Roster period

A roster period is the block of time a business treats as one planning unit when it publishes and allocates shifts: a week, a weekend, or a full season of event nights.

How it works

A roster period usually contains a number of shift days or nights, each with its own published work. The period as a whole moves through a lifecycle. It's built (the available work laid out), opened for requests, allocated once requests close, confirmed, run, and finally completed. Completion often triggers calculations across the period, such as recalculating a reliability score for everyone who worked it.

The length of a period can usually be set to match how the business works. A retailer might roster weekly, a venue that opens at weekends might treat each Friday–Sunday block as a period, and a seasonal business might run one long period across a whole event season.

Choosing a length

The period boundary matters because everything else hangs off it: request windows, allocation decisions and reliability scoring are all worked out per period rather than continuously. A period that's too short means constant admin. One that's too long makes it harder to react to changes in demand or availability.

In Chronomancer

In Chronomancer, a period is a window you configure, containing a set of nights (event days such as weekends, specials and public holidays). Each period moves through seven states: Draft, Requesting, Allocating, Scheduled, Revise, Live and Completed. Reliability scores are recalculated automatically when a period is marked Completed.