Plan rosters in Rostering

Rostering shows teams as rows and upcoming services as columns. Use it to fill several rosters without opening every event.

A normal cell has no unresolved warning.
Amber shows explicit event positions that are still open, or draft suggestions that need review.
A yellow Double booking strip in an event heading means at least one person is scheduled in more than one team for that service.
Red Unavailable means someone is scheduled during a saved absence.
Assignment chips show each person’s current response state.

Open Double booking to see the affected people and their teams. A combination such as preaching and hosting may be intentional when the responsibilities happen at different times; check the service timing before leaving it as planned.

Save a custom row order

Hover over a team row to reveal its drag handle, then drag it to another row. The row floats above the grid while the other rows make room. Press Escape to cancel. On a touch screen, the handle stays visible. You can also focus the handle and use the up and down arrow keys.

The first move opens Save roster view. Enter a name. Share with team starts checked; clear it for a private view. Every organiser can create views. Private views are yours; shared views appear for the other organisers in your church. Only the creator can edit or delete a view, and colleagues can use the copy icon to make their own copy.

Choose a saved view or Default order in Roster view at the right of the team filter. Connect remembers your selection on this device for your account and church. After rearranging a saved view, choose Save changes or Revert. The edit, copy and delete icons appear beside each view in the dropdown. Use edit to rename your view or change its sharing setting.

Clicking a team row or its drag handle opens its sidepanel. Clicking again keeps it selected. Hover over the panel to reveal the resize grip on its left edge, then drag to change its width. Connect remembers this width for your account on this device.

Views save only the row order. Your filters stay as they are, hidden teams remain hidden, and assignments are unchanged. New teams appear at the end of custom views. Exports follow the displayed order.

Use Plan roster

Choose the visible teams with the compact team filter. My teams selects teams you lead; it is a view shortcut, not an access restriction. Choose Plan roster for the three-step flow. Each team row also has shortcuts for availability requests, roster suggestions and invitations. The availability and invitation shortcuts open the matching step for that team; opening them sends nothing.

1. Request availability

Choose the visible teams, one team, or explicitly All teams for the request audience. All teams also includes eligible teams hidden by your roster filter; roster suggestions and invitations still follow the visible teams. Recipients come from each team’s Who can serve pool and event eligibility, even when its events have no open positions. Availability requests require a Complete plan.

The initial request period is Rest of the year. Choose Change to edit its dates or use a shortcut such as This quarter or Next 6 months. The request period can differ from the visible roster weeks. Add every missing email address before sending.

After sending, View responses and delivery lists every recipient. It shows separately whether the email was accepted and whether the person shared unavailable dates, confirmed no conflicts, or has not responded yet. It opens automatically when an address is missing or a send fails. Accepted means the email service accepted the message for delivery; Connect cannot confirm that it reached the person’s inbox. The paper-plane action stays available beside every person who has not responded, including accepted messages, so you can deliberately send only that request again. After correcting an address in People, refresh these details before resending so the current address is shown and used. If an address is missing, add it in the same row and choose Save & send.

Latest sends expands the history with named teams, periods, opened-link counts and responses. Requests keep their team audience: one team’s request does not replace another’s. Once everyone in a team has opened their link, the requester and team leaders receive a readiness email. Opening a link is not a completed response; review unanswered requests before scheduling, and you can start planning earlier. Volunteers can add available or unavailable dates, then confirm that their information is complete.

2. Create a roster draft

Choose the teams and visible weeks before creating the draft. Connect suggests people from each team’s serving pool, spreads service fairly, respects unavailable dates, and avoids putting one person in two teams at the same service.

Suggestions are not assignments yet. They remain amber until you review and apply them.

Rostering never invents a position from team applicability alone. Add positions in an event under Team & roles, or define them in the event type; a rowless Rostering cell stays empty.

3. Review and invite

Review every suggestion and conflict. Apply only the suggestions you want. Unapplied suggestions must be reviewed first. Availability warnings remain visible but do not block the Rostering invitation action; its audience can include people with a conflict. Review those people deliberately before sending.

The invitation delivery report uses the same per-person result. Check anyone marked Needs attention before considering the invitation run complete; a successful result remains available from View details.

Do not send invitations simply because a draft exists. Check ministry fit and any pastoral or practical circumstances that Connect cannot know.

Define who can serve

Open a team's settings to edit Who can serve.

This optional list supplies Auto-fill suggestions and team availability requests. Manual scheduling can still assign anyone in your directory.

Add an individual person or a reusable group.
Review everyone in one combined list without duplicates.
Owners and admins can use the crown beside a name to manage team leaders.
Open Groups to review or unlink the sources behind the list.
Create a group when a set of people normally serves together.

If a person belongs to more than one linked group, the draft considers that person once. Removing a team from Rostering deactivates it for future planning but keeps its history.

Start with a base team

Open a Rostering cell and choose a saved group under Base team, such as Worship Team B. Connect places every member into the service as an individual assignment. Unavailable members remain visible, so you can choose Replace beside only that person and select a substitute.

Click the selected base team again to remove it and clear all assignments for that team in this service, including substitutes and manually added people. Based on … disappears, and you can then assign one person or choose a base team again.

The cell then shows the saved starting point and its exceptions, for example Based on Worship Team B · 1 changed and Nadine for Suzanne. Use the restore action beside one substitution, or Reset to restore the original people in the remaining lineup. Explicitly removed assignments stay removed. To apply the group’s current members again, deselect the base team if it is still selected, then select it again. These changes apply only to this service: they never edit Worship Team B itself, and later membership changes to that group do not silently rewrite an already planned roster.

Choose where a team can be scheduled

Select a team name and open its settings. Owners and admins can choose where the team may be scheduled under Scheduled events:

All event types, except… when the team normally serves everywhere, then uncheck event types it does not need.
Only selected event types when the team has a specific purpose, then select event types such as Bible Study.

These choices control eligibility, not headcount. Open positions come from rows added under an event's Team & roles or copied from its event type. The choices also apply to future events created from the same template. Editors see this reusable rule as read-only, but they can open an individual Rostering cell to include or omit that one event as an exception. A staffed event stays included when a broader rule changes; clear its assignments before omitting it directly.

Use the final team row to create a team. Use the final event column to add an event. Event column headings also provide the calendar QR action.

Assign or replace directly

Select a cell to add a person or group. Connect warns when the choice is unavailable or already scheduled elsewhere in that service. Group assignments show how many members are unavailable.

Click an assigned person's name again to remove their assignment in one click. Remove also acts immediately; Change/Replace opens the replacement flow. To schedule one speaker from a base team, remove the other assigned speakers. When one person remains, their assignment automatically becomes a normal individual assignment and Based on … disappears. Their response status and the team's membership stay unchanged.

Removing an ad-hoc or base-derived assignment also removes its extra position. A template position or explicitly requested staffing position stays open. Removing the last base assignment clears old empty base entries too. For an already empty base team showing No replacement, use the cell's trash control once to clean it up. Remove any other durable position under the event's Team & roles when it is no longer needed.

When someone was scheduled manually without belonging to the team's serving pool, the cell sidebar shows People outside this team. Remove keeps a template or explicitly requested position, but removes an ad-hoc or base-derived position completely.

Choose Replace to change an assignment while keeping the roster place. A person who marked the date Available is listed before people with no preference, and their note appears with that availability. Dates without a preference remain schedulable; Unavailable takes priority over an overlapping available range.

When a team-pool member must replace someone despite a saved absence, Schedule anyway requires a second click. This applies only to that manual replacement and service; it does not erase the person’s unavailable dates or bypass a same-service double booking. Auto-fill does not make this exception. Recheck conflicts before sending invitations.

Export or share the filtered roster

Set the visible weeks and select the teams you want to include, then choose Export / share. The preview lists each event's date, time and title, followed by its teams and the names scheduled for that event. Base teams include their saved replacements; assignment statuses and unavailable people remain marked.

Choose Share to open your phone's sharing options, such as WhatsApp, and select the recipients there. Copy text copies the same summary. You can also download a Text file or CSV file. If the browser cannot share directly, Share copies the text instead.

Only saved assignments are included. Apply any roster suggestions you want to share first. Hidden teams and events outside the visible period are excluded, and omitted team cells contain no names.

Keyboard controls

Arrow keys move between cells.
Enter opens the selected cell.
Typing while a cell is selected opens its people and group search.
Command-click on macOS or Ctrl-click on Windows adds or removes one visible person; Shift-click selects the visible range. Both save immediately.
Escape clears a non-empty search first; press it again with an empty search to close the open cell.
Command+G on macOS or Ctrl+G on Windows creates a group from the current multi-person selection.

If planning cannot continue

Missing email: add it directly beside the person in Plan roster. For an open request, Save & send contacts only that person; invitation rows offer their own Add email action.
Failed delivery: verify the address and retry; do not count a failed message as sent.
No suggestions: check the selected teams, visible weeks, each team’s Who can serve list, and whether the events contain open positions under Team & roles.
Unavailable conflict: replace the person or correct an incorrectly recorded absence.
Availability request unavailable: Complete is required; ask an owner to check Settings → Plan & billing.
Stale cells: clear any team filter, wait for current data, then reopen Rostering.