Shift scheduling and coverage in TeamMap

A schedule is only worth what it tells you at 3am. Who is on post right now, who was supposed to be, and what the last guard left behind. This walks through how shifts are built, assigned, clocked and handed over in TeamMap.

What a shift record actually holds

The shift is the unit everything else hangs off. It carries the schedule, the assignment, the clock events and the handoff, so there is one record to look at when a client asks what happened Tuesday night.

• Scheduled times against actual clock-in and clock-out times
• Clock-in and clock-out location, distance from the site, and an optional photo
• Breaks started and ended
• Regular, overtime and double-time hours
• Timesheets submitted, approved, or sent back with a reason
• No-shows and late arrivals

Everything in that list is also what a paper schedule loses. The table below is the honest version of the trade.

On paper	In TeamMap
Printed schedule goes stale the moment it changes	The roster on the guard's phone is the current one
You call six guards to tell them about one swap	The change pushes to the affected guards
Overtime shows up on the payroll run	Hours accumulate against a threshold you set
You find out about the empty post from the client	Coverage is on the dashboard while the shift is running
Handoff is a verbal at the gate	Pass-down entries carry from shift to shift

How do you build a shift?

Most of the fields are what you would expect. Three of them decide how strict the shift is, and those are worth setting deliberately rather than accepting the default.

Field	What it does	Example
Shift name	What the guard sees in their roster	Day Shift, Building A
Start and end time	The scheduled window	0600 to 1400
Client and site	Who the shift is billed to and which of their sites it covers	Acme Corp, North Campus
Assignees	Named guards, or left open to claim	2 guards
GPS at clock-in	Whether clocking in requires being at the site	Required
Welfare checks	Lone worker check-ins during the shift	On for overnight posts
Attached reports	Reports the guard has to file before the shift closes	Daily Activity Report

The order of work is short:

1. Open the scheduler and go to the date and site you are covering
2. Add a shift and set the start and end times
3. Assign guards, or leave it open for someone to claim
4. Decide whether clock-in needs GPS
5. Add the notes the guard needs before they arrive
6. Save

What repeats, and what does not

Each shift is created for the dates you schedule it. What repeats on its own is the work inside the shift. A route runs on an hourly, daily, weekly or shift-based recurrence, and a recurring task runs hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.

So build the recurring patrol once, then roster guards against the dates that need covering. Setting up a route that repeats on schedule covers the patrol side of that.

Who gets the shift?

Four things to check before you commit an assignment.

• Overlap. A guard whose shift is still running cannot clock in to a second one, so check the roster for a clash first
• Hours already worked. Watch the week's accumulated hours against your overtime threshold, not the day's
• Preference. Guards who like a site stay on it, and the ones who hate a post are the callouts you get at 5am
• Travel. Back-to-back shifts across town produce a late clock-in that is your scheduling error, not theirs

Overtime is the one that compounds quietly. If you are trying to bring the number down rather than just watch it, cutting overtime with better scheduling and the wider cost picture go into the patterns that create it.

Open shifts guards can claim

Leave a shift unassigned and it shows on the app as unclaimed. The first guard to tap "Assign to me and clock in" takes it, immediately, with no approval step in between. That is deliberate: an approval queue on a 2am coverage gap is a gap that stays open.

The trade is that you need your overtime thresholds set before you open shifts up, because a guard claiming their sixth day does not know your payroll math.

Clocking in, and proving where

The guard arrives, opens the app, taps clock in on the assigned shift. GPS is captured with the event. An NFC scan at the post can be added on top if you want the location tied to a physical tag rather than a coordinate.

How strict that is depends on one setting.

Setting	Behavior	Fits
GPS off	Clock in from anywhere	Office and admin staff
GPS required, violations flagged	The clock-in goes through, but an out-of-radius one is flagged and the manager can be notified	Most guard posts
GPS required, geofence enforced	The clock-in is refused outside the site radius you set	Fixed posts with a tight perimeter
Photo at clock-in or clock-out	A photo is required before the shift starts or ends	Sites where identity matters as much as presence

Late arrivals and no-shows

• Late arrival. Set a threshold in minutes past the start time. Past it, the clock-in counts as late on the shift, in the shift report, and in the alert to your admins and supervisors
• Clock-in after the shift has ended. Allow it or block it, with a grace window you set in minutes
• No-show. An alert fires if nobody has clocked in by the end of the grace period

The alert is the easy half. Having somewhere to send the alert at 4am is the hard half, and it is a rostering problem before it is a software one. Nine ways to reduce guard callouts is about the causes rather than the notification.

Watching coverage while it is happening

The dashboard answers one question: is every post covered right now?

• Today's shifts across every site
• How many of your team are online right now
• Shifts nobody has claimed yet
• Overdue and unassigned work sitting against those shifts
• Every guard sharing location, live on the map

Alerts push the exceptions at you so you are not reading the board continuously.

Alert	Trigger	Goes to
No-show	Nobody clocked in by the end of the grace window	Supervisor
Late arrival	Clock-in past your late threshold	Supervisor
Clocked in off site	Clock-in happened away from the site	Supervisor
Left the site	Guard crossed the site boundary mid-shift	Supervisor
Overtime	Shift crosses the overtime threshold	Supervisor and guard

Overnight posts add one more layer. Welfare checks turn a lone worker shift into a scheduled prompt the guard has to answer, and a missed answer escalates rather than sitting there. That is covered separately in welfare check-ins for lone workers, and the feature page for lone worker monitoring has the configuration side.

Handing the post over

Most information loss in this industry happens in the ninety seconds between two guards at a gate. The pass-down log exists to stop that.

1. The outgoing guard writes their handoff notes on the shift
2. Anything still open goes in as a pass-down entry
3. Each entry names the condition, the incident, or the equipment involved
4. The incoming guard reads the pass-down before clocking in
5. They work the entries during the shift
6. Each one is marked resolved, and can be reopened if it comes back

What belongs in an entry, in practice: active incidents still running, tasks nobody finished, contractor and visitor activity that is still on site, broken equipment, open maintenance requests, standing instructions from the client, and every key or access card that changed hands.

The last one is the one that bites. A key handed over verbally at 2300 is a key nobody can account for by Friday. A key control policy and a written handoff SOP are the two documents that make the pass-down log fill itself in properly.