What publishing does
Publishing a week turns every draft in it into a real shift. Each person who is on it gets one notification covering the whole week, not one per shift, and the shifts appear in the Paddl Assist app straight away.
Before you confirm, the publish box tells you how many shifts you are about to publish, how many people it affects, and any warnings on them. Read it: this is the last point at which nothing has been promised to anyone.
Changing a published shift
You can still move, shorten, reassign or cancel a published shift. Each of those notifies the person affected and only that person, and each one is recorded.
The notice counter
The header shows how many shifts changed at short notice this week. "Short notice" is measured against your site's notice target, which defaults to seven days and lives under Settings > Locations.
Notice is always measured against the shift's original start time. If you move a shift twice, the second move is still measured against the time the person was first given, because that is the commitment they actually had.
Why Paddl records this
The Employment Rights Act 2025 brings in duties around reasonable shift notice and compensation for shifts cancelled at short notice, with the detail expected in secondary legislation. Nobody has to do anything about it yet. Paddl keeps the record from now so that when the rules land you already have a year of history rather than starting from zero.
You will not see a pound figure. The compensation rates are not in force, and a confident number that turns out to be wrong is worse than no number. Paddl shows counts and hours until the rates are published.
Deleting versus cancelling
A draft you delete is simply gone: it was never promised to anyone. A published shift is cancelled rather than deleted, so the record of it having existed, and of you having withdrawn it, survives.