Assigning rotas to services

By assigning rotas to a Service you can group together all the related rotas for each of your services, making it easier to visualise who is serving across a service, identify any gaps and communicate with everyone involved. Service notes are shown on all rotas linked to the service, ideal for disseminating important service details such as themes and readings.

Adding services

To add a service, navigate to the Services section of the Rotas module and click Add service.

On the Add service pop-up, give the service a suitable Name. Where you have multiple services, you may find it helpful to incorporate the service day and/or start time in the service naming convention. Similarly, multi-site customers will find it helpful to include the site name, like the example below. This will help rota members when they are viewing their rotas and lists of serving dates in My ChurchSuite and their rota reminder - especially if people serve on rotas for multiple sites. If you have previously added some rotas, you may also see a list of rotas not yet assigned to a service - you can optionally tick any rotas that will be assigned to the service you are adding, ignoring the ones that don't apply. Later in this article, we'll see how new and existing rotas can be assigned to a service. Click Save to add the new service.

The Service "view" page opens - we'll explore the Service "view" later in this article.

Returning to the Services section, the newly-added service is listed. Continue adding your other services as appropriate.

Note: Deleting a service is a destructive action, unlinking - but not deleting - all the assigned rotas from the service and permanently deleting all service notes. Delete services with caution!

Assigning rotas to services (ChurchSuite)

You can assign a rota to a service when the rota is first added. On the Add rota pop-up, select the Service from the drop-down list.

Existing rotas not currently linked to a service can also easily be assigned to a service. Working within the Rotas section of the module, and for a rota listed with an empty service (like the example shown below), select Edit from the rota actions.

On the Edit rota pop-up, select the Service from the drop-down list.

You can also bulk-assign multiple existing rotas to a service using batch actions. Working within the Rotas section, use the Advanced Search to filter the list of rotas with 'No Service'. Tick the checkbox on the left for each rota to be assigned to a service and select Edit from the batch Actions menu.

On the batch Edit pop-up, tick Service and select the appropriate service from the drop-down list. Click Save to assign all the selected rotas to the selected service.

Assigning rotas to services (My ChurchSuite)

Designated ministry overseers with My ChurchSuite access can assign the new rotas they add to an existing service. On the Add rota pop-up, select the Service from the drop-down list.

Similarly, ministry overseers can Edit an existing rota and assign the rota to a Service. On the Edit rota pop-up, select a Service from the drop-down list.

Working in service view

From the Services section of the Rotas module, clicking on a service Name from the list opens the Service view.

From the Service view, you can navigate to any service Date within the range of dates of the linked rotas - either using the date picker to jump to a chosen date or using the forward/backward controls to navigate one service date at a time.

Like the rota view, the service view allows users to fully manage people's serving details but across all the rotas for the selected service date. Ordinarily, the service view respects each rota's order; however, you can change the Order to Name or Role order, which applies to all rotas in the current service view.

The Add dates action is shown where one or more service rotas don't have a date instance for the service date being viewed. This may be intentional - for example, a Communion rota that only serves on the first Sunday of a month will not be shown on the service view for other Sundays in the month. The Add dates action can be used to add an additional service date to one or more service rotas. Begin by navigating to the service date using the date picker. Click Add dates.

In the example above, we can navigate to the 25th of December to add rotas for a special service for Christmas Day. Clicking Add dates opens the Add dates pop-up with a list of all service rotas. Rotas that do not have a date instance for "25th December" are shown pre-ticked but you can deselect rotas not needed on 25th December. In this way, you can bulk add a service date instance of 25th December to all the selected rotas. Note also that the rota's default serving start time is shown for each rota but you can make ad hoc changes to the serving start time for a rota, perhaps if the service time is slightly different on 25th December. The rota reminders will reflect the serving times for each rota when they are sent for the 25th of December. Click Save to add the service date to all the select rotas.

Once the service date has been added, you can begin to add people or teams to each rota from within the service view using the Add to date and Add to role options on each rota.

Optionally add a Plan and Service note. Service notes are ideal for noting the theme or readings for a service.

Finally, you to easily Communicate with all the service rota members for a service date.