Shift Offers
A shift offer is a unilateral handoff: an employee gives one of their shifts to a colleague (or to anyone qualified at the location), and the recipient accepts the shift on their own. The supervisor isn't involved on the happy path — compliance is enforced automatically at the moment of claim.
This is different from a Shift Swap, which is a bilateral exchange: A's shift goes to B and B's shift comes back to A. Use offers for "I can't work Saturday — anyone want it?" and swaps for "I have Friday but need Monday — who can trade?".
How an Offer Works
- An employee opens their shift card and clicks "Offer this shift". The Offer your shift dialog appears with two modes:
- Offer to a specific colleague (targeted) — only that named recipient can take it.
- Open to anyone at the location (open) — anyone assigned to the same location can take it. The first qualified person to click Take this shift gets it.
- The shift is offered. Until someone claims it, the original employee is still responsible for the shift.
- The recipient (or anyone, in open mode) sees the offer on their own schedule under Available from colleagues and can take it with one click.
- Compliance is checked at the moment of claim. If the claimer would break a working-time rule (rest period, overtime, etc.), the claim is blocked with a clear message and the offer stays open for someone else.
- On a successful claim, the shift is reassigned in the same step that closes the offer. The original employee gets a notification.
Offer Statuses
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Open | Offer is live. Targeted: only the named recipient can claim. Open: anyone at the location can. |
| Claimed (shown as Taken) | Someone took it. The shift has been reassigned. |
| Cancelled | The offerer withdrew the offer (or a manager cancelled it). |
| Expired | The shift's start time passed without anyone claiming. The original employee still works the shift. |
Liability Stays with You Until Claim
Until the offer status flips to Claimed, the shift is still your responsibility. If no one claims an open offer before the shift starts, the offer auto-expires and you are still rostered for that shift — there is no automatic cascade to the manager.
Plan ahead: post offers as early as you can, especially for less popular slots.
Where Offers Surface
| Surface | What you see |
|---|---|
| Shift card on the schedule (Today in the nav) | Offer this shift button on your own future, non-active shift cards; an Offered badge once posted. |
| Schedule | Available from colleagues section listing offers you could take. |
| Team schedule (read-only) | An Offered badge on a colleague's shift card when there's an active offer for it. Claims do not happen here — go to the schedule to take it. |
| Shift Swaps → Active offers tab | Oversight view: employees see their own offers; supervisors and managers see offers at their assigned locations; Company Admin and Accounting see every location. |
Compliance Pre-filter and Re-check
To keep noise low, the Available from colleagues list pre-filters offers that would obviously fail for the viewer (e.g., they already have an overlapping shift on the same day). This is a cheap check — the full compliance suite still runs at claim time. So a claim can still be blocked even if the offer appeared in the list. The error message names the specific rule.
Cancelling an Offer
The offerer can cancel any open offer they created. Managers and Company Admins can also cancel any open offer as an oversight override. Once an offer is claimed, cancelled, or expired, it's terminal and can't be cancelled — it just stays in the history.
Supervisors cannot cancel offers (they aren't a write authority on this surface).
Why Open Offers Don't Broadcast
When you create an open offer, the system does not notify everyone at the location. Discovery is pull-based — colleagues see your open offer when they next look at their /schedule. This avoids dozens of notifications for a single offer that one person will eventually take.
Targeted offers do notify the named recipient, since there's exactly one person to alert.
Locked Payroll Periods Block Claims
When a shift falls in a payroll period that has been Locked or Exported, claiming an offer for that shift is blocked — the period is the official record sent to payroll. The claimer sees an error naming the locked period's date range; the offer stays open. There is no role-level override.
Cascading Cancellation on Shift Mutations
If a manager cancels a shift, deletes a draft, or changes the shift's planned start, planned end, location, or assigned employee, any open offer pointing at it is automatically cancelled. The offerer (and the targeted recipient, if applicable) receives a "Shift offer cancelled — the shift changed" notification.
The cascade happens together with the shift change, so an offer is never left pointing at a stale shift. Edits to non-schedule fields (notes, training flag, etc.) do not trigger the cascade.
Expired Offers
A daily background job (10:00 Helsinki time) marks offers whose shift has already started as Expired. Offers are treated as expired from the moment the shift starts even before the job runs, so an expired offer can never be taken.