Scheduling is where next week gets decided. The section has four pages — Schedule, Marketplace, Acknowledgements, and Configuration — and everything you build here eventually lands on the daily roster your dispatchers work from.
A week, start to finish
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 offers two ways to start: have Viki generate it from demand, driver preferences, time off, and your work-hours rules, or copy a week you've already run — or apply a saved schedule template — and 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's 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 a nightly automatic sync; the rostering article covers that hand-off and everything that happens on the day.
Working the grid full screen
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.
Seeing several weeks at once
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:
Weeks that haven't been generated show as empty greyed columns marked "Not generated yet" — visible, but not something you can schedule into until the week is generated.
Week-level actions disappear — Publish, Notify drivers, Reset week, Copy week, Save as template, History, and swapping two drivers' weeks from the driver panel each act on one specific week, so they only appear in the one-week view. Save, Discard and the unsaved-changes list stay, because they act on whichever days you edited.
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.
The kinds of shift
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.
The marketplace
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.
Setting the rules once
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.