Templates

What templates are

A template is a saved, reusable shift pattern. You schedule a day or a week the way you like it, save it under a name, and later apply it to fill another day or week in a couple of clicks — no need to rebuild the same shifts from scratch every period.

Templates are shared with your whole team. Any owner, admin, or manager on the team sees and can apply the same templates, so a pattern one person saves is available to everyone.

Tip: Think of a template as a permanent cousin of copy and paste. Copy/paste only remembers shifts for your current session; a template is a named pattern the team can re-apply any time.

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Day and week templates

Every template covers either a single day or a full week:

Template	Captures	Save it from	Apply it on
Day	One day's shifts	The day view, or a single day column in the week view	The day view
Week	A full week of shifts, lined up to your team's week start	The week view	The week view and the month view

There is no separate "month" template. On the month view you apply a week template, and Plantime repeats that week's pattern across the weeks of the month. You don't pick the scope yourself — it follows the view you're working in.

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What a template remembers

A template stores the shape of each shift, not the calendar dates, so it can be dropped cleanly onto any future day or week. For every shift it remembers:

• Time of day and length — when the shift starts and how long it runs. Overnight shifts keep their full length when re-applied to another day.
• Role (competency) — the competency the shift requires.
• Number of people — how many people the shift needs.
• Unpaid break — the unpaid break, if the shift has one.
• Note — the shift note, if there is one.
• Pinned people — only locked assignments are remembered. Anyone left unlocked or filled in as a suggestion is not saved, so those slots are filled fresh each time you apply the template (for example, by auto-assign).

Only planned shifts go into a template. Clock-in (freeform) shifts are actuals, not part of your plan, so they're always left out.

Tip: Lock the people you always want on a recurring shift before saving. Anyone you leave unlocked will be assigned again from scratch every time the template is applied.

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Saving a template

Open the planner's ⋯ menu and choose Save as template (the heart). There are two ways in:

• The view's ⋯ menu saves the whole period you're looking at — a day template on the day view, a week template on the week view.
• A day column's ⋯ menu (in the week view) saves just that one day as a day template.

Saving isn't offered on the month view, and it's disabled when the period has no shifts — the menu shows the hint "Add shifts before saving a template."

In the dialog you can:

1. Type a new name to create a new template, or
2. Pick an existing template from the list to overwrite it with the current shifts.

Typing the exact name of a template that already exists overwrites it instead of creating a duplicate — a safety net so you don't end up with two templates sharing a name. Saving an empty period, or leaving the name blank with nothing selected, is rejected rather than creating an empty template.

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Applying a template

Open the ⋯ menu and choose Apply from templates (the star). Pick a template and its shifts are added to the period in view — appended like a paste. Applying never overwrites or removes the shifts already there; it only adds.

Where the shifts land depends on the view:

• Day view — the template's shifts land on the day you're viewing.
• Week view — the template's shifts land on the week you're viewing, aligned to your team's week start.
• Month view — the week template is repeated across the month, week by week, and trimmed to the month's edges. Boundary weeks fill only their in-month days; any shift that would land in the next or previous month is skipped (you fill those by applying the template there). Nothing is ever created outside the month you're looking at.

The scope has to match the view: day templates apply on the day view, week templates on the week or month view.

People who aren't active are simply left off

Each pinned person a template carries is re-checked against the day of the new shift. If that person's contract doesn't cover the date — it has ended, hasn't started yet, or they've left the team — they're quietly left off. The shift is still created, just without that person, so you can assign someone else.

What the result tells you

After applying, on-screen messages summarise what happened:

Message	Meaning
Applied N shifts	Shifts added to the period.
Nothing to apply for this view	The template produced no shifts for the current view.
N shifts skipped (outside the month)	Month view only — shifts that fell outside the visible month were trimmed.
N locked assignments dropped (contract inactive)	Pinned people left off because their contract wasn't active on that day.

Tip: A "dropped" message usually means a template remembered someone whose contract has since ended or who left the team. The shifts are still there — just re-assign them.

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Using a template in Auto Schedule

Week templates do more than fill on demand — they can also feed Auto Schedule, the automation that builds each new period for you. In your team's Settings → Auto Schedule, choose the Use a template fill source and Plantime stamps a chosen week template onto every upcoming period as it's prepared, instead of copying the previous cycle.

• You pick a primary week template, and can optionally add a second template to alternate with it week by week.
• Filling is non-destructive — any day that already has a shift is left untouched, so re-runs are safe.
• A template can also act as a fallback, used only when there's no previous period to copy.

You'll only see saved week templates offered there — so save a week template in the planner first, then pick it in Auto Schedule. Auto Schedule has its own settings for periods, lead times, and publishing; this page only covers the template side of it.