When a shift is locked in the schedule it can no longer be changed or deleted. This may happen for a number of reasons as explained in this article:

• What is a locked shift?
• Background to schedules
• What factors cause a shift to be locked in the schedule?
  • The shift is associated with a completed timesheet on a previous day
  • The Location settings have been configured to lock shifts after a specific time period
  • 1000 days have passed since the shift date

What is a locked shift?

You may notice on the Schedule page that a shift is labelled as LOCKED.

When you click on a locked shift on the schedule you can see that you are unable to edit any fields in the shift such as who is working, which area, the start and end times, the break times and the shift notes. They are greyed out as shown below and the shift is marked LOCKED. 

Background to schedules

The purpose of a schedule is to communicate when the team is (or was, if you are looking at a previous schedule) intended to work.

Timesheets, on the other hand, are created to inform us when the team actually worked.

By default, once the current day of the schedule has passed and shifts in the schedule have a submitted timesheet associated with them they will be automatically LOCKED by Deputy. This is intended to prevent anyone from retrospectively changing the shift from what was originally scheduled at the time the timesheet occurred.

What factors cause a shift to be locked on the schedule?

The shift is associated with a completed timesheet on a previous day

A shift will be automatically LOCKED on the schedule once it fulfils both of these two criteria:

1. it is associated with a submitted timesheet AND
2. it occurs on a day previous to the current day in the schedule

Note: You can see that a shift is associated with a timesheet by clicking on View Timesheet under the three dots icon.

The shift below, on the other hand, has no timesheet associated with it. When you click on the three dots icon there is no View timesheet option and therefore no timesheet associated with this shift. This shift would not be locked by default one day after it has occurred (unless the Location settings have been configured as such).

Deputy locks the previous day's shifts from being edited once they have a timesheet associated with them to preserve data integrity. You can think of it in the context of:

• The shift information displays when and where the Team member was scheduled/intended to work
• The timesheet shows when and where the Team member actually did work

Locking the shift after the timesheet has been submitted, means that the scheduled details remain preserved as what was published when the shift was completed.

Note: Shifts are never locked on the current day's schedule.

The Location settings have been configured to lock shifts after a specific time period

In addition to the above default rule, there is also an optional setting to lock the schedule to preserve the integrity of the shifts that were scheduled, regardless of whether a timesheet was submitted or not.

Practically this means that after the specified amount of time has passed since the shift occurred, no one will be able to edit the scheduled shifts in retrospect.

Read Can I lock shifts to prevent changes? for more information.

The shift date is 1000 days in the past

If the shift date is more than 1000 days ago, then the shift will be automatically locked regardless of the above settings.