We rebuilt Weekwright around the three people who use a schedule

For most of this year Weekwright had a strong engine and a hard-to-use product. The engine could draft a week against availability, skills, time-off and your compliance rules, and explain every assignment. The product around it was twelve navigation items, one panel per feature, and a chat window bolted to the side of the screen. Everything was there. Very little was where you needed it.

So we rebuilt it around a simple observation: three different people use a schedule, and they want three different things from it.

The owner wants the first week done

Someone opening a scheduling tool for the first time does not want to configure positions, skills and locations. They want next week on paper. The first session now asks three things — when you are open, who works for you, and who does what — and drafts the week from that.

Names are enough. A person no longer needs an account, or even an email address, to be on the schedule. You type "Maria, cook" and Maria can be scheduled immediately. When you are ready, you send her a link and she claims the seat that is already hers — with her shifts already in it.

The manager wants to know what needs them

The manager's navigation went from twelve places to four: This week, Schedule, Needs you and Team, with the business settings behind one more door.

• This week says how the week is before anything else: what is covered, what is not, and what it costs.
• Needs you collects every decision waiting on you — time-off requests, swaps, open shifts — and each one comes with a suggestion and the reason for it. You can still look first; most of the time you will not need to.
• The assistant follows your role and lives in the flow of the screen instead of in a fixed side panel. You can close it.

The person on the shift wants their shifts

An employee who joins now lands on their own shifts, not on a dashboard built for their manager. And they hear about changes without having to check:

• Publishing tells people. When a week is published, each person gets their own shifts. Publishing again only reaches the people whose shifts were added.
• Changes tell people too. Moving or deleting a shift someone can already see sends them one notice. Edits to a draft notify nobody, because nobody has seen it.

One Sunday draft instead of three automations

We used to offer three overlapping ways to get next week started automatically: a recurring template, an auto-draft switch, and a weekly briefing. They lived in three places and ran at fixed times in UTC, which for a restaurant in Seattle meant Saturday afternoon.

Now there is one setting per schedule: have next week ready by Sunday at 10am, your local time. You choose whether it starts from last week, from a template, or as a fresh draft of your usual week. It never publishes and never touches a week that already has shifts. Approved time off is respected, and those shifts are posted as open shifts rather than silently dropped. You get a single message when it is ready.

What did not change

The engine. Every draft is still checked against rest between shifts, daily and weekly hour limits and consecutive days, and every assignment still carries its reasons — including fairness across the previous six weeks, so the same three people do not catch every weekend. Pricing is still per location, so hiring never changes your bill, and a single location with up to 20 people is still free.

If you tried Weekwright before and bounced off it, this is the version we would ask you to try again. The demo shows a full week without signing up, and the first week takes about ten minutes.