Autofill for Filling Shifts

The autofill tool is a great way to auto select the most appropriate employees for a range of shifts, based on suitability to the role and its requirements. Primarily, a scheduler will use this tool to fill an open shift, but it can be to fill shifts already allocated to employees, if necessary.

This article will cover the following steps on using autofill in Schedule Xpress:

The first step is to highlight all the shifts in your calendar that you would like to fill. There are many methods to this. If you want to highlight every shift, the easiest way is to right click on the Employee Name tab in the top left of the calendar, and click Select all shifts, as below.

The drag and select method is also very simple, which allows you to drag your cursor over the particular shifts you’d like to select. You can also tick the small box in the bottom right corner of each shift to confirm selection.

Once you have your selection, proceed to clicking the Schedule Tools option, followed by Autofill shifts as shown below.

Once selected, you will be given the option to choose the criteria you want to apply, which will act as as a search engine to find the relevant match for each shift. Please refer to our Employee search rules document for help in setting this up.

Once you’ve selected the criteria for the autofill and hit the orange button in the bottom right corner, you’ll receive a list of the shifts that are auto filled, or failed to autofill, in some cases. You can confirm these by pressing the Accept button, if you’re happy with them.

If the shifts couldn't be filled, then it means that the requirements for the shifts didn't match any of your employees. In this case, you'll either have to apply less restricted criteria or manually choose an employee, despite them not having the initial requirements.

As stated previously, it’s important to understand the fundamentals of the Employee search rules first. Then, you can look at applying a name containing employee rule criteria, which may be useful when looking for a certain category of employees to fulfil certain vacant shifts using autofill.

For more information on Autofill, please Contact Support now!