Schedule templates and recurring weeks

Saving a week as a template

Build a week you are happy with, then save it as a template. What is stored is the layout — day of week, start and end time, position — not the people and not the dates. A template is "two servers 7–3 Monday to Friday, three on Friday night", not "Marta on the 14th".

That is why a template survives your roster changing. You can also edit a template directly, without going back through a week, when the pattern changes rather than the staffing.

Applying one

Pick a template and a target week. Every template shift becomes a real shift on that week, with the times resolved against the schedule's timezone — so a template built in March still produces a 7am start after the clocks change, rather than a 6am one.

Two behaviours worth knowing before you use it:

• It adds; it does not clear. Applying a template to a week that already has shifts leaves them alone. Clearing is a separate, deliberate action — baking it into apply is how people lose an afternoon of work by clicking one button.
• It does not pre-check conflicts. The point of a template is "lay this down and see what fits". Overlaps and compliance problems surface in the grid immediately afterwards, and at publish at the latest.

If some shifts cannot be created, you are told how many landed and how many did not — "applied 12 of 14" — rather than the whole thing rolling back.

Making it recur

Turn on recurrence for a template and it is applied to next week automatically, every Sunday, without you asking. For a stable rotation this removes the weekly ritual entirely.

The rules around it are strict on purpose:

• At most one template per schedule recurs. Enabling one turns the others off and tells you which — two templates populating the same week would double-book everybody, and resolving that silently at 2am would be worse than saying so now.
• An empty template cannot recur. You find out at the toggle rather than the following Monday.
• The job never touches a published week, never overwrites existing shifts, and never publishes anything. Its output is always a draft for you to review.

Templates or AI drafts?

They solve different problems and the choice is not close once you name it.

Templates reproduce a fixed layout. They are deterministic, need no plan upgrade, and are the right answer when your week genuinely is the same week — a factory rotation, a reception desk, a clinic with fixed sessions.

AI drafts solve the assignment: who works which slot, given who is available, who is off, who has the certification and who carried the last three weekends. Use both — a template for the shape, the agent for the names.