How rotations, demands, and assignments fit together
Planner is built on three ideas that work together: a rotation, a demand, and an assignment. Once you can tell them apart, the schedule board and everything you do on it makes sense.
The three building blocks
- A rotation is a named on and off pattern, for example three weeks on followed by three weeks off. It describes the shape of a working cycle, not who works it. You reuse the same rotation for many people.
- A demand is a job's need for personnel: how many of a given role it needs, on which shift, over a range of dates. A demand says "this job needs two of this role on the day shift from this date to that date". It is a need, not a person.
- An assignment is a specific person actually placed to work. When you assign someone, Planner writes out their daily records across the cycle, so each day shows whether that person is on or off.
Read together: a rotation gives you the pattern, a demand tells you what coverage a job requires, and an assignment is a real person filling that need day by day.
Two things that surprise people
Two details trip up newcomers, so it is worth stating them plainly.
Assigning a rotation fills roughly one year, then stops. When you place a person on a rotation, Planner materialises whole on and off cycles for about a year ahead and then ends. It is not a rolling job that extends itself forever. Even when an assignment has no fixed end date, that only means the record itself is open, not that days are being generated indefinitely. When the filled period runs low, you extend or re-assign to keep coverage going.
An assignment does not need a matching demand. People are often placed where there is no demand behind them, and that is intentional. A count such as 579/0 (579 assigned against 0 needed) is legitimate, not a mistake. This commonly happens when you assign someone directly from a person's year plan, which places them without creating a demand first. So do not assume every assigned person must trace back to a demand.
Why it is split this way
Keeping the pattern, the need, and the person separate means you can plan coverage before you know who will fill it. A job can state its demands early, the schedule can be shaped around rotations, and named personnel can be slotted in later without redrawing the plan. It is also what lets Planner check a person against a role's requirements at the moment you place them, rather than hard-wiring people into jobs from the start.
What you can do
- Read and filter the live plan on the schedule board.
- Assign a person to a slot and see how their days are written out.