Coverage

Coverage requests enable you to ask for coverage from your teammates without the back-and-forth. You choose the time interval you need coverage for and Shiftkeeper takes care of notifying the right people.

Once someone accepts your coverage request, you will be notified and the shifts will be reassigned to that user.

​

Creating a coverage request

​

Who is notified about my coverage request?

Your coverage request is sent to all users who are part of the schedules selected in your request. The members of the teams linked to the schedules are also notified.

​

What happens when I accept a coverage request?

When you accept a coverage request, the shifts listed in the coverage request are automatically reassigned to you using overrides. The user who requested coverage is notified that their request has been accepted.

​

Coverage requests vs overrides

As you might have noticed, coverage requests and overrides serve a similar purpose: they both enable you to substitute a schedule user when they are unavailable for their on-call shifts, but the approach is different.

Most of the time, you’ll likely want to use coverage requests. They make the process of aligning with everyone involved easier. While with overrides you typically need to align with the involved users and consider their availabilities manually, which can be time consuming.

Here a few tips to help you decide which one to use:

Use Coverage requests when:

• You are unavailable for a period of time and need someone to cover your shifts.
• It is not relevant who specifically covers your shifts, i.e., anyone can accept your coverage request.
• You need coverage for multiple shifts across multiple schedules.

Use Overrides when:

• You need to reassign certain shifts in a schedule to specific users.
• You need to extend a shift outside of the applied restriction intervals for that schedule.