Availability & weather
See when each staff member is free, where approved leave falls, and the weather forecast — all on the roster grid as you build it.
The scheduler shows you who's free, who's on leave, and what the weather's doing — right on the grid — so you can roster around it. This guide covers reading staff availability, approved-leave blocks, the warnings you get when you roster over someone's availability, and the weather forecast in the day headers.
Who this is for
Owners and managers using the Shiftly web platform to run your business.
Before you start
- You're an owner or a manager with access to the location you're rostering.
- Open Roster from the main navigation and pick the location at the top left.
- Switch to View by staff (top left) — availability and leave show against each person's row.
See who's available
In View by staff, each person's empty cells tell you their availability for that day.
- Only available 3:00pm – 12:00am — they're free only within that window. If they have more than one window, you'll see +N more (hover it to see the others).
- Unavailable (with a warning icon) — they've marked themselves off for the whole day.
- A blank cell — they're available all day.
When someone splits their day into more than one window, only the first shows in the cell — +N more holds the rest. Hover it to see them.
Staff set their own availability in the Shiftly Me app; you're seeing it here, not editing it.
Approved leave on the grid
When someone has approved leave for a whole day, their cell for that day shows the leave type they're on — for example On Compassionate — with a matching icon (hover for the dates).
A full-day leave blocks that whole day — you can't roster a shift onto the cell. If you try, Shiftly stops the save with a message naming the leave, for example "Staff member is on Compassionate from Tue 2 Jun." See Approving & declining leave.
Part-day leave on the grid
Leave can also be booked for part of a single day — a start and end time rather than the whole day. When it is, the cell shows it as a slot: the leave type with its time range below it, for example Annual Leave · 9:00am – 4:36pm. The rest of that day stays open, so you can still roster a shift around it.
- A part-day leave only blocks a shift whose time overlaps the leave's slot. A shift earlier or later that same day is fine — Shiftly only stops the save if the shift and the leave actually clash.
- If someone has more than one part-day leave on the same day, the cell shows the first slot with +N more — hover it to see the rest.
A full-day leave blocks the entire day; a part-day leave blocks only the hours it covers. So two part-day leaves on the same day don't clash unless their times overlap, and you can roster a shift on a day someone has part-day leave as long as the shift sits outside the leave's hours.
Rostering around availability
Availability is a guide, not a hard rule — except where there's a genuine clash:
- Marked themselves unavailable — you can still roster them, but the cell warns you as you drag, and the shift card shows a Marked as unavailable warning afterwards. Their call to swap or hand it back; your call to roster it.
- Already on another shift — this is a hard block. Shiftly won't let you drop a shift whose time overlaps one they already have.
- On full-day approved leave — a hard block for that whole day; the cell won't accept a shift.
- On part-day approved leave — only the leave's hours are blocked. You can roster a shift on that day as long as it falls outside the leave's slot; a shift that overlaps the slot is rejected.
When you assign someone in the shift form, the staff dropdown shows the same Unavailable / Blocked badges — see Creating & editing shifts.
Weather in the day headers
Each day header carries a weather icon from the location's forecast. Hover it for the conditions and the day's temperature range — handy for planning around a heatwave or a wet weekend.
Forecasts only run a week or so ahead, so weather icons show on the near-term days and drop off for weeks further out.