Shifts

Before making rotas, it's a good idea to click on More, go to settings and find Shifts, where you can edit and create the shifts you're going to use. Three come with the trial, and you can edit those if they don't match anything you do at your workplace. To make your own, click Add Shift.

As an example, create an office shift that runs from 9 till 6. You give it a name and a reference, where the reference is typically a shorter version of the name - useful when it comes to reporting and using the rota, though the colour you choose doesn't matter.

You'll fill in a start, a duration and a payable duration, rather than a start and an end, which is where most people expect to fill in. You can set the start using the dropdowns, and fill in the duration faster by typing the duration you want in hours and minutes, not decimal hours. If the shift has an unpaid 30-minute break in the middle, the payable duration would be 8 hours 30 minutes even though the shift itself spans 9 hours.

There's also a site, a department and a pay grade on the shift, covered in the in-depth movie - you don't need to know about that for now. Click submit and the shift joins your list. Go to Rotas, open a rota, choose the shift from your list and start filling in your week. Looking at the calendar, you'll see those shifts appear from the rota.

The quick movie about shifts showed you the bare minimum for making a shift and using it in a rota. This one explains, in depth, all of the choices you make when creating a new shift, and an alternative way to create custom shifts you don't use very often.

Under More, then Settings, you'll find Shifts, including the one made quickly in the last movie. Making a new "afternoon" shift, the colour doesn't matter, but the block you choose does - in your trial settings and defaults you'll only have one block for the rota. The movie about blocks explains the concept in full, but the short version is you might want more than one type of shift in your rotas.

You set a start, a duration and a payable duration. An afternoon shift starting at lunchtime and lasting four hours, with no unpaid break, would have a duration and payable duration that are both four hours. This matters because when your staff clock in and out using Alpaka Presence, Presence compares their readings to what was expected - usually from a rota - using the shift you've placed for somebody to know whether they were early or late, what their dwell time was, and what the payable duration should be. That's how Alpaka decides whether time at work was acceptable and what to pay someone on their timesheet.

You can choose a site and potentially a department for a shift, though it's not usually recommended to set a department, because it restricts the shift to rotas built for that department. If you want to put admin staff, cleaning staff and kitchen staff all on the same rota, a department-restricted shift wouldn't be available to you. It's generally better to leave department blank so all departments can use the shifts you create.

For pay grade: choosing none means staff are paid their default rate of pay for that shift. Specifying a rate overrides their contracted rate. This is typically not used for rates in pounds and pence, but for multiples, uplifts or incentives - covered fully in the pay grades movie, since there are four kinds of ways to pay people.

If you no longer want a shift, you can make it inactive and submit - this won't remove the shift from rotas it's already used in, but it will affect Alpaka's decisions about whether time worked under that shift is acceptable, so it's best not to make shifts inactive too soon after you stop using them. It's also best not to radically change a shift once it's been created and handed out to people - if the afternoon shift is changing to run until five, it's better to create a new shift called "afternoon-5" than edit the existing one, since editing or deleting shifts can cause problems for people still working those shifts from existing rotas.

In the shift list, a highlighted row means the payable duration doesn't match the shift's natural duration - normal where there are unpaid breaks. Like other Alpaka list views, you can refresh, reset filters, and download the list as an Excel file, and filter by site or department, though most organisations won't have so many shifts that filtering becomes necessary.

Back in a rota, if someone needs to work an existing shift but arrive at an unusual time as a one-off, there are two ways to handle it. You can create a custom shift for that day only - for example "arriving late afternoon" starting at one instead of twelve, with the payable duration adjusted accordingly - without affecting the pay grade or the block that goes into the schedule. Or, holding down the option key on a Mac (alt on a PC) and clicking a shift opens a more detailed dialogue where you can adjust the start time of that single instance directly, without creating a new shift at all. Shifts are meant to be fast and for common use; for exceptions, use a custom shift or adjust the individual instance.