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How to use Contracted availability for employees
How to use Contracted availability for employees

Mark specific days or periods in which you have agreed with your employee to work and use it as a guide for accurate scheduling.

Saad Saeed avatar
Written by Saad Saeed
Updated over a week ago

🎯 For admins and schedule managers looking for clarity on when an employee is contracted to work. This feature differs from availability settings, where employees indicate their wishes or availability for work without having a contractual obligation or an agreement.

Are you an employee? See how to indicate your availability wishes.


What is Contracted availability?

The Contracted availability feature allows you, as an admin or schedule manager, to mark specific days or time intervals in which you have agreed with your employee to work. Typically, this is based on an employment contract or terms you have in place with agreed hours and days. For example, you can hire staff for weekends or morning shifts only and mark their contracted availability so you can be alerted if you schedule them outside these periods.

This feature can help you get an overview of specific scheduling guidelines or contractual agreements that may influence the schedule and make it easier for you to see who is available and when.


How to set an employee’s Contracted availability

You can add or edit an employee's Contracted availability from the quick edit menu by going to People > Employees. Click on the employee's name, open the quick edit window and then press Add under Contracted availability.

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This will open up the Contracted availability window. You can select the days and mark specific time intervals during those days when an employee should be available for scheduling.

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In the above example, an employee should work on the following days:

  • Mondays and Tuesdays, from 9 am to 5 pm,

  • Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 am to 6 pm,

  • and then Fridays from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm.

You also need to specify when these settings should come into effect by setting a Valid from date. That way, you can keep track of an employee's availability even if their work pattern changes over time or if you need to add a new availability but have it apply from a particular time in the future.


Using Contracted availability on the Schedule

You can then navigate to the Schedule and create a new Shift. When assigning a Shift to an employee, a green symbol will indicate the presence of Contracted availability for this employee. You can hover over this symbol to see when the employee is contracted to work. Read more in the article Schedule based on Availability preferences.

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Regardless of contracted hours, you can still schedule the employee for work outside these hours.


See related articles:

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