Enter employee coverage needed

By adding open (unassigned) time blocks, you can tell WSDN your workforce needs at your specified times, on each day of the week. You can specify how many employees you need, at what times you need them, and in which department. Optionally you may also specify the area, task, and general time of day for which you need the help. Then in a later step (STEP 3), you can instruct WSDN to automatically assign the best employees for each time slot based on your Rules, such as employee qualifications, availability, preferences, rank, maximum hours, cost, etc.

Determine how many employees you need to work and when. You should also decide whether or not to break down your coverage needs into specific areas, tasks, and/or times of day. If all employees in the whole company perform the same exact task in the same place, for example, there may be no need to specify areas or tasks, and if you are asked for them, you can simply leave them unselected (ie., choose "None Selected"). The example below shows an example where the manager wants to specify the tasks, and we will use this example to show the rest of the procedure:

Example: Fresh Food Grocery needs two cashiers, one manager, and one stocking personnel daily during regular business hours. So when creating our recurring schedule, we would add two open time blocks for the two cashiers, one open time block for the manager, and one open time block for the stocking personnel.

Click on Edit menu, then Add Time block(s) (Special), then Add open time blocks.

3. ENTER THE INFORMATION IN THE GREEN FORM(S) TO CREATE TIME BLOCKS IN A SPECIFIC TIME SLOT / AREA / TASK

Fill in the required information on the green form that shows in the lower section of the screen. Some options in this form may be different on your screen, depending on the data you entered in the setup wizard.

•	Time of Day (if chosen in setup wizard): Choose the time of day from the drop down menu. This will default the From and To (below) to the start time and end time specified in the Time of Day item.

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From (Start time) to (End time): Set these times to the start and end times, respectively, for which you need employee coverage. Although you can't specify different start and end times for different days on a single green form, you can use the additional green forms below to enter more time slots which could apply to different days. Times can be specified down to the exact minute. To give you an understanding of what you can type here, the following are all examples of valid times (assuming you did not choose military time in your setup wizard): "9a", "5:28p", "12:01 am", "8:15pm". If using military time, the following are valid examples of times: "0", "15:23", "24:00", "16"

•	Under each day in the box next to the "#:": Enter a number to specify how many employees you need in a certain department/area/task. You choose these on the next step.

•	Choose the appropriate options from the Department / Area / Task drop down menus (your account may be showing other category options depending on your settings). It's OK to leave some options as (None Selected), is the coverage doesn't break down to that level for your situation.

•	Notes: This is a free text area for you to enter any information you want about the time blocks. These notes will show to the employees. Keep in mind that you can not sort, group, or filter by anything in the notes. These notes will be replicated on every time block.

If this is your very first time adding time blocks, we recommend clicking the Submit button at this point so you can see how the time blocks look once added in the weekly view. You can easily repeat steps 2 and 3 above to add more time blocks after submitting. Or you can scroll down the page to add more open time blocks in the additional green forms below (up to 10 green forms by default).

If we want to create the recurring schedule for the example described in step 1, we have to fill in the green form above three times to cover the need for the cashiers, manager, and stocking personnel.

In the first form, underneath "On the following days" we will enter '2' under each day, and choose cashier in the task drop down menu because we need 2 cashiers daily.

In the second form, we will enter '1' under each day and will choose Manager in the task menu because we need 1 manager daily.

See Using the time block editors for information on how to make adjustments to the schedule by adding, removing, and changing time blocks. Generally, these functions work the same in both the recurring and current schedules.