Rota

The rota says who is working on a day, who is off and who is covering for whom. Planning the day reads it, so a driver on holiday is not given a round and whoever covers them gets their patch.

It is not an HR system. It keeps enough to run the yard: shifts, time off, how much holiday somebody has left and how many days they have been off sick.

The calendar

Rota in the rail. The office sees the month with one row per driver and a column per day. A shift is a bar in the colour of the driver’s pattern. Holiday is green, sickness red, other time off grey and cover purple. Anything still waiting for a yes has a dashed outline.

Above the calendar: who is working today, who is off, how many requests are waiting, and who is covering.

• Press a day to see it. From there you can book time off starting that day, approve or cancel time off already on it, or put somebody on cover.
• Drag along a row to book several days off for that driver in one go.

Shift patterns

The Shift patterns tab. A pattern is the shape of a working week: which days, and the hours on each. It can repeat every week, or every two, three or four weeks, for alternate Saturdays or four on and three off. Design it once and give it to as many drivers as work it.

A pattern can also say how long the break is. Leave it blank to use the business’s.

A driver’s pattern is what planning reads for their day: a round leaves at the start of that day’s shift, has to be back by its end, and allows its break. Fixed hours set on a driver before patterns still apply to somebody with no pattern, until they are cleared under People.

Give a driver their pattern on the Drivers tab. For a pattern longer than a week, say which Monday its first week began, so the rota knows which week any date falls in.

A driver with no pattern counts as available every day, which is how things worked before patterns existed. Planning the day still passes over them if they are on holiday or marked off.

Holiday and sickness

Set the defaults under Settings, Business, Time off:

• Holiday a year, in days or weeks. The UK minimum is 5.6 weeks, which is 28 days for somebody working five days a week. In weeks, Bottle works out the days from each driver’s own pattern, so somebody on four days a week gets 22.5.
• When the holiday year starts, for example 1 January or 1 April.
• When sickness is counted from, which can be a different date.
• Whether holiday needs a yes, or is booked as soon as it is asked for. Sickness can work either way too; by default it is booked straight away, since it is reported rather than asked for.
• Carry over up to, the most unused holiday that moves into the next holiday year. 0 carries none. Sickness never carries over.
• Paid sick days a year. Leave it blank for no limit.

Over the allowance

Holiday past what a driver has left, and sickness past their paid sick days, can still be booked and approved. The days over are counted as unpaid, so whoever does the pay can see who is due less.

Anything that would be partly unpaid always waits for a yes, even where the business books time off straight away. The request says how many days would be unpaid, and the Drivers tab shows the unpaid days taken this year.

Anything agreed differently with one driver is set on their row on the Drivers tab: a different allowance, carry-over, paid sick days, or approval rules. Leave a setting blank to use the business default.

Time off counts only the days the driver would have worked. A week’s holiday for somebody on four days a week takes four days, and a bank holiday or other day the business is closed takes nothing. Either end can be half a day.

Requests

A driver asks for time off from their own Rota page. If it needs a yes, it appears on the Requests tab, showing how many days it takes, what the driver would have left and who else is off then. Approve it and it comes off their allowance, and they are kept off rounds for those days.

The office books time off for anybody, and that is booked at once.

Owners and admins get an email, and a notice under the bell, when a driver asks for time off that needs a yes. The driver gets one when it is approved or declined. Anyone can switch these off in Notifications, under their account menu: the row is Time off.

A notice is easy to miss, so anything still waiting also sits under Needs you on Your day every morning until it is answered.

Bank holidays and closed days

Under Settings, Business, Closed days. Pick your part of the UK and Bottle keeps its bank holidays, from GOV.UK, up to date each night. Choose whether you deliver on them.

Add days of your own below: Christmas week, a stocktake, anything else.

On a day you are closed, whether a bank holiday you keep or one of your own:

• no rounds are planned, and the Rounds page says why;
• nobody is on the rota, and it takes nothing off anybody’s holiday;
• a delivery promised for it moves to the next day you are open, as do regular deliveries that fall on it;
• the Take Order form warns you if you pick it by hand.

What a driver sees

A driver sees their own month and nobody else’s. It shows their shifts, their holiday left, anything waiting for a yes and their sick days this year.

To ask for time off, a driver taps a day, drags across several, or uses Ask for time off. They can cancel their own time off up until the day it starts; after that, the office can change it.

Sickness is health information, so a driver never sees anybody else’s. Only the office can.

Cover

Press the day of somebody who is off and choose who covers them. The person covering takes the absent driver’s patches for that day. You can also press a working driver’s day and give them another driver’s work, or one patch, on top of their own.

A driver with no patch of their own who covers somebody takes exactly that patch, not everything waiting. Someone on cover counts as working that day, whatever their pattern says.

On the Rounds page

Each driver’s row on Rounds says if they are on holiday, off sick, not on shift or covering someone. A driver on holiday or off sick has no Plan button, and Plan rounds for everyone out today passes over them.

Somebody who is simply not on shift can still be planned by hand, for the day they come in to help.