Your team – planned, tracked, paid

Let’s look at how shift planning actually works in the system. On one hand, there’s the Staff area, where you can add individual shifts directly for specific days and people. And you also have the option to set them up right from within the event itself. From there we go into Shifts and can create new jobs. Jobs are especially useful because you can assign specific skills to them – the qualifications required. That lets you define who’s actually allowed to apply for a given job. We’ll add that here, set the address, and add the new job. From the job, you can then add further shifts. That means you can name each shift, enter the times for it, and also say how many staff members you need – or whether people can sign themselves up for the shift through the staff portal. You can also search for people yourself and add them, and assign a contact person for each shift, or price the shifts directly here. So we can say we have our shift for the service staff set up right here. The system also does the math for you: four hours times three people needed for the event, and that’s included directly. We create that. And we create a second shift, Supervision, the same way. Then you get an overview of your shifts right here. From there, people can apply for them. If you’re working the event yourself, you can start your shifts directly, or copy individual jobs, or save them as a template. That means all these shifts and jobs are also available here as templates – you can insert items from templates to save yourself a good amount of time. You also have the option to view everything by job in a timeline, or by the individual people assigned to each task. On top of that, you can send reminders to people from here – either by tags, by skills, or by crew group – asking them to please apply for the open items. If you go in here and, say, someone’s already assigned to one of your shifts – let’s add myself to the shift – you can then say: if that person calls in sick, you can mark them as sick. And the system can also find a replacement for you. It automatically checks who’s still available that day, so you can add them in. It also works like this: if you go into the Finance tab, you see your planned versus actual hours. We’ve planned 136 hours here, which you can also manually adjust or set outright. And you have the tracked hours – whenever someone logs their shifts on the event, that flows straight into the planned-versus-actual view. From there you get an overview of how many hours were planned and how many were actually tracked. The rates for those hours are also calculated automatically, so you immediately see how much you’ll bill the customer if you’re charging by the hour rather than a flat fee – and at the same time you see how your cost coverage looks for the event. In the Shifts area, as we saw before, there’s also the shift plan with an overview by day. And from here you can also see the overall view of all shifts, as well as the overall view of all time entries and the overall view of the hours still waiting for approval.