In this article, you will learn how to make the most out of Planday’s scheduling feature and spend the least amount of time to get the best possible overview of your employees’ scheduled hours.

To create a roster, you need three components: a Department, an Employee group and Employees. If you haven’t already set those components up, you can learn about them in the Setup Planday article.

Navigate to the Schedule tab in the top bar. Now you can find the employee you wish to create and allocate a shift to and click the “+” icon on the chosen day.

From here you can set the start and end times of the shift and assign the correct Employee group/Job role for this particular shift.

Breaks can be applied manually to individual shifts or you can navigate to Settings > Schedule > Breaks to set up your own automatic break rules.

Once you hit “Create” you will have created your very first shift in Planday.

💡 You can copy existing shifts by holding down ALT (Windows) or OPTION (Mac) while dragging and dropping your shift to another day or another employee.

Shift types are used to distinguish one type of shift from another, such as distinguishing paid leave from a standard working day.

You can also create your own custom-made Shift types by following the steps in the article Create and use Shift types.

When you create or edit a shift in the schedule you can apply a Shift type. Once selected, hit “Save” and the shift has now been updated to reflect the chosen Shift type.

You are able to export reports from Planday that tell you how often employees have taken certain Shift types such as Personal/Carer’s Leave. Learn more about using Shift type to generate reports.

Contract rules allow you to easily track how many hours your employees are contracted to work and compare this to how many hours they have been scheduled for.

A traffic light system is used to keep track of your employees' ordinary hours of work in relation to their contracted or agreed number of hours per week.

Learn how to utilise Contract rules to manage Overtime.

Working time rules have been set up to notify you when a shift has been scheduled that may be in conflict with a particular section of the relevant Award. For example, you will receive a warning should you schedule a shift for a casual employee for less than the minimum number of hours per shift detailed in the Award.

The Working Time Rules specific to the Modern Award covering your employees can be found by navigating to Settings > Schedule > Working time rules.

If you were to accidentally create a shift that conflicts with one of the Working time rules set up within Planday, you will see a warning prompting you to do one of three things:

Ignore - Keeps the shift as you created it. In this instance, we recommend you contact the Fair Work Ombudsman or seek independent legal advice to discuss the possible implications of keeping the shift unchanged.

Cancel - The shift is not created.

Edit shift - You are redirected back to the shift creation pop-up window allowing you to make any necessary changes.

To export a record of working time rule infractions, you can download a Working time rule report under Schedule > Tools > Working time rule report (Excel format). ⬇️
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Now that you have mastered how to schedule your employees based on the Award, you can save time when creating future schedules by using Templates. Please navigate to our Schedule templates article.
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