First of all, we’d kind of forgotten about this blog, and haven’t posted anything in forever. Sorry about that. But we were looking for a good place to write some notes about this new feature in MOW Scheduler, and the light bulb came on… wait, we have a blog!

The MOW Scheduler system is primarily designed to facilitate scheduling volunteers for Jobs (for example: delivery routes) that run consistently on certain days of the week, every week. And it works great for that. We allow you specify a set of week days for each Job, and the Jobs are only shown on their “active” days on the schedules.

But… occasionally something unusual happens. On an upcoming week you might want to run a Job (or a group of Jobs) on a different day of the week than normal. This might be known in advance (maybe a holiday) or on short notice (a snow day, for example). Lets say you canceled a delivery shift (or shifts) for Monday, but now you want to recruit volunteers to drive the same route on Tuesday. This is more complicated than it seems at first. For one thing, your “regular” Monday volunteers might not be available on Tuesday. And since the MOW Scheduler doesn’t usually show that job on Tuesdays, you need to get the system to treat that specific Tuesday differently than normal, and show the Tuesday slot as “open” (short-handed, aka “pink”) on the staff schedules, and on the public Help Wanted page.

Previously, this required some clever trickery… the Job probably wasn’t “active” on Tuesday, so to get it to show up on the schedules on a Tuesday, you’d need to “activate” the job for Tuesdays. But you don’t want it to show up as short-handed on other Tuesdays. The “best” solution to that was to activate it for Tuesdays in the Job Settings, but set the “required workers” for all positions to 0 so it wouldn’t usually be short-handed, then go to the specific Tuesday and set required workers to 1 (or more, if needed).

The new feature allows you to accomplish this in a more straight forward way: you can now activate the Job on a specific Tuesday without changing the Job Settings that apply to other Tuesdays. To do this, go to the Job Calendar on the Job Detail page (click the Job name from the Daily or Weekly schedule or from the Job Settings or Jobs pages). There’s a magnifying glass icon in each calendar slot, even on inactive days (gray slots on the calendar) — that’s new. Click it to get to the Shift Detail page. It will tell you the shift is “inactive” because the Job is normally inactive on Tuesdays — but you already knew that! However, there’s a new button labeled “Activate Shift”. Click that, and the shift for that specific Tuesday will show up on the schedules.

The detailed recipe for this can be found in one of the Scheduling “How To” pages on the support site https://support.mowscheduler.com/tutorial/nonstandardday