How volunteer scheduling works

The Schedule page is where you plan who serves at each of your services. This article gives you a tour so you know what everything on the page means before you start assigning people.

Before you begin

You need access to the Schedule tab. Admins have it automatically, and other team members can be given access to it.

Finding the Schedule page

Click Schedule in the left sidebar (look for the calendar-with-a-checkmark icon). The page opens with the heading Schedule and the subtitle "Manage volunteer scheduling for your services."

If you have permission to manage who's on your team, you'll also see a small gear button in the top-right corner. It opens a Schedule settings page that, for now, does just one thing: it controls who can use the Schedule tab. There are no other settings there yet.

Which events show up here

Not every event lands on the Schedule page.

On the redesigned Schedule, only the events you add appear, whether they repeat or not: click Add event at the top of the page and pick the event. A repeating event stays until its series ends; a one-off drops off after its date. The ... menu on a card removes it again. The page also has a Teams tab under its title; see Run your teams from the Schedule tab.

On the classic Schedule, two kinds appear:

Recurring events (your weekly services) show up automatically and keep rolling forward, week after week, without you doing anything.
One-off events only appear once you turn on Request volunteers in the event editor.

If nothing is set up yet, you'll see a message that reads "No events to schedule yet." On the redesigned Schedule it comes with the Add event button; on the classic Schedule it reminds you that a one-off event needs "Request volunteers" turned on to be added.

Reading the grid

Each event gets its own card laid out as a grid:

Rows are grouped by team. Each team has a shaded band (for example, a Worship band or a Hospitality band), and under it sits one row per serving role (like Sound Tech, Greeter, or Usher).
Columns are dates. Each column is one date the event happens, so you can see several weeks side by side.

To fill a slot, you click into the cell where a role row meets a date column and pick a person. To learn that step in detail, see Assigning volunteers to dates.

Moving between dates

For a recurring event, you get a few controls in the top-right of its card:

A week picker (on a computer) that lets you show 1 week up to 4 weeks of dates at once.
A Today button that jumps you back to the current week.
Left and right arrows that step you one period backward or forward in time.

A one-off event shows a single date column, since it only happens once, so it has no week picker or arrows.

Past dates are locked

Columns for dates that have already passed appear dimmed and are read-only. You can look at who served, but you can't add or change assignments in the past.

To open the fuller view for one date, click a date at the top of a column or click the event's name. That takes you to that event's own schedule view, focused on the date you picked.

Good to know

On a phone, the week picker is hidden to save space, but the Today button and the arrows still work.
The Schedule page only lists events that are published. A draft event won't appear until you publish it.
Empty slots only show on today's and future dates, which is why past columns look quieter.