🎯 For Admins and Schedule managers.
🟡 This feature is currently limited to select Planday organisations or regions, with full availability gradually extending to all.
What are Draft Shifts?
In the Planday Schedule, you can save a draft of your weekly or biweekly shifts and finalise them before publishing.
Saving shifts as drafts let you create and assign shifts as needed, then publish them all at once to inform your employees about their upcoming schedule.
Draft Shifts allows the option to hide the week from the schedule. This means that until you or your scheduling managers publish them, draft shifts won't be visible to your employees.
How to create and use Draft Shifts on the schedule
In addition to making open or assigned shifts in the schedule, you can also create draft shifts.
Start by creating a new shift on the schedule and fill in the info needed, including:
Start and end time.
Keep the shift open or assign it to an employee.
Set a Shift type if needed.
After entering the shift details, click the Save as draft button. This action saves the shift you created as a draft and is shown as an orange-coloured shift in the schedule.
You can edit your drafts, move them or assign them, just like you would with any shift. The shifts won't be visible to employees except those with Admin and Schedule manager access level. When you've set up all your planned shifts, click the Publish shifts button at the top right corner to make your rota visible.
⬆️ The above screenshot shows a series of drafts (Wed. to Fri.) and an open shift (Sat.), for reference along with a few published shifts on the same schedule. This allows for easier planning where you can set some open shifts, have some assigned shifts and some shifts in draft mode.
When publishing, a confirmation message will appear, showing the number of shifts that will be published. You'll then have the option to notify your employees with a single message that new shifts are available for them:
By SMS: This sends a text notification to your scheduled employees' mobile numbers. (You may be charged for SMS alerts)
Through a Planday Message: This sends a notification on the Planday app to your scheduled employees and/or an email notification. Learn more aboutmessaging in Planday.
When choosing to notify employees, no matter how many draft shifts you've added to your schedule, each scheduled employee will be notified only once.
How to use Draft Shifts along with Schedule templates
You can save your week’s schedule as a template – This is useful if your schedule has patterns and is similar from week to week. Read more about how to Create and use Schedule templates.
When applying a Schedule template, you have two choices:
Apply as draft — This option puts the shifts from the template as drafts on your schedule when you apply a template. You will have to publish the schedule to make the shifts visible to employees.
Apply — This option publishes the shifts from the template and makes them visible to employees at once.
The same logic applies when using the Copy week feature in Schedule > Templates > Copy week.
How to use Draft Shifts on the Planday app
For Schedule managers using the Planday app, drafts will be visible on their schedules and just like in the web version, drafts will be highlighted in orange.
Managers can edit and publish drafts created through the web schedule using the mobile app. Pressing Save as Draft on the app will keep the shifts as drafts on the web schedule.
Please note:
You can't create new draft shifts through the Planday app; you'll need to use the web version of the schedule to create draft shifts.
This also applies to applying Schedule templates. Any draft shift included in a template applied through the Planday app will be published automatically.
Comparison between draft shifts vs open or assigned shifts
Draft shifts are a bit different than Open or Assigned shifts in the sense that:
You or your employees cannot punch in/out for a draft shift. Punch Clock can be used for those shifts after they have been published.
Your employees cannot sell or swap drafts, as those shifts might not be visible to them before they are published.
However, they are also similar to Open or Assigned shifts in some ways:
To edit or create a draft shift, you would need to have a Schedule manager or a higher access level.
When assigning draft shifts, the contacted availability set per employee will be visible. Read more about How to use Contracted availability for employees.
You can notify your employees about the new schedule after the drafts are published with only one message.
Draft shifts can be accessed through our API if you have a custom application or integration that requires access. Read more onDeveloper.Planday.com.
ℹ️ Need more help?
🔍 Search the Help Center | See videos at Tutorials.Planday.com | Watch a webinar
💬 For personalised support
Login and contact our support team via the blue icon at the bottom if you have more questions or book a one-to-one professional training session with an expert.