Member Availability
TimelyChurch tracks per-member "time off" so volunteer schedulers don't assign people on dates they've already blocked. The data is unified across every group a person belongs to — set unavailability once, and it applies everywhere. This article covers how it works, who can edit it, and the differences between the portal and admin flows.
Unified Availability — The Big Picture
Earlier versions of TimelyChurch tracked availability separately for each team. That has been retired. Today, all availability data is stored in one place.
A record means: "This person is unavailable on this date, optionally for a stated reason." The schedulers across all serving teams check this data when proposing assignments.
A person who serves on multiple teams shares one unified availability. The portal applies a change to all of a person's memberships at once, so the experience is simply "I'm unavailable Saturday June 8" — applied across the board.
Who Can Set Availability
| Actor | What They Can Do |
|---|---|
| The member themselves (via portal) | Toggle a single date or a date range as unavailable / available. Affects all of their group memberships. |
| A group leader (admin scheduling planner) | View any team member's availability when planning a schedule. Direct editing of someone else's availability is admin-only. |
| A church admin (with the Groups permission) | Add or remove availability directly via the admin tools. |
Members cannot view or edit anyone else's availability.
Member Portal — Availability
Availability now lives as an Availability tab inside the member's My Schedule page, so serving and time-off share a single home. (The older standalone /portal/availability link still works, but it now redirects to the canonical Serving Availability page described below.) The availability view loads the next 3 months across all of the signed-in person's group memberships, removes duplicate dates, and renders a calendar where unavailable dates are highlighted.
Three actions are available:
| Action | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Toggle a single date | Marks the date unavailable, or clears it if already marked |
| Mark a date range unavailable | Blocks every date in the range |
| Clear a date range back to available | Reopens every date in the range |
Toggle Behavior
Toggling a date is bidirectional:
- If the date is currently marked unavailable, toggling clears it — making the person available again.
- If the date is not marked, toggling marks it unavailable everywhere.
This guarantees the calendar always shows a single state per date.
Range Behavior
Marking a range lets you block (or reopen) a start-to-end span of dates in one step. Reopening a range simply clears every date in it back to available.
Optional Reason
When marking dates as unavailable, members can attach an optional reason ("vacation", "out of town", "kid's wedding"). This free-text note is shown to leaders when they hover over the date in the schedule planner.
Recurring Unavailability
For predictable absences (e.g., "I'm out every Sunday morning until July"), the portal also lets members add recurring unavailability: a repeating rule you can add or remove at any time. These rules are turned into individual blocked dates automatically. See the Scheduling docs for details on rule shape (weekday, frequency, end date).
The Canonical Serving-Availability Page
Serving Availability is the primary, richest availability page — it supports single-date toggles, date ranges, optional reasons, and recurring patterns, with validation up to 6 months out. It uses the same unified availability data. The legacy /portal/availability link redirects here, and the Availability tab on My Schedule points to the same place, so members can use whichever surface they land on.
Admin / Leader View
In the admin scheduling planner, every team member's unavailable dates are highlighted on the date picker. The planner automatically filters out members who have blocked a date when proposing auto-assignments.
Leaders cannot edit a member's availability from this view — they can only see it. If a leader needs to clear a member's time-off (for example, because the member texted that they can serve after all), they must:
- Ask the member to update their portal page, or
- Use the admin override (where available) to assign the member anyway.
Migration Notes
If you're upgrading from an older TimelyChurch version that tracked availability per team:
- All historical time-off was carried over automatically during the upgrade.
- Per-member availability now applies across all of a person's serving teams, not just one — this is intentional and matches how members actually think about their time.
Tip: Encourage members to add a short reason whenever they mark dates unavailable. It saves the leader from having to ask "are you sure?" before reassigning, and turns the calendar into a useful pastoral-care signal ("Sarah is out three Sundays in a row — is everything OK?").