The rota lives under Rota & Scheduling in the admin panel. It shows one week at a time for one site, with a row per person and a column per day.
Draft, then publish
Every shift you create starts as a draft. Nobody is told about it and nothing appears in the app until you publish the week, so you can move things around all afternoon without anyone's phone buzzing.
Read the band first
If the site has a connected till with a month of takings, each day carries a demand band underneath it: darker where the site is usually busy at that hour, paler where it is quiet. Look at it before you place anything. The shifts should follow the dark stretches, and a shift over a pale stretch is a question. See The demand band on the rota.
You can also ask Paddy to draft the week as open shifts against the band and fill in what it gives you. See Letting Paddy suggest a week. No band yet? Everything below works exactly the same.
Adding a shift
Click an empty cell on the row for the person and the day you want.
Set the start and end time, and the unpaid break if there is one.
Pick an area and a team if you use them. These drive the default candidate list and, later, the pay rate.
Save. It appears greyed, because it is still a draft.
Leave the person blank and you get an open shift: a slot on the rota with nobody on it. Open shifts count in the week's totals and, once published, get their own alert when one is still empty 48 hours out. See Unfilled shift alerts.
Copying last week
Most weeks look like the week before. Copy last week brings every shift forward as a draft, keeping the people, times and breaks. Change what has moved and publish.
Templates
If your week has a shape that repeats regardless of who is in, save it under Rota > Templates. A template holds the days, times, breaks and teams but not the people, so applying one gives you a skeleton to fill in. A new template starts from your site's trading hours rather than an empty grid.
Shifts outside trading hours
A shift that starts before you open or ends after you close is flagged in the grid rather than refused. Deep cleans and deliveries are real, and the flag is there so an accidental 03:00 start does not slip through.
Only employees appear on the rota. Contractors are booked through contractor events instead, so one person never has two competing records of when they are on site.