Auto-Fill Week in helloswap: What It Does and What It Leaves to the Manager

Auto-fill week takes the numbers you give it — how many people you need on each shift, each weekday — and builds a draft schedule that balances everyone's hours against their contract. It doesn't publish anything on its own, and it doesn't make the staffing or skills decisions for you; it fills shifts within rules you set, and hands you a draft to check before your team sees it.

What it actually does

Auto-fill week sits next to a department's name on the Schedule, and it's available whenever that department's week isn't published yet. It works one department at a time. You tell it how many people you need per shift per weekday — or use "Every day" to set all seven at once — untick anyone who shouldn't be considered that week, and click Fill.

From there:

• Shifts are handed out at random, but fairly: everyone's hours are balanced against their contract over the three weeks before, so someone coming off a long week gets fewer shifts, and someone coming off a short one gets more.
• Nobody gets stuck with the same shift time every single day.
• Every shift it creates is checked against working-time rules — rest periods, legal weekly limits, days off, availability, approved time off. Those are never broken, no exceptions.
• Draft shifts already sitting in the week, like a repeating weekly shift, are kept and count toward the numbers you set.
• If a slot genuinely can't be filled by anyone legally, it becomes an open shift instead of being forced onto someone.
• Everything it produces is a draft. Nothing is visible to your team or final until you publish.

If someone worked more than their contract last week, Auto-fill's response is to give them fewer shifts this week, not to shorten a shift to make the hours work — a shift is always exactly as long as its pattern in Settings. Approved time off is accounted for too, so a week with holiday in it doesn't quietly become a week they "owe" hours for.

What it leaves to you

Auto-fill's balancing is a priority, not a promise. If a week genuinely can't be staffed any other way, it will give someone more hours or push someone over target — but only after it's tried everyone still under theirs. That means your job after clicking Fill is to look at the draft and ask: does this result make sense for this particular week? A few things worth checking every time:

• Open shifts it created. These are the slots nobody could legally take. They need a human decision — post them more widely, adjust staffing needs, or accept the gap.
• Anyone pushed over contract. It happens for a reason (an odd week, a weekend falling mid-week), but it's worth knowing who and why before you publish.
• Skill requirements. If a shift needs a skill — key holder, first aid — Auto-fill respects that, but it's on you to make sure the right people have the skill recorded on their profile in the first place.
• Staffing numbers themselves. Auto-fill fills to the numbers you give it that week; it doesn't tell you if those numbers are wrong for demand. That judgment stays with you.

When to use it, and when not to

Auto-fill is best for a normal, repeating week where your staffing needs are stable — the kind of week where you'd otherwise be dragging the same names into the same slots by habit. For an unusual week — a holiday rush, a one-off event, a department running short-staffed on purpose — build it manually or adjust the numbers before filling, since Auto-fill will do exactly what you tell it, not what the week actually needs. And whichever way you build it, treat the draft stage as real review time: nothing goes live until you publish, so that's your last chance to catch an open shift or an odd distribution before your team sees it.