Build a weekly roster, staff each shift, and keep it covered: templates for repeat shifts, drag-and-drop moves, employee availability, shift swaps, open shifts employees can claim, and a report on who actually showed up.
Scheduling lives on the Schedule page under Time & Attendance. It plans who works which shift and when, staffs each shift with employees, and tracks whether the people who were supposed to show up actually did. It is a separate concern from clocking in and out: a shift is a plan, a time entry is what happened. The two connect where useful: a clock-in is matched to its scheduled shift for lateness, and the schedule adherence report compares one against the other, but neither depends on the other to work.
Scheduling is part of the licensed Time & Attendance module. The page only appears when your company has TIME_ATTENDANCE enabled.
Who can do what
Three permissions gate the page:
| Permission | What it allows |
|---|---|
view_own_schedule | See your own upcoming published shifts, confirm or decline them, request swaps, and claim open shifts. |
view_schedule | See the full roster, coverage gaps, shift templates, and the adherence report, without being able to change anything. |
manage_schedule | Everything above, plus create, edit, publish, delete, and assign shifts, manage templates, and decide swap requests. |
Anyone with view_schedule or manage_schedule sees the manager roster view. Someone with only view_own_schedule sees a simpler personal view of their own shifts instead.
Assigning staff is scoped by who you manage: a company-wide operator (HR, an admin, or anyone who can manage users or both employees and payroll) can roster anyone, while a department manager can only assign shifts to their own direct reports.
The schedule page
The page shows one week at a time, with arrows and a This week button to move around. Managers get three views:
- Roster: shifts grouped by day, in a simple list.
- Grid: a seven-day board with one column per day; shifts can be dragged from one day to another to reschedule them.
- Adherence: the attendance report described below, with its own date range instead of the week navigator.
Filters for work location, status (draft / published / cancelled), and role narrow both the roster and the coverage-gaps check.
Building the roster
New shift opens a form for date, start and end time, role or position, work location, how many people are required, and optional notes. A shift can also be marked Open for claims, which lets employees pick it up themselves (see below).
To create the same shift on several dates at once, add extra dates in the form before saving: Arche creates one shift per date. New shifts are created as draft and are not visible to employees until published.
Applying a saved shift template pre-fills the form's time, role, location, headcount, and notes from the template; you still pick the date(s) and save it as a normal shift. Templates only exist to pre-fill the form: there's no separate "apply to a date range" action. Any shift or the edit form can be turned back into a template with Save as template.
Shift statuses and publishing
A shift is draft, published, or cancelled. Employees only ever see published shifts: a draft is invisible to the person it might get assigned to.
- Publish on a single shift makes it visible and notifies its assignees.
- Publish week finds every draft shift in the visible week and publishes them all in one action, sending a single roster-updated notification instead of one per shift.
- Editing a published shift's date, time, role, location, or headcount notifies its assignees that the shift changed. Toggling Open for claims does not count as a schedule change and never triggers that notification.
- Deleting a shift removes it and all its assignments; this cannot be undone.
Assigning staff
Assign staff on a shift opens a picker of eligible employees, annotated with their availability for that time and any weekly-hours or overtime flags, so you can see a conflict before you create it. Assigning is not blocked by an availability rule or a projected overtime risk, those show as warnings, not errors, so a manager can still schedule someone if there's a good reason to.
An employee who's already on another active shift that overlaps the same day is skipped automatically rather than double-booked; the assignment call reports who was skipped and why.
Each assignment has its own status: assigned, confirmed (the employee accepted it), declined, swap_requested, swapped, or cancelled. The Replace action on an assigned employee reassigns that slot to someone else in one step, checking the new person for conflicts first.
Copy last week and publish week
Two toolbar actions speed up repeat rosters:
- Copy last week recreates the previous week's shifts as drafts, skipping matching shift definitions. The web workflow also copies active staff assignments with conflict checks; inspect its created/skipped results and the new roster before publishing.
- Publish week publishes every draft shift currently shown for the week in a single action.
Coverage gaps
A banner above the roster reports understaffed shifts for the visible week: how many shifts are short, and how many more people are needed in total. Coverage accounts for approved leave: an assigned employee who is on approved leave that day is not counted as covering the shift, so a shift can look fully staffed on paper and still show as a gap because someone assigned to it is away.
The same logic runs the other direction when an approver reviews a leave request: if the requester is rostered on published shifts during the requested dates, the approver sees which of those shifts would fall short of their required headcount if the leave is granted. It's advisory. It never blocks the leave approval.
Shift templates
A template stores a reusable shift definition: name, work location, role, start and end time, required headcount, and notes. Templates have no date and no assignments: they exist purely to pre-fill the new-shift form quickly for a role you staff often (for example, "Front Desk: Weekday"). Manage the list from the Templates button in the roster toolbar.
Employee availability
Employees (or a manager, on their behalf) can record availability rules: Unavailable (hard preference) or Prefer not (soft preference), for either a specific date or a recurring day of the week, with an optional time window. These rules are entirely advisory: they show up as badges in the assign/replace picker and as a warning if you assign over one, but nothing in the system blocks the assignment, and an employee can still claim an open shift that conflicts with their own stated availability.
Shift swaps
An employee can request to swap one of their own upcoming, published shifts, optionally naming a specific colleague they'd like to hand it to. The assignment moves to swap_requested while the request is pending, and the employee can cancel it themselves before a manager decides.
A manager with manage_schedule approves or rejects the request from the Swap requests list:
- Approve with a named colleague reassigns the shift to them.
- Approve without a named colleague releases the assignment, leaving the shift open (and visible as a coverage gap if it drops below headcount).
- Reject returns the shift to its original assignee unchanged.
Open shifts and claiming
A shift marked Open for claims is visible to any employee with a schedule view as an opportunity to pick up extra hours, as long as it still has room and hasn't started. Claiming it immediately assigns the employee: there's no manager approval step, and the manager is notified afterward rather than asked beforehand. An employee already committed to an overlapping shift that day can't claim it.
Schedule adherence
The Adherence view compares published shifts with attendance for a range of up to 92 days. It reports scheduled, attended, late and no-show counts; lateness uses a five-minute grace period. Evaluation uses the work-location timezone, falling back to the company timezone. Today's unmatched shifts remain pending, even after their start time; no-shows are resolved for past days. The adherence rate uses resolved attended/no-show outcomes, excluding pending shifts. The report also distinguishes linked attendance from attendance found without a shift link.
My Schedule
Someone with only view_own_schedule sees their own upcoming published shifts instead of the manager roster. From there they can confirm or decline an assignment, request a swap, and browse and claim open shifts.
Mobile
The Arche mobile app carries scheduling over for both sides of the roster. Employees can view their upcoming shifts, confirm or decline an assignment, request or cancel a swap, browse and claim open shifts, and manage their own availability rules. Managers get the weekly roster, the coverage-gaps report, filters, shift creation, assigning or replacing staff (with the same availability and overtime warnings as the web app), and approving or rejecting swap requests. Shift templates and the adherence report are web-only for now.
FAQ
Why can't an employee see a shift I just created? New shifts start as draft and are invisible to employees until you publish them, either individually or with Publish week.
If I assign someone who's marked themselves unavailable, does it fail? No. Availability is advisory. You'll see a warning in the assign picker, but the assignment still goes through, useful when you genuinely need that person despite their stated preference.
Does claiming an open shift need my approval? No. An employee who claims an open shift is assigned immediately; you're notified after the fact, not asked beforehand.
Does approving a shift swap need the target employee to agree first? The requester can name who they'd like to hand the shift to, but it's still the manager who decides. Approving with a named colleague reassigns it to them directly.
Why does a shift show as a coverage gap when it looks fully staffed? Check whether one of the assigned employees has approved leave that overlaps the shift date: coverage counts them as away, not present, even though they're still listed as assigned.
What happens to assignments when I copy last week's shifts forward? The web workflow copies active assignments as well as shift definitions. Conflicts can cause assignments to be skipped, so review the resulting draft roster before publishing.