The rota is a calendar of shifts for the people at one home. Nothing you build is visible to staff until you publish the dates it falls in, so you can plan freely and release it when it is ready.

Open Staff Rota from the sidebar under Daily work. It appears once a home is selected. The page is titled Staff rota and shows one week or one month at a time. Times are UK local time.

Add a shift

Select Add shift. Choose:

Person — someone at this home, or Open shift (nobody yet) (see below).
Shift — one of your organisation's shifts, which fills in the times, or Custom times.
Starts, Starts at, Ends, Ends at. A shift can run for at most 72 hours, and appears in every week it touches.
Type — Work, On call or Sleep-in.
Notes, if you need them.

Shifts stay in draft until you publish the dates they fall in.

Open shifts

Leave the person as Open shift (nobody yet) and choose Open to: Anyone, Bank staff or Agency staff. Once published, eligible staff can claim it, and you confirm who gets it under Approvals.

Double-booking

If a shift overlaps another shift for the same person, ARC saves it and warns you: "Saved, but this overlaps another shift for the same person". A red Overlap badge stays on the shift. Nothing is blocked. The check looks at the person's shifts in every home of your organisation, not just this one.

Repeating patterns

Select Patterns, then Add a pattern, for someone who works the same cycle every time. Give the Person, the Cycle length (days) (1 to 56), the Anchor date (day 0), and one or more steps. Each step has Starts on day, Start time, Ends on day, End time and Type. Use this example fills in a 48-hour shift on a six-day cycle.

ARC creates the pattern's shifts twelve months ahead. Editing a pattern replaces its future draft shifts; shifts you have edited by hand, or that are already published, are left alone and listed afterwards. Deleting a pattern removes its future shifts that are unedited and unpublished, and keeps the rest.

Copy a week forward

Select Copy week forward, choose how many weeks to copy into (1 to 12), then Copy forward. Every shift that starts in the week on screen is copied to the following weeks at the same clock times. Shifts that came from a pattern are not copied, because the pattern already covers those weeks.

Publish

Select Publish, choose From and To (inclusive), then Publish these dates. Shifts that start in those dates become visible to the people on them.

Changing or deleting a published shift tells the person affected, and a changed shift carries a Changed after publish badge.
To take dates back, open Publish and select Unpublish beside the range. Those shifts go back to draft and people can no longer see them.

Published shifts are what staff see on their own Rota page, limited by the visibility setting your organisation administrator chose.

Leave on the rota

Approved and waiting leave shows against the person (waiting leave is dashed). You see its type and reason; colleagues only ever see that someone is unavailable.

To add leave for someone yourself, select Record leave at the top of the page. Choose the person, type, first and last day and an optional reason. It is approved at once and the person is told. You cannot record your own leave. See Approve leave, swaps and open-shift claims.