Start by setting the anchor date to the first day of Crew A’s four-night block. That is cycle day 1 in this generator. All other dates—including dates in later months and years—are calculated from that fixed reference. A wrong anchor does not change the 28-day mathematical sequence, but it places every assignment on the wrong calendar date.

Four crews are phased seven days apart. Crew A starts at base day 1; the remaining crews use offsets of seven, fourteen and twenty-one days. Their names and which team your organization calls A, B, C or D may differ. Compare at least one known real shift for every crew with the displayed grid before using the schedule for operational work.

Day and night shift starts are independent controls. The duration selector determines how long each automatically generated work shift lasts. For example, a 07:00 day start with a 12-hour duration finishes at 19:00, while a 19:00 night start finishes at 07:00 the following morning. A night shift belongs to the date on which it begins, even though it extends into the next calendar day.

Set local start times to match the workplace. Changes to these base settings affect standard generated duty cells but do not erase saved date-specific overrides. Calendar exports use absolute timestamps based on the browser’s time zone. Check imported times in your actual calendar, especially near daylight-saving transitions.

Select any crew/date cell to open its editor. You can assign a day shift, night shift, leave, training or an off-day; edit the label, add a short operational note, or adjust a shift’s exact start and end times. A change is stored as an exception tied to that specific crew and calendar date. The underlying repeating 28-day algorithm remains available for comparison.

Clicking an empty or off-duty cell is the simplest way to add coverage or an additional shift. Drag a work cell toward a different date or crew when you need to transfer duty; the original position becomes off and the destination receives a dated assignment. The destination’s previous status is replaced, so inspect the before/after coverage report and use Undo immediately if the move was not intended.

On a desktop pointer device, press and drag a day or night cell onto another date/crew cell. Use the slim resize grip at the bottom of the duty block to increase or decrease its duration in fifteen-minute increments. You can always open the editor instead to enter an exact start/end time, a more reliable option for touch devices, keyboard access and unusually long duties.

Every drag, resize and editor change enters the Undo/Redo history. The time editor supports duties extending past midnight. For exceptionally long shifts, confirm the start and end dates in the exported calendar rather than interpreting the 28-day grid as an hour-by-hour visual scale.

The coverage panel evaluates one duty-category slot for day and one for night on every displayed date. It flags missing slots or extra assignments after overrides. This is a mechanical crew-category check: it cannot establish whether a crew contains enough staff or has the right skills, certification, supervision, breaks, relief coverage, or fitness for duty.

The crew workload panel shows scheduled shift counts and planned hours. In the unmodified 12-hour cycle one crew works fourteen shifts—seven days and seven nights—with 168 scheduled hours in twenty-eight days, which averages forty-two scheduled hours over each of those four weeks. This is not a payroll calculation and individual weeks do not necessarily have equal hours.

Guest work is automatically saved in the current browser under this DuPont tool’s local storage key. A JSON backup includes your anchor, shift times, crew names, cycle range and all date-specific exceptions. Restore uses the data in that file and replaces the current local draft only after confirmation. Export CSV for spreadsheet review, ICS for dated calendar events, and Print/PDF for a simple handout.

If you sign in using your existing ScheduleFlowLab site account, “Save to My Schedules” creates or updates a dated cloud schedule in the existing schedule/event tables. The live account pages remain separate. Cloud saving depends on the configured Supabase project and permissions; retain a JSON backup when you need a full copy of overrides and generator-specific settings.