans for different periods — normal weeks, peak trading periods, holiday cover — and switch between them as needed.

1. Click New plan on the Schedule tab.
2. Give it a name (e.g., "Summer plan — reduced volume", "Q4 peak — full complement").
3. Set the week start date and adjust headcounts per shift per day.
4. Save the plan.

Plans can be duplicated, archived, and compared side by side. This is useful for presenting options to stakeholders: "Plan A costs $42,000/week and achieves 97% coverage; Plan B costs $38,000/week and achieves 91% coverage — which do you want to approve?"

Rostering — assigning named agents to shifts

Shift templates tell you how many agents you need on each shift; the roster planner (lower on the Schedule tab) tells you who works each one. It turns the coverage plan into a real, hand-out-able schedule.

For the selected week, each shift shows its slots per day with a filled/needed count. You can:

• Auto-fill the week — Turnella assigns eligible agents to every slot, balancing each person's weekly hours and rotating who works which shift. Slots it can't fill (not enough eligible agents) are flagged so you can see exactly where you're short.
• Assign or remove by hand — click a day to open the picker. Eligible agents are selectable; ineligible ones are greyed out with the reason (e.g. "not available that day", "on vacation", "would exceed contracted hours").
• Navigate weeks and build a roster as far ahead as you like.

Who is eligible

Two checks are always on: an agent's available days (set in the Roster tab) and any booked time off. An agent is never auto-assigned or selectable on a day they can't work, and never double-booked onto two shifts the same day.

Scheduling rules (optional)

Open Scheduling rules on the planner to switch on extra constraints, enforced for both auto-fill and manual assignment:

• Don't exceed contracted weekly hours — caps each agent at their Roster contracted hours.
• Require the shift's role as a skill — only assign agents who have the shift's role in their skills (or as their own role).
• Max consecutive days — limits how many days in a row anyone works.
• Min rest between shifts — enforces a minimum gap (in hours) between an agent's shifts, including across the day boundary (e.g. late shift → early shift next day).
• Allow split shifts — off by default (one shift per agent per day). Turn it on to let an agent take more than one shift in a day, as long as the shifts don't overlap in time.

Rotating rota

For operations that rotate teams across shifts (e.g. a week on earlies, then a week on lates), use Rotating rota… on the planner. Pick the shifts that form the cycle (in order) and the agents to rotate, then choose how many weeks to generate from the current week. Agents are split into groups and each group cycles through the shifts week by week, so everyone shares the unpopular shifts over time. Days an agent can't take (unavailable or on time off) are reported so you can fill them by hand. Generating a rota replaces existing assignments in those weeks.

Current limitations (early access)

The roster planner is in early access. A few things to know:

• One shift per agent per day by default — turn on the "Allow split shifts" rule to permit multiple non-overlapping shifts in a day.
• Single-planner editing — Turnella syncs your data across your own devices, but it isn't collaborative multi-user rostering. Avoid editing the same week on two devices at once, since the most recent save wins.
• Not an HR system — don't store medical details, sickness specifics, or disciplinary notes; keep those in your HR system.

Exporting the Schedule

From the Schedule tab, you can export in several formats:

The roster exports appear once you've made assignments in the roster planner.