Swaps and cover
A rota changes after it goes out — that is not a failure of planning, it is what a week does. The planner's job is to make every change visible, agreed and recorded against the shift it touched, so that nobody has to reconstruct Thursday from a group chat.
See it on your own week
How a swap runs
Three states, each with a name and a time on it.
Proposed
From the shift itself, on the share link. The person opens their own shift, chooses swap, and picks who they would like to swap with from the people free that day. A manager can propose one the same way from the draft or the published week.
Agreed
The other person sees the proposal against the shift and answers yes or no. Then the manager answers. Both answers are needed; a swap is never live on one person's word, and a manager can decline with a short note that both people see.
Recorded
The two shifts change places on the published week, and each cell carries the record: who proposed, who agreed, who approved, and when each of those happened. The print view marks both cells as changed. Nothing about the original placement is erased — the record shows what the week was and what it became.
Finding cover
Who is free, who said yes, written where the shift is.
Finding cover
Someone cannot make a shift. The manager opens that shift and chooses cover, and the planner lists the people who are available that day and not already on shift, in the order they last worked that role. The shift can be offered to one person or to all of them at once. The first yes takes it, everyone else's offer closes, and the shift moves.
The cell shows a cover note — who covered, who agreed it, when — which is what you can see in the draft week on the home page. If nobody says yes, the cell turns red and stays red on the print view, which is an honest wall to look at: an open shift is not a quiet day.
Cover offers go out on the share link only. The planner sends no messages to anyone's phone, so the person doing the asking is still you; the planner just shows you who can be asked and keeps the answers in one place.
After the week
A published week keeps its own history.
On a week already published
Swaps and cover almost always happen after publishing, so the planner treats a published week as the normal case. The change is applied to the live week and the share link updates for everyone. The cells involved carry a small mark in the print view, so if the wall copy was printed on Monday and a swap happened on Wednesday, the difference is easy to spot and reprint.
What the record is for afterwards
The first use is the boring one: answering "who actually worked Tuesday" a fortnight later, in one look, with the names of the people who agreed the change. The second is fairness over a run of weeks — if one person has covered four Saturdays in a row, the record shows it plainly, and a manager can see it before the person has to say it. The third is hand-over: a new manager can read the last eight weeks and understand how the team really runs, not how the pattern says it should.
What the record is not: a timesheet, or evidence for pay. It shows the plan and the agreed changes to it, and it will not tell you who arrived late. That distinction is spelled out on the what it does not do page.
See a swap recorded on your own week.
Send one real week and we will run a swap and a cover through it on the walkthrough, so you can see exactly what your staff would see on their phones.
See it on your own week