Shift Schedule Kit

When this helps

You want a shift schedule, but requests, headcount, law and fairness pile up until you can't explain any of it

What it does

Enter requests (×/△/○) plus each person's wage, role, new-hire status and who they shouldn't be paired with, and it drafts a shift schedule that follows labour law (8-hour days, 40-hour weeks, breaks, a weekly day off, no late hours under 18, a 28-hour cap for international students) and your own workplace rules (priority order, night-shift counts, fairness). Days it can't fill aren't forced — it shows who could step in and why. After you hand-edit the draft, it checks it and, once clean, issues a version to hand out (v1, v2...). The handout never shows wages, income, birthdates, personal notes, or pairing restrictions. It also finds substitutes for swaps or absences and carries everything into next month.

The fixes baked into this kit

1. An international student's 28-hour weekly cap gets exceeded across week boundariesCounting Sunday-to-Saturday weeks let one student hit 35 hours in a 7-day span that crossed that boundary. Now it checks every possible 7-day window so the cap is never exceeded, no matter where the week starts.
2. Night shifts pile up on a few peopleOn a 3-shift ward, one person worked 15 night shifts while another worked 5, with 3 late-night shifts in a row. Added a cap on night-shift count and consecutive night shifts, and balances the count fairly. If the combined caps can't cover the shifts needed, it flags this at the top of the check.
3. A day after a night shift gets counted as a day offA day after a night shift, or after a shift ending past 2am, was being counted as a day off. Days off are now counted by calendar day (midnight to midnight), and the day after an overnight shift counts as a working day, not a day off.
4. Staff get scheduled on holidays at a holiday-closed workplaceA clinic that closes on public holidays still had people scheduled on them. Added a "holiday handling" setting, and it now always flags it when a schedule is built using that day of the week on a holiday.
5. A part-timer who avoids weekends still gets pushed toward more weekendsSomeone who marks most weekends unavailable was still judged by raw weekend-shift counts as having "too few weekends," pushing them toward even more. Now it compares against a target based on what share of their available days are weekends/holidays.
6. A person's name or situation leaks into the handoutWriting something like "so-and-so has a doctor's visit" in a special-day note showed up in the table handed to everyone, and check results showed the name of the person someone shouldn't be paired with. Notes with names are now withheld and flagged instead of shown, the reason given is just "a pairing restriction" with no name, and handouts go in a separate folder that's checked every time for wages, salary, and birthdates.
7. Cost-cutting mode can push staff below their contracted minimum hoursWith "cut labour cost" selected, a staff member's monthly minimum could be undercut even though it was achievable. People with a set monthly minimum are no longer penalised for hours above the basic headcount, fixing this.
8. A 12-person workplace could still use the small-business 44-hour exceptionA 44-hour week is only allowed below a certain headcount, but a 12-person shop could still be scheduled that way. It now blocks the 44-hour setting once staff count reaches 10 or more.

What's inside

• A starting flow: recommended defaults by industry, written into a shared "policy" sheet
• A tool that auto-builds a shift draft honouring requests, headcount, roles, law and fairness
• A tool that checks a hand-edited draft and, once clean, issues a handout version (v1, v2...)
• A tool for finding substitutes after swaps or absences, plus a change log
• Month-to-month handover (people and rules carry over; totals and consecutive-day counts update)
• Two fictional sample workplaces to try the whole flow end to end
• A dated list of the official sources behind the labour-law and income-threshold rules
• A watch that flags AI-style instructions hidden in files you load

The first three decisions

1. The shift types (e.g. early/late shift hours)
2. How many people and which roles are needed each day
3. The priority order when requests conflict (headcount, wishes, fairness)

What you need

• No extra costClaude Code or CodexBoth CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md are included.
• No extra costNode.js 18 or newerNeeded to run the tools. Nothing else to install.
• No extra costExcel, Numbers, or Google SheetsUsed to enter people and requests, and to hand-edit the table. Save as .xlsx.
• No extra costA browserUsed to open and print the printable table.

How to use

Just paste this into your AI.

I want to use the nice to have kit "Shift Schedule Kit". Follow https://nicetohave.app/en/g/CTE4FWBK-•••••••••• and set it up.

Works the same in Claude Code or Codex.
Read what this tells your AI to do, before you paste it

FAQ

Does it calculate pay?

No. It goes as far as late-night hours and projected annual income, not actual payroll calculations.

Is there a form staff can use to submit requests themselves?

No. Requests collected on paper or via chat apps are entered into Excel by whoever builds the schedule.

Does it support annual variable-hour or flex-time systems?

No. It supports weekly scheduling and the one-month variable-hour system, with days off as either one day a week or four days per four weeks.

Can it handle headcounts set per time slot, like "2 people from 9am to 1pm"?

Time-slot headcounts need to be converted into per-shift-type headcounts first. It can't mix counting across shift types, handle two shifts in one day, or cover staff working across multiple locations.

Does it include staffing ratios for care or childcare facilities?

No, those ratios aren't built in. If you need them, enter your workplace's own ratio as a required headcount and role.

Supporters

Once support opens, the people who backed this kit will be listed here.