Help creating an Employee Schedule base

[Daniel_GS]

Hey everyone,

I’m having trouble creating an employee scheduling base that has the functionality I’m looking for. Our company is a delivery service, and services close to 50 regions. For each region, there is at least one “opener” and one to two “closers”.

The functionality I’m looking for:

• Be able to create weekly schedules by assigning employees to region shifts on specific dates
• Display employees in each shift based on their availability
• Have the ability to account for “call-outs”, which will be submitted through a form
• Have an easy UI for managers to create the schedule for each week

The biggest problem I have run into is the date functionality, as there is no way I see to create a “week start date” function and have the rest of the week populate like in excel. This is also an issue with row/column management for me.

I’m looking for someone to go over all of this for me, and either give guidance on how to do it take it over completely.

This is what we’re hoping to transition from (google sheets):

Thanks!

[Connex_Digital]

Daniel, happy to help. Sending you a PM

[Russell_Findlay]

the great news is that this will all work and you will ultimately be happier in airtable than in google sheets - the ease of reporting and communication will increase with a database …

Airtable as a database will however require you to be more structured in how you structure and connect your data (e.g. do you create shifts - as a combination of role and region and create a number of each per region and then fill them with staff or do you just have a shift as a time and region and add as many people (with role types) as you like) and also how you want to build in work processes to this (e.g. are you allocating shifts by week or by day - how will that work with holidays)

Once you have worked through the solution and then the underlying data you can adapt how users work with the data…

as a simple structure - you will need the following tables

Weeks
Employees
Regions
Shifts (a junction table between Region and Weeks)

You may also benefit from using junction tables so a table that combines employees and shifts so you can easily track status of offers of work etc - this could also get more complex with role specific (opener closer etc)

You can automate the creation of your region shifts table (and also turn this into discrete day shifts if and when this is useful) and then add employees to a linked record field (or fields to distinguish the roles) - this is where a more compelx version would create the employee-shift table.

the manager would go to the shift table (ideally in an interface or a portal - but also a form with prefill could work) - and then allocate employees to roles on that shift.

You can visualise the view in different ways - incl timeline and send out shift rotas etc.

That’s a bit of an overview - but to give you confidence it can all be done - without code or much complexity

[Cherry_Yang2]

Hi @Daniel_GS,

I’m an Airtable consultant and have built databases for both delivery services and scheduling databases before. I’d love to connect to discuss your project more.

You can reach me at cherry[at]airopsconsulting.org or schedule a call with me directly here: Calendly - Cherry Yang

Here’s my website if you’d know to know more about me. https://www.airopsconsulting.org/

Look forward to connecting with you.

Best,
Cherry

[Philo]

Hi Cherry, do you still consult on creating shift/employee schedulers? Thanks!