Teamsly's schedule builder gives you a fast, flexible way to staff your team each week. Every shift requires a start and end time — this keeps timesheets accurate, enables overtime calculations, and makes it easy for employees to know exactly when to show up and clock in. Once your shift types are set up with their times, building a schedule takes just a few clicks.

Getting There

Click Schedule in the left navigation, then click the Create Schedule button.

Step 1: Choose Your Departments and Dates

In the schedule creation panel:

Departments — Choose to schedule all departments at once, or select a single department to work on separately
Date range — Set the start and end dates for this schedule period

💡 You can have multiple draft schedules running at the same time — one per department, or by date range. Each publishes independently. See Scheduling by Department for more on working with multiple drafts.

Step 2: Choose How to Build the Schedule

Teamsly gives you four ways to build your schedule, depending on how your team is set up:

AI Auto Schedule

Let Teamsly's AI automatically fill your roster for you. When you select this option, the AI assigns employees to shifts — covering your minimum required coverage while avoiding conflicts and overtime where possible. You can review and adjust any assignments before publishing.

The AI doesn't just fill slots randomly. It takes into account:

Staffing Needs — The roles, times, and shift counts you've defined as your minimum weekly coverage
Employee availability — Both preferred availability and unavailable blocks set by each employee
Preferred schedules — The days and times employees have indicated they prefer to work
Seniority and tenure — How long employees have been with the company, factored into scheduling priority
Past scheduling habits — The AI learns from your previous schedules over time, recognizing patterns in how you've scheduled roles, shifts, and employees, and applies that knowledge to future auto-generated schedules

✨ The more you use Teamsly, the smarter AI Auto Schedule gets. It learns from your past scheduling decisions and improves its suggestions over time — so your schedules get faster and more accurate the longer you use it.

Add Required Shifts (Staffing Needs)

Pull in the recurring shifts you've defined in Staffing Needs as a set of open shifts to be filled. This gives you a pre-built framework of what needs to be covered — you then assign employees manually or let the AI fill them in.

Apply Schedule Template

Apply a Schedule Template to automatically assign your recurring shift patterns to their designated employees. Ideal for teams where most people work the same schedule each week or on a bi-weekly rotation. Any staffing need shifts left unassigned in the template will be added as open shifts.

Copy from a Past Week

Reuse a previously built schedule by copying its shifts into the new date range. Select which past week to copy from, and all shifts carry over as a starting point for the new schedule.

⚠️ You can combine AI Auto Schedule, Required Shifts, and Schedule Templates together — but Copy from a Past Week is a separate option and cannot be combined with the others in the same schedule.

Step 3: Build and Review

Once your schedule is created, Teamsly shows you live counts of Conflicts, Users in Overtime, and Open Shifts at the top of the builder. Use these to catch and fix issues before publishing:

Conflicts — Employees scheduled for overlapping shifts
Users in Overtime — Employees whose scheduled hours exceed your overtime threshold
Open Shifts — Shifts that haven't been assigned to anyone yet

You can add, edit, or remove individual shifts at any time while the schedule is in draft. Use Autofill open shifts to let the AI suggest employees for any remaining unassigned slots.

Step 4: Publish the Schedule

When the schedule is ready, click Publish Schedule. Teamsly shows you a Schedule Overview first — a summary of total shifts, staff, open shifts, conflicts, and employees in overtime — so you can confirm everything looks right before it goes live.

Once published, employees are notified and can see their shifts in the app.

📋 Draft schedules are only visible to managers. Employees only see shifts once the schedule is published.

Creating a Schedule on Mobile

You can also create a new schedule directly from the Teamsly mobile app.

Tap Schedule in the bottom navigation.
Tap the blue + floating button in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
Tap Add Schedule from the menu that appears.
The Create Schedule page will open with all the same options as the web: department selection, date range, AI Auto Schedule, Import Shifts, Apply Shift Templates, and Copy From Past Week.
Make your selections and tap Create.

📱 Once created on mobile, the schedule is available on both web and mobile. You can switch to the web to add and edit shifts in the full schedule builder.

How to Create Schedules