Flincs

Auto-Generate

Available to: Owner, Admin

Flincs can automatically generate a full week's schedule based on your shift rules, employee availability, and staffing requirements. This saves you from building every shift by hand.

How to auto-generate

  1. Navigate to the week you want to fill on the Schedule page
  2. Click the Generate Schedule button
  3. The system runs the optimization algorithm
  4. Shifts appear on the weekly schedule as drafts

Review the generated schedule and make manual adjustments if needed.

What the algorithm considers

The auto-generator takes many factors into account:

Employee contracts

  • Each employee's weekly hours target
  • Full-time employees (Priority 1) get shifts first, then part-time (Priority 2), then temporary (Priority 3)

Availability

  • Only schedules employees during their available times
  • Respects the availability mode set on each employee (weekly pattern, one day per week, or specific dates)

Labor law limits

  • Maximum daily hours (default: 8, extended: 10)
  • Maximum weekly hours (default: 40, with overtime: 50)
  • Minimum rest period between shifts (default: 11 hours)
  • Maximum consecutive working days (default: 6)

Overtime balance

  • Employees with high overtime are deprioritized or blocked entirely
  • The blocking threshold is configurable in Schedule Configuration (default: 4 hours)

Shift requirements

  • Uses the staffing requirements you defined in Shift Rules -- how many people are needed per area, per day, per time slot
  • Tries to fill all required positions

Work areas

  • Assigns employees to their primary area first
  • Falls back to alternative areas if needed to fill gaps

When generation fails or looks wrong

The algorithm does its best, but it cannot always find a perfect solution. Common reasons:

  • Not enough employees to cover all shift requirements
  • Availability conflicts -- too many people unavailable that week
  • Overtime limits -- many employees are already over their hours
  • Calculation timeout -- the solver ran out of time (configurable in Shift Rules > Advanced)

When this happens, the generator fills what it can. Review the result and fill gaps manually.

After generating

Generated shifts come in as drafts. This gives you a chance to:

  1. Review the schedule
  2. Move shifts around or swap employees
  3. Adjust start/end times
  4. Publish when everything looks right

Tip: Set up your shift requirements in Schedule Configuration before using auto-generate. The better your requirements are defined, the better the generated schedule will be.

Regenerating

If you don't like the result, you can delete the week and generate again. The algorithm may produce a different result based on how it handles ties and constraints.