Publishing a schedule

What publishing does

A draft week exists only for managers. Publishing does three things at once:

1. Moves every shift in the week from draft to published.
2. Makes them visible to the people assigned — in the web app, on their phone, and in their subscribed calendar.
3. Notifies everyone affected.

Until that moment, nothing you did leaked. That is what makes it safe to let the AI draft a week, wipe it, and draft it again.

The pre-flight

Publishing runs a whole-week compliance check first and shows you what it found before anything is sent. It reports, per person:

• Weekly hours over your maximum.
• Consecutive days over your maximum.
• Too little rest between two shifts.
• Too many shifts, or too many hours, in one day.
• Shifts overlapping approved time-off.
• Shifts requiring a skill the assignee does not hold.

Anything from a rule you marked blocking stops the publish. Warnings are listed and you decide. See Compliance rules for how to set that boundary where you want it.

You can run the same check at any time without publishing, which is the honest way to answer "is this week actually legal yet?" halfway through building it.

Knowing they have seen it

Publishing sends a notification, but a notification is not evidence. Two things close that gap:

• Acknowledge the week — a single "I have read this" per person per week. Managers get an overview panel showing how many of the team have, and exactly who has not.
• Confirm a shift — per shift rather than per week, for the ones where a specific yes matters.

The gap between published and acknowledged is the single best predictor of a no-show, which is why the number sits on the schedule page rather than buried in a report.

Changing a published week

You can edit a published week directly — move a shift, add cover, delete one. Each change notifies the people affected rather than re-notifying the whole team.

Unpublish takes the entire week back out of view. It is the right move for "we published the wrong week" and the wrong move for "one shift changed", because your team briefly sees their week disappear.

Several jurisdictions require a fixed number of days' advance notice, and pay a penalty when a published schedule changes inside that window. If you operate under one of those laws, our predictive scheduling reference covers which states have what.