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Lock availability / preferences after certain date?

“Is there a way to schedule employee availability? Specifically if we say they need to enter their work preferences by a certain date every other week. Is there a way we can lock it so that they can’t go in and change it after the fact?”

We do not offer such a feature at this time but note that normally it is always best to know each employees’ most up to date preferences.

If you are struggling with employees who change their preferences after you Publish the schedule and then complain about the schedule, you might try this: 

Just before you “Publish” a schedule week, go to the “Grid” schedule view and click the “Analyze Shifts” button.  This will add a “Pref” column to the left of all assigned shifts for week that shows the employees preference status for their assigned date and time.

You can then click our “Print” button to print the assigned shifts along with the current status of the employees’ preferences for their assignments.  Then you can Publish the week and know you have a hard copy of the exact preference information for each employee for each of their assigned shifts. So no one can complain later if they edited their preference and they don’t match what you printed out.

If you decide that you do want the listed preferences to not be up to date you can do the following:

If you prefer Preference editing on and off at SETTINGS > Global Employee Permissions. When these permissions are set to ‘Yes’ employees can edit information, but when they are set to ‘No’ employees cannot edit, but the information is available in your account and continues to be used by Autofill, etc.  We do have customers who turn on editing just for the first few weeks of a new semester, but leave it off for the most part, so that employees will rely on Time Off instead of entering Cannot Work times without asking first.

Note that you could leave ‘Like’ and ‘Dislike’ preferences on, and simply disable the ‘Cannot Work’ preference for long periods of time to accomplish a kind of compromise.

Note that you can see when an employee’s preferences were last updated by checking the timestamps at the bottom of their preferences display on the ‘Schedules – Prefs‘ tab of their employee information screen.

 

We are having issues with staff changing their availability after a schedule is already made. later change 

 schedule employee availability? Specifically if we say they need to enter their work preferences by a certain date every other week. Is there a way we can lock it so that they can’t go in and change it after the fact?