The Schedules page gives you a weekly grid for planning who works when at a location. You build a week in private as drafts, then publish it to make it visible to your staff and send them a notification. This article covers the weekly grid, the difference between drafts and published shifts, how staff get notified, recurring shifts, copying last week, and open (unassigned) shifts.
The weekly grid
The schedule is organized one location at a time, one week at a time. The grid lays out staff as rows and the seven days of the week as columns. Each cell holds the shifts assigned to that person on that day.
- Rows are staff. Who appears here is determined automatically. Workspace owners and admins always appear, plus anyone with a staff role at the selected location. Regular members and customers who only use the space do not appear on the schedule. If a location has nobody schedulable, you see a prompt to invite teammates or assign existing staff to that location.
- Columns are days. Weeks run Monday through Sunday. Today's column is highlighted, and weekend columns are tinted so the week reads at a glance.
- The bottom row is for open shifts. Any shift that has not been assigned to a person lives in a separate "Open shifts" row at the bottom of the grid. See the Open shifts section below.
Each shift shows its time range and, if you set one, a role label. Roles are color coded: the same role text gets the same color everywhere on the schedule, so "Front desk" always reads the same hue across the week.
Totals
The grid adds up scheduled hours for you. Each staff row shows that person's total scheduled hours for the week on the right, and a "Day total" footer shows hours per day plus a grand total in the corner. Totals deduct any unpaid break minutes you set on a shift. Only published shifts count toward totals. Drafts are excluded so your numbers reflect what is actually committed.
Moving between weeks and locations
Use the previous and next arrows to step a week at a time, or click the date range to open a calendar and jump to any week. Picking any date snaps to the start of that week.
The schedule follows the location you have selected in the app. If you have a specific location active, the schedule shows that location. If you are viewing all locations and you manage more than one, a location picker appears so you can choose which one to schedule. If you only manage a single location, it is selected for you.
Who can edit
Workspace owners and admins can edit schedules for every location in the workspace. Location admins (managers) get a read-only view: they can see published shifts for the locations they manage, but they cannot create, edit, or publish, and they never see drafts. Managers see a banner reminding them the view is read-only and that drafts stay hidden until published. People without a staff role at a location cannot open the schedule for it at all. For more on roles, see Roles and permissions.
Drafts versus published
Every shift is either a draft or published. This is the core idea behind the page: you plan freely in draft, and nothing reaches your staff until you decide it is ready.
- Drafts are private to editors. When you create a shift it starts as a draft. Drafts are visible only to workspace owners and admins on the Schedules page. Managers and staff never see them. Draft shifts render with a dashed outline and a small "Draft" tag so you can tell at a glance what has not gone live yet.
- Published shifts are visible to staff. Once published, a shift counts toward weekly totals and shows up for the assigned staff member.
To add a shift, click any empty cell in the grid (the cell you click pre-fills the staff member and the day). In the shift dialog you can set the date, start and end times, a role label, unpaid break minutes, and notes. A live "Total" field shows the worked duration after breaks as you adjust the times. Saving creates the shift as a draft.
To change a shift, click it to reopen the dialog, where you can edit its details or delete it. Deleting removes the shift entirely.
Publishing and notifying staff
When your week is ready, publish it. The Publish button shows how many drafts are waiting (for example, "Publish 6"). Clicking it opens a preview that lists exactly which staff members will be notified and how many new shifts each one is getting, so you can confirm you have the right people before committing. If your drafts are all unassigned open shifts, the preview tells you there is nobody to notify.
Confirming with Publish & notify flips every draft shift in the current week at this location to published in one action. It does not touch shifts that were already published.
Each affected staff member receives a single email summarizing their shifts for the week, rather than one message per shift. They also get a push notification (if they use the mobile app) telling them how many shifts they have that week. Times in the email are shown in your workspace's timezone and follow your workspace's 12-hour or 24-hour time format, so they match exactly what you saw while scheduling. You can confirm those settings in Workspace settings.
A few details worth knowing:
- If there are no drafts to publish, Deskie tells you everything is already live and sends nothing.
- Notifications are sent on a best-effort basis. If an email bounces or a push fails for one person, it does not stop the rest of the batch and does not undo the publish. The schedule is live regardless of whether every message got through.
Staff see their own upcoming published shifts on the time clock area of the app. See Time clock. The schedule grid can also overlay each staff member's actual clock-in and clock-out against their scheduled shift, so you can compare planned versus worked time once clock data exists.
Recurring shifts
When creating a new shift, you can turn on Repeat shift to schedule the same shift across multiple days. This is useful for staff who work a fixed pattern, such as Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.
To set up a recurring shift:
- Fill in the shift details (staff member, times, role, break, notes) as usual.
- Check Repeat shift.
- Pick the days of the week the shift should land on.
- Set a Repeat until date. Deskie creates one shift for each matching weekday from the start date through that end date.
As you choose days and an end date, the dialog shows a live preview of how many shifts will be created, for example "Creates 9 drafts through Apr 30," so you always know the blast radius before saving. The Save button updates to match ("Create 9 drafts"). Every shift in a recurring run is created as a draft, so you can review the whole series before publishing.
Each occurrence is a real, individual shift on the grid, so you can edit or delete any single one on its own. The repeat times stay anchored to your workspace timezone, so a 9 AM shift stays 9 AM local even across a daylight-saving change.
Copy last week
Most schedules repeat week to week, so rather than rebuilding from scratch you can use Copy last week. This takes every shift from the previous week at the current location and recreates it in the week you are viewing, keeping the same staff, the same times, and the same roles and break settings.
Copied shifts always come in as drafts, even if the originals were published. That gives you a starting template you can adjust (swap a person, tweak a time, delete a shift) and then publish when it is ready. If the previous week had no shifts, Deskie tells you there was nothing to copy.
Open shifts
An open shift is a shift with no staff member assigned to it. Open shifts are useful when you know a slot needs coverage but have not decided who will take it yet.
To create one, add a shift and leave the staff member set to Open shift instead of picking a person. Open shifts appear in their own "Open shifts" row at the bottom of the grid, drawn with a distinct striped, dashed style so they read clearly as "not yet assigned to a person" rather than belonging to anyone.
Open shifts behave like any other shift in most respects: they can be drafts or published, and they can carry a role label. They do not count toward an individual's scheduled-hours total, since no one owns them. When you publish a week, open shifts are published too, but because no one is assigned, there is nobody to notify for them. To assign an open shift, click it and pick a staff member.
Note that you can only assign a shift to someone who is schedulable at that location. Deskie checks this when you save, so you cannot accidentally put a customer or guest on the schedule.