🔓 Access level in Planday: Administrator, Schedule manager
🌐 Subscription plan: Plus, Pro
⏱️ Reading time: 4 min.
🟡 This feature is currently limited to select Planday organisations or regions, with full availability gradually extending to all.
This feature is in beta: Auto-schedule is a brand new, agentic way to build your schedule, and it's currently rolling out to a selected group of customers before becoming available to everyone.
Important: During the beta, you may see both this new Auto-schedule and the existing Auto-schedule tool (Pro plan only) in your portal at the same time. If you're using the older tool, head to How to use the Auto-schedule tool (Pro Plan only) instead.
What is Auto-schedule?
Auto-schedule is a new agentic feature that generates a full week's schedule for you in just a few clicks. Instead of starting with an empty rota or a template you have to build and maintain yourself, Auto-schedule looks at your portal's own scheduling history and creates a complete draft schedule - shifts and all, ready for you to review.
Auto-schedule takes the following into account when generating your schedule:
Contracted hours
Employee availability
Working time rules
Past scheduling patterns
Once it's done, Auto-schedule applies the generated shifts to your schedule as a draft, with a short window to undo before you confirm. You can review the draft, make any adjustments, and either undo the whole run or keep the changes. Your employees will not see the generated schedule until you publish the draft, just like with any other draft schedule in Planday.
How Auto-schedule learns from your data
Auto-schedule works from your own scheduling data, so a little preparation goes a long way to get the best results:
You need at least two weeks of actual scheduling history in the department you want to generate a schedule for. The longer your history, the better, since the system learns more from more data.
It works best when contracted hours, employee availability, working time rules and employee groups are set up for your employees.
It's most accurate for workspaces with predictable, repeating patterns. If a week is unusually irregular, a one-off, or very different from your normal trend, the suggestion may be less accurate.
Note: All the data used to generate your schedule stays inside Planday and nothing is shared externally.
How to generate a schedule with Auto-schedule
To generate a schedule with Auto-schedule, follow these steps:
1. Go to Planday Web > Schedule and select the department you want to generate a schedule for.
2. Click the Auto Schedule button at the top of the Schedule page.
3. Choose how many weeks you'd like to generate schedules for (default: 1 week, up to 11 weeks).
4. If needed, exclude specific Positions, Employees, or Shift types that you don't want the Auto-schedule to consider.
5. Click Start analysing. This then takes about a minute to process, and you can cancel at any time while it's running.
6. Once analysing finishes, Auto-schedule applies the generated shifts to your schedule as a draft. A banner at the top of the Schedule page confirms how many shifts were added and for which date range, along with an Undo available until option with a countdown.
7. While the banner is visible, you can still adjust the draft: drag a shift to a different day or employee, edit the start and end time, employee, position or employee group, and watch hours and cost updates live at the bottom of the Schedule as you make changes.
8. If the result isn't quite right, click Undo before the countdown ends — all generated shifts will be removed and your schedule will be returned to exactly how it was.
9. If you're happy with the result, click Keep changes to confirm it. The generated shifts remain on your schedule as a draft, ready for you to review and publish to your employees as usual.
Good to know about Auto-schedule
Your schedule stays safe throughout — Auto-schedule adds shifts as a draft, so nothing reaches your employees until you publish, just like any other draft schedule. You can cancel at any point while Auto-schedule is analysing, or undo the applied draft within the time window shown, without affecting your existing shifts.
Auto-schedule is currently available on Web only.
During the beta, Auto-schedule is being rolled out region by region to a selected group of Plus and Pro customers, starting with the UK & Ireland, then Nordics & DACH, and then the rest of the world. If you don't see it in your portal yet, it’s on its way.
The more scheduling history you build up in Planday, the more accurate Auto-schedule becomes — so results will keep improving over time.
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