Scheduling & Shifts

Scheduling is where next week gets decided. The section has four pages: Schedule, Marketplace, Acknowledgements, and Configuration. Everything you build here eventually lands on the daily roster your dispatchers work from.

The bar across the top of the schedule tracks the week through four steps, and they map the whole routine.

Route demand arrives. Amazon's forecast for the week syncs in on its own. You can adjust a day's expected routes before building, or add custom demand for volume the forecast doesn't show yet.

You build the week. An empty week shows "Build this week's schedule" with the ways to start: have Viki generate it from demand, driver preferences, time off, and your work-hours rules, or use "Create from template or copy a previous week" to apply a saved schedule template or copy a week you've already run, then adjust by hand. Generating has its own article covering the plan screen, the driver availability matrix, and the generation options.

You review and publish. Nothing reaches a driver until you publish, so edit freely first. Publishing is also what starts acknowledgement tracking.

Drivers respond. The acknowledgements page tells you who has opened the week and who has explicitly acknowledged it, and lets Viki text the stragglers. Closer to each shift date, Viki calls and texts rostered drivers to confirm they're coming in. That is a separate check with its own page and article.

Publishing a week does not by itself put anyone on a roster. The schedule has to be pushed across to the day, either by hand or on the daily automatic sync; the rostering article covers that hand-off and everything that happens on the day.

Edits on the grid are held until you save. While you have unsaved edits, the actions bar shows Discard and Save changes (with a count of the changed days you can review). Saving writes the week; it does not send anything to drivers.

Publishing is a separate button. On a week that has never been published it reads Publish & notify (or Publish when the "Notify drivers when a schedule is published" setting is off). Once a week is published, a "Published" chip appears and the button changes to Publish N shifts whenever you save shifts that drivers haven't received yet. You can't publish while there are unsaved edits; save or discard first. A separate Notify button on a published week re-sends every driver with a published shift a message with their schedule.

Time off comes in two ways: approved time off synced from payroll, and time off you enter by hand. Both are respected when Viki generates the week and both show on the plan screen.

You can only add or remove time off while the week has not been generated yet. On that view, the "Upcoming time off" card lists each driver's time off with a Remove time off button per range and an Add time off button. Once the week is generated the card is gone, which is why you can remove time off for weeks further out but not for a week you've already built. To get the controls back, use Reset week to return the week to the not-generated state, then remove the time off before generating again.

Removing payroll-synced time off is temporary: the next payroll sync adds it back. Fix the request in your payroll system if it should stay gone. Schedule templates and copying a week carry shifts only; neither adds, removes, or overrides time off.

Above the grid, a warning band lists the active drivers who have no shift on any day of the week or weeks you're viewing. The band is a prompt, not a blocker: use Show all drivers to turn on the All-drivers toggle and reveal their rows, then add shifts for them as usual. If the list is long, the band shows the first five names with a +N more button that expands the full list inline. Adding a shift for a missing driver clears that driver from the warning right away, even before you save, and the band disappears once every active driver has a shift. Drivers whose approved time off covers every day in the viewed period are not listed.

The schedule page stacks the lifecycle bar, the compliance and open-slot panels and the demand forecast above the grid, which leaves the part you actually edit a narrow strip. The expander in the top-right of the grid's own header opens the same grid full screen, with an X to come back.

It is the same schedule, not a read-only copy. Search, View by, the shift-type filter, the legend, Desynced only, Bulk select, All drivers, Save and Discard all come with it, and every edit behaves as it does on the page: dragging a shift to another driver or another day, the shift menu, the day and driver panels, filling open slots. Unsaved edits survive opening and closing it, so moving between the two never costs you work. The forecast chart and the station staff schedule stay behind on the page.

Inside full screen, and only there, a 1 week / 3 weeks toggle sets how much is on the grid. Three weeks puts the previous, selected and next week in one continuous run of day columns that scrolls sideways with each driver's name kept in view, and a heavier divider where each week starts. Chevrons at either edge pull in one more week at a time, up to nine; switching back to 1 week resets the span, and full screen always opens on a single week.

The whole span is editable, including dragging a shift from one week into the next, and one Save writes every changed day across every week. Two things differ while more than one week is up:

Compliance still works a week at a time: an edited week is re-checked on its own and its warnings join the rest in the issues panel, so weekly rules like hour caps keep the meaning they have on a single week.

Most shifts are assigned to a driver with a real time. An open shift has nobody on it yet and goes to the marketplace for drivers to claim. A placeholder shift is assigned but deliberately vague about the hour: it tells the driver they work that day, and you fill in the time closer to it.

Each associate's role comes from Cortex and syncs into VoiceERP; you don't set it here. Someone whose only Cortex role is Helper is treated as a helper: they appear under the Helpers filter on the Driver configuration tab and are matched to helper shift types (their detail panel offers "Any helper shift" instead of "Any shift"). Anyone with the Driver role, including people who hold both roles, is scheduled as a driver. To make someone a helper, change their role in Cortex and let the sync bring it across.

Open shifts, VTO offers, and drivers' own drop and swap requests all flow through one marketplace page. You publish what drivers can see and get the final say on every claim, with a compliance preview against your work-hours rules before you approve. The marketplace article covers each posting type and the approval bands.

Configuration holds the inputs: each driver's weekly preferences, reusable preference and schedule templates, station staff shifts, extra shift types, company-wide manager defaults, and the compliance rules generation must respect. Its own article walks the tabs, including the automation that can generate, publish, and sync a week to the roster on a cadence without anyone pressing a button.