What's the difference between Assigned, Unassigned, Open, and Unpublished shifts?

Assigned, unassigned, open, unpublished, assigned and published, open but unpublished... There are quite a few statuses that can apply to your shifts and we know it's potentially a bit daunting for those of you who didn't spend several days of their lives debating *exactly* the right way to label everything. We know, we're sad. Don't worry though, we've set out the various meanings in a handy guide below.

Assigned

Assigned shifts are any shifts that have been allocated to an employee.

Unassigned

You may be able to guess this one, with the above hint - unassigned shifts are any shifts that have not been allocated to an employee.

Open

Open shifts are shifts that employees can volunteer for. They allow you to set up the shifts that you need to fill and then offer them to eligible employees so that your team can choose the shifts that suit them. You can choose whether the shifts are automatically assigned to the first person to volunteer or if a manager needs to confirm the assignment from a shortlist.

Unpublished

Unpublished shifts are shifts that you haven't released to your team yet. Think of them as being in draft form - you can see them and they can be either assigned, unassigned, or open as you see fit, but your team won't be able to view them until you're ready. For you, they'll display with a dashed bar so that it's easy to spot which shifts you've published and which are yet to go out.

Keeping shifts unpublished can be especially helpful if you want to set up your whole schedule before releasing it to anyone, rather than bombarding the team with constant individual updates. When you're ready you can click the 'Publish x Shifts' button in the top right of your screen to publish them all at the same time.

And that's it. Quite simple actually, isn't it?