Shifts & Rosters
Build weekly rosters, read a whole month in one grid, and keep the right people on them as your team changes.
A roster is your team’s working week: who is on, on which days, and on which shift. Each roster covers exactly one Monday-to-Sunday week, so a calendar month is made up of four to six of them. You build a roster as a draft, publish it so the team can see their shifts, and lock it once the week is settled.
How rosters work
Before you build your first roster, two things need to exist: shift types and, optionally, default schedules.
- Shift types — set up under People → Scheduling Settings → Shift Types. Each one has a short code (the letter or two that appears in a roster cell), a name, start and end times, a break allowance, and a colour. Non-working types — a day off, for example — are marked as such so they do not count towards scheduled hours.
- Default schedules — set up under People → Scheduling Settings → Defaults. This is each person’s usual weekly pattern. Anywhere Eleo offers to “auto-fill” or “fill in default shifts”, this is the pattern it applies.
Every roster is in one of three states:
- Draft — fully editable, and not visible to the team.
- Published — visible to team members in My Shifts. Still editable, but everyone has already seen it, so changes should be deliberate.
- Locked — closed to all further changes, and permanent. Use this once the week is finished and you want it kept as a record.
Publishing requires the Publish roster permission and locking requires Lock roster — both are Admin-level by default. Building and editing a roster only needs Manage rosters, which a Supervisor has.
Creating a roster
From People → Shifts & Rosters, click Create Roster to build a single week, or Generate Monthly Rosters to create every week of a month in one go.
- 1
Set the week
Choose the start date (a Monday) and end date (the following Sunday). Give the roster a name if you want one — otherwise it is identified by its date range.
- 2
Populate the members
Leave Auto-populate members from active team on and Eleo adds everyone on your team who is eligible for rostering. You can add more people later — see Adding team members to a roster.
- 3
Fill in the shifts
Turn on auto-fill to lay in each person’s default weekly pattern straight away, or leave it off and assign shifts by hand.
Members are grouped on the roster by their department, so the kitchen, the floor, and the back office each read as their own block.
Filling in a roster
Open a roster to see a grid of team members against the seven days of the week. Click any cell to pick a shift type for that person on that day, or clear what is already there. Alongside the grid, the toolbar offers:
- Auto-fill — applies everyone’s default weekly pattern. Existing assignments are kept.
- Copy from previous — copies assignments from another roster, matching by team member and day of the week.
- Add members — puts more people on this roster.
If the roster has gaps or problems — a day with no coverage, a member with no shifts at all, an unmarked public holiday — they are listed in a banner above the grid.
Moving between weeks
Because a roster is a single week, you will often want the week either side of the one you are looking at. Once your store has more than one roster, a navigation strip appears above the toolbar:
- ‹ Previous week and Next week › — step to the adjacent roster in date order. They are disabled at either end of your roster history.
- The week picker — a dropdown of every roster in the store, each showing its date range and status, so you can jump straight to a specific week.
- View whole month — opens the month this roster’s week belongs to in the month view.
The month view
The month view stitches the four to six weekly rosters that touch a calendar month into a single team members × days grid, so you can read a whole month of cover left to right instead of opening each week in turn. The weekly roster is still where a week is published or locked — the month view is a way of reading and editing across all of them at once.
You can reach it from three places:
- The banner at the top of the roster list — Open month view.
- See the whole month next to any month heading in the roster list.
- View whole month on an individual roster.
The month is held in the address bar as /scheduling/month?month=YYYY-MM, so a particular month is a link you can bookmark or send to a colleague. Use ‹ Prev and Next › in the toolbar to move between months.
Reading the grid
- Rows are team members, grouped by department. Anyone who appears on at least one of the month’s weeks is listed, even if they only work part of it.
- Columns are days. A month rarely starts on a Monday, so the grid runs from the Monday of the week containing the 1st to the Sunday of the week containing the last day. Days that belong to the neighbouring month are dimmed, and weekends are shaded.
- Week headers span each seven-day band and show the roster’s name and status. Click the name to open that week on its own page.
- Public holidays are marked with an asterisk after the date; hover to see the holiday name.
- Below the grid, a legend maps each shift code to its colour, and a summary bar totals the shifts assigned, the scheduled hours, and how many of the month’s weeks have a roster.
A member who is on a week’s roster but is no longer eligible for rostering — they have left, or they have been excluded — is shown in italics and marked (inactive). Their existing shifts are still displayed so the history of the month stays intact.
Editing in the month view
Cells in a draft week are editable in place: click one to assign a shift type or clear the day, exactly as you would on the weekly page. Changes are saved against the roster that owns that day, so the weekly page and the month view always agree.
A week that has been published or locked cannot be edited from the month grid. Click its week header to open it on its own page, where the usual publish, revert, and lock controls apply. This keeps a change to a week the team has already seen a deliberate act rather than a stray click in a month-wide grid.
Weeks with no roster
A week that has no roster yet is still shown, as a gap: its header reads No roster yet and its cells cannot be edited. If any of the month’s weeks are missing, the toolbar offers a Generate missing weeks button that creates them in one step, populated with your eligible team. Their shifts continue the pattern of the most recent roster that has any, falling back to each person’s default weekly pattern. Weeks that already exist are left untouched.
Adding team members to a roster
A roster picks up its members when it is created, so anyone who joins afterwards — or anyone you took off it earlier — needs to be added. Click Add members in the roster toolbar.
- 1
Pick the people
The picker lists roster-eligible team members who are not already on this roster, each shown with their department. Select as many as you need.
- 2
Decide about their default shifts
Fill in their default shifts is on by default. It applies each person’s default weekly pattern to the empty days on this roster; shifts already assigned are never overwritten. Turn it off to add them with a blank week and assign shifts yourself.
- 3
Add to roster
The people you selected appear immediately, placed in their department’s group on the grid.
Add members is available on draft and published rosters — a new hire has to be addable to a week the team has already seen. It is not available once a roster is locked, and locking cannot be undone — so lock a week only when you are certain nobody else needs to go on it.
To take someone off, hover their name on a draft roster and click the ×. Their shifts on that roster are deleted, and Eleo remembers the removal — see below.
Team members who are disabled, not yet approved, or marked as excluded from rostering are never offered in the picker, and neither are service accounts. If someone you expect is missing, check their team profile first. When everyone eligible is already on the roster, the picker says so instead of offering an empty list.
New hires join upcoming drafts automatically
When a team member becomes eligible for rostering — a new hire is added, an invitation is approved, or someone previously disabled or excluded is turned back on — Eleo puts them onto the store’s upcoming draft rosters straight away. Without this, a person who joined after you generated the month would be invisible on every week of it.
The scope is deliberately narrow:
- Draft rosters only. Published and locked weeks are left exactly as they are — they are what your team has already been shown, so quietly editing them would be worse than the omission. Use Add members to put someone on those.
- Weeks that have not finished. Any draft whose end date is today or later. Past weeks are history and are left alone. The week in progress counts, because a draft has not been published to anyone yet.
- Never a roster they were removed from. See below.
The new member is placed in their department’s group on each roster. Their shifts are not filled in automatically — use auto-fill on the roster, or add them again through Add members with the default-shifts option on.
If you take a team member off a roster by hand, Eleo records that as a decision for that roster and will never put them back automatically — not when their profile changes, and not when their eligibility is recalculated. Removing them from next week says nothing about the week after; the record is kept per roster. To put them back, add them explicitly with Add members, which clears the record for that week.
Publishing and locking
When a draft is ready, click Publish. The roster becomes visible to your team in My Shifts on the web and mobile apps. A published roster can still be edited, and Revert to Draft takes it back out of the team’s view.
Once the week is over and settled, Lock it. A locked roster accepts no further changes of any kind — no shift edits, no new members.
A locked roster cannot be reverted to draft or unlocked. Lock a week only when you are sure it is finished; until then, leaving it published keeps it visible to the team and still correctable.