User shifts and availability statuses

Two things live on this screen: when your people are scheduled to work, and the availability statuses they can pick from.

How to set them up

1. Go to Settings, then User Management, then User Shifts and Statuses.
2. On the Shifts tab, click New shift and schedule when users are working.
3. On the Statuses tab, configure the availability statuses your staff pick from.

Shifts are a schedule, not a permission

A shift records when someone is expected to be working. It does not stop work being assigned to them outside it, and it does not pause any deadline.

Use shifts where your office genuinely runs to a rota, so colleagues can see who is on today without asking. Skip them if everyone works the same hours, because a shift table that is always the same is a maintenance job with no reader.

Availability statuses are your office's vocabulary

The statuses configured here are what appears in each person's account menu and beside their name elsewhere in the product.

Keep the list short and make the words mean something specific to your office. "Available", "In a hearing", "On leave" tells a colleague what to do. A list of nine shades of busy tells them nothing and gets used at random.

What availability does not do

It does not reassign requests, pause the clock, or stop work arriving. A statutory deadline does not care that its owner is away.

Coverage is a handover somebody performs, not a state they declare. Before any planned absence the work still has to move, which is a separate job covered under transferring requests.

Do not confuse this with business hours

Business Hours decides how deadlines are counted, agency-wide. This screen decides who is scheduled and what they can say about their own availability.

Changing a shift changes nothing about a deadline. Changing business hours changes every deadline in the product.