How Auto Duty Planning works

Understand Auto Duty — a recurring, self-driving duty plan that notifies your team, collects availability and leave, and generates a roster on a repeating schedule.

An Auto Duty is a recurring definition that plans your roster for you, cycle after cycle — weekly or monthly — without you rebuilding it by hand each time. Set it up once, and PlanMyRounds notifies your team, opens a window for availability and leave, generates the schedule, and (if you choose) publishes it, all on its own.

Auto Duty is a separate, additional way to get a roster — it doesn’t replace the manual Duty Plan wizard. Every cycle it runs still produces an ordinary Duty Plan, generated into the same rosters you’d otherwise build by hand.

Auto Duty, Planning Cycle, Duty Plan — what’s what

Auto Duty

The recurring setup: which team, which Shift Schedule, what cadence, and how much of the process runs unattended. Created once, reused every cycle.

Planning Cycle

One run of that setup for one period — for example, the cycle that plans next week. Moves through five stages from Notify to Published.

Duty Plan

The roster a cycle produces. Once generated, it’s the same kind of Duty Plan you’d get from the manual wizard — reviewable, publishable, editable.

What an Auto Duty covers

Cadence

Weekly or monthly, with a start day and how far ahead planning opens.

A Shift Schedule

The weekly shift pattern generated against every cycle.

A doctor pool

Scoped by department, pod, and location — re-queried fresh every cycle, so staff changes are picked up automatically.

Scheduling rules

The same work, rest, and fairness rules used by the manual roster wizard.

The 5-stage planning cycle

Every cycle moves through the same stages, shown as a stepper on the cycle page:

Stage	What happens
Notify	The team gets a heads-up email/push, and the availability window opens.
Availability & Leave	Staff update their availability at any time; admins review leave in parallel — these run side by side, not one after the other.
Generate	The engine solves the roster against the current doctor pool, Shift Schedule, and rules.
Roster Review	The generated Duty Plan is ready to check — coverage, workload, and any soft violations — before it goes live.
Published	The Duty Plan is live and visible to the team.

A cycle that can’t produce a valid schedule lands in Failed instead of Roster Review; one you stop partway through lands in Cancelled. See Running a planning cycle for what to do at each stage.

How much runs on its own

You choose how hands-on each cycle is:

Setting	Behaviour
Off (default)	You start each cycle and click Generate Duty Plan and Publish Roster yourself.
Generate duty plan automatically (Auto Mode)	The cycle generates on its own once the review window closes, even if some responses are still pending. You still review and publish.
Publish automatically	Requires Auto Mode. The generated Duty Plan publishes with no review step at all.

See Setting up an Auto Duty for how to configure these.

The doctor pool is never a saved list — it’s queried fresh at Notify and Generate time from your department, pod, and location filters. A doctor who’s deactivated, transferred, or rotated out is automatically dropped from the next cycle; no manual list to maintain, but also nothing to manually pin down.

Where to find it

Select Auto Duty Planning in the sidebar to see every Auto Duty in your organisation, its cadence, its Shift Schedule, and its latest planning cycle.

Next steps

Set up an Auto Duty

Configure cadence, team scope, and automation level.

Run a planning cycle

Walk a cycle from Notify through to a published Duty Plan.

What is Auto Mode?

The three automation levels, explained plainly.