Availability

How to indicate your work preferences

James Denham avatar
Written by James Denham
Updated over a week ago

The Availability tool lets you mark when you are free to work, or unable to work, so that your employer knows if you can work a shift before building the rota.

On the Availability page, you’ll be presented with a calendar where you can set your availability or unavailability. You can use the arrow icons to change months at the top of the page, or click on the month’s name to quickly select a different month.

A screenshot of an employee's Availability calendar on the Desktop version of RotaCloud.

Note: If you’re a Manager or Administrator, you can change which employee’s Availability you’re editing using the drop-down menu in the top-left corner of the page.

One-off availability

To mark a single day, click on it on the calendar. The ‘Create Availability’ menu will pop up. Here, you can choose to set whether you’re available, or unavailable.

By default, ‘All day’ will be selected, but if you need to enter a specific time, you can unselect this option to be shown a start and end time to enter. If you have multiple periods in the same day, use the + icon to add another set of times.

A screenshot of the process of creating an instance of Availability, showing multiple time periods in the same day.

You can also quickly mark a whole day as available/unavailable from the calendar, using the shortcut menu in the top-right corner of each date.

A screenshot of the all-day shortcuts found on an employee's Availability calendar on the Desktop version of RotaCloud.

Note: You are unable to add both availability and unavailability to the same date on the calendar.

Editing & deleting

Once availability has been added to a date, you can use the menu in the top-right corner of that date to make any edits to your availability, or click ‘Clear day’ to delete it.

A screenshot of the Edit and Clear day tools, found in the shortcut menu of an employee's Availability calendar.

Using the ‘Available all day’ and ‘ Unavailable all day’ options in this menu will also overwrite any availability that you’ve already entered on that date.

Availability patterns

You can also create patterns to more quickly mark multiple dates. To get started, click the ‘Create repeating pattern’ button above the calendar.

You’ll be taken to the ‘Repeating Pattern’ screen. First, set the start and end dates for your pattern, and choose how many weeks long the pattern will be. Your pattern will loop for as many times as necessary until the end date that you set. For example, if you create a 2-week pattern and set your start and end dates 8 weeks apart, then the pattern will repeat 4 times.

Next, in the same way as adding an individual day, mark your availability by clicking on each day in the pattern. While adding a information to a single day, you can use the checkboxes to instantly copy the same times to other days in the pattern, to save you some time setting the pattern up:

A GIF showing the process of adding Unavailability to multiple dates while creating an Availability pattern, in the desktop version of RotaCloud.

At any time while creating the pattern, you can click ‘Reset’ to start again, or click ‘Cancel’ to return to the calendar without adding any availability. When you’re happy with your pattern, click ‘Create Pattern’ and it’ll be added to your calendar.

Note: Creating a pattern will overwrite any availability that’s already been added in the respective dates. You can use a blank pattern to quickly clear multiple days on your calendar.

Viewing availability

If you’re an Administrator, or a Manager who has rota-editing permissions, then you can refer to Availability while planning the rota. You can show or hide it whenever you need by going to the Tools menu and clicking ‘show’ or ‘hide availability’:

A GIF of how to Show Availability on the Rota, from the Tools menu, on the Desktop version of RotaCloud.

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