Schedule Grid, Team Roster, and Copy Week Forward

Once your church starts running serving teams across recurring services, the question shifts from "who is on the schedule for this event" to "who is on the schedule across the next several weeks, and where are the holes?" This article covers the admin tools designed for that bird's-eye view: the Schedule Grid (available both as a cross-event view on the Events page and on each series page), the serving positions behind it, and the Copy Forward workflow.

Note: All of these features live in the admin panel (under Events). They are not in the member-facing portal. Volunteers see their own personal schedule under My Serving Schedule in the portal; the grid is a coordinator tool.

Where to Find Them

There are two places to view a schedule grid, depending on whether you want one series or a cross-team picture:

Schedule Grid (cross-event, the primary view):

1. Open Events in the sidebar.
2. Click the ⋮ More menu in the top-right of the Events page.
3. Choose Schedule Grid. This opens the Events Planning page on the Schedule Grid tab, showing who serves when across all your teams.

Per-series grid:

1. Open Events in the sidebar.
2. Click the ⋮ More menu and choose Event Series.
3. Open the recurring series you want to view (e.g., "Sunday Morning Service").

The per-series Schedule Grid and the Copy Forward buttons only render when Volunteer Scheduling is enabled on the series and at least one Serving Position is configured on it (see Creating Serving Teams and Roles).

The Schedule Grid

The grid shows you, in a single glance, which volunteers are scheduled for which upcoming occurrences. Rows are people; columns are dates.

How to Read It

Hover over a confirmed cell to see the position name (e.g., "Confirmed — Sound Tech"). Pending cells read "Pending response" and unavailable cells read "Marked unavailable."

The leftmost Team member column is sticky as you scroll horizontally, so the volunteer's name stays visible while you flip through weeks of dates. The header row stays in place too.

Adjusting the View

On the cross-event Schedule Grid, you have a few controls the per-series grid doesn't:

• Week window: switch between 4 wk, 8 wk, and 12 wk to widen or narrow how many weeks of dates are visible at once.
• Back / Forward arrows: page the visible window earlier or later; a Today button jumps you back to the current week.
• Team filter: narrow the grid to a single team, or show All teams.

Who Appears in the Grid

The grid pulls in the volunteers assigned to (or available for) the upcoming occurrences in scope. Each person appears once even if they belong to multiple teams, and the rows are sorted alphabetically by first name.

Why This View Matters

• You can spot patterns at a glance: "Sarah hasn't served in 6 weeks", "we have no greeters scheduled for the 17th", "Mike is scheduled three weekends in a row -- maybe ease off."
• It complements the auto-scheduler's per-event view: the grid shows fairness across people and coverage across dates, side by side.
• It's the ideal place to start your next round of manual cleanups before running an Auto-Fill or Copy Forward.

Serving Positions (within the Series)

Alongside the grid, the series page lists the serving positions templated to that series in a Serving Positions panel -- each position's name and how many slots it needs each occurrence.

This is useful when:

• You're checking how many slots a series needs to fill each week (e.g., "this series templates 1 sound + 1 projection, so the Tech Team has to cover two slots every Sunday").
• You're onboarding a new coordinator and want to show them the position structure of a recurring service in one place.
• You want to add or remove a position directly: type a Position name, set slots needed, and click Add Position; or use the remove (✕) button next to an existing position.

For day-to-day team management (adding members, changing roles, updating skill levels) you still go to Groups > [Team Name] -- see Creating Serving Teams and Roles.

Copy Forward

Once you have one well-staffed week (e.g., next Sunday is fully assigned and confirmed), you can replicate that lineup forward to the upcoming occurrences in the series in one shot.

When to Use It

• You've manually built a "good" week and want every following week to default to the same people.
• You're returning from a holiday gap where the schedule was cleared and want to bootstrap the next quarter.
• Your team rotates in a fixed order and you've just dialed in the right rotation -- now propagate it.

How to Use It

1. From the series page, find the source occurrence (the well-staffed week) in the Upcoming Occurrences list.
2. Click the Copy Forward button on that occurrence's row.
3. Confirm the prompt ("Copy this week's assignments to the next 12 future events?").

The system loops through the next future occurrences in the series, takes the source occurrence's non-declined assignments, and applies them to each future occurrence's matching positions. Conflicts (volunteer already assigned in that position, no matching position, etc.) are skipped on a per-date basis -- the rest of the schedule still gets populated.

Tip: To staff all upcoming occurrences at once with the best-available volunteers instead of repeating one week, use the Auto-Fill All Events button at the top of the Upcoming Occurrences list.

Important Behaviors

• Declined assignments are not copied forward. If someone declined the source week, they're not propagated.
• Existing assignments on future dates are not overwritten. If a future occurrence already has the same person in a position, Copy Forward won't create a duplicate.
• Copies start as Pending. Just like other admin assignments, the volunteer needs to confirm via email or portal -- unless the team is configured to Auto-confirm assignments.

Copy Forward vs. Auto-Fill

Both staff a stretch of services quickly, but they're different tools:

Many coordinators use both: Copy Forward to seed a sensible default, then Auto-Fill All Events (or manual cleanup) to fill the inevitable holes where the source week's volunteers can't make a future date.

Tip: The Schedule Grid is read-only. To make changes, open a specific event from the series page (or the calendar) and use its Serving tab. The grid reflects your changes the next time you reload it. On the cross-event Schedule Grid, you can also use Auto-fill and Remind from the toolbar to fill open slots and nudge pending volunteers for the visible window.