How to create a rota
The process of producing rotas begins with adding your ministries, adding each ministry's teams and members and optionally assigning team member roles - the ministry is the foundation of building a rota. Our related support article How to add a ministry talks you through the steps of adding ministries, teams, roles and team members. Once ministries are added, you can start producing rotas for a ministry. Where a ministry serves multiple services, you will produce separate rotas for each service, with each rota based on the same underlying ministry. However, if the ministry's teams, members and roles are significantly different for each service, you'll need to add separate service-specific ministries to produce service-specific rotas.
Top tip!
Read our related support article How to add a ministry before attempting to add a rota.
Adding rotas
Either click the Add rota button at the top of the Rotas list...
...or click Add rota from the top of the Ministry View:
On the Add rota pop-up, select the Ministry (if not already pre-selected), the Service to which this rota relates (optional) and specify the Date range for the rota. You might create a rota to run for a term, a year, or even just a single date (perhaps for an event that you are running) – you have complete flexibility. You can easily later extend a rota or produce a new follow-on rota. Note that the rota Name is pre-populated, but you can optionally change this if you wish.
The rota Days and serving Times are pre-populated with the ministry's default settings, but you can override and change these if necessary. For example, where a ministry serves multiple services, you will choose the appropriate Service from the list and set the rota Start and End times to reflect the rota member serving times served for that service:
The Team Rotation and Repeat Rota are pre-selected using the ministry defaults, but they can also be overridden and changed if desired.
For an Ad Hoc Team Rotation, there are no teams to rotate because ministry members will be manually added to rota dates on an ad hoc basis. The Repeat Rota determines how often the rota Days repeat within the rota's date range. Most Sunday rotas typically repeat Every week, but other options are available.
For a Simple Rotation Team Rotation rota - two or more teams are required - set the Repeat Rota, typically "Every week", choose the Teams to Rotate (perhaps excluding a reserves team), and choose the Start Team for the rotation.
For a Simple Rotation, notice also the Serving Pattern options that determine the number of consecutive rota dates each team will serve before the rotation moves on to the next team in the rotation. For example, for a rota where teams serve for two consecutive weeks before moving on to the next team, set the serving pattern to 2 Date(s). If teams serve for an entire month before rotating on to the next team for the next month, set the serving pattern to 1 Month(s).
For a Serve 13 Team Rotation, choose the Teams to Rotate (perhaps excluding a reserves team). Be sure to include four or five weekly teams; otherwise, the rota cannot be created.
Which team rotation?
The three Team Rotation types determine how rota dates are generated within the rota's range of dates They also determine how ministry teams are auto-populated to rota dates in rotation (Simple Rotation and Serve 13), or whether an empty grid of rota dates is created ready to assign ministry members on an Ad Hoc basis.
Teams in a rotation have distinct advantages over ad hoc (no rotation). Not only can ministry members better manage their serving commitments by knowing ahead of time which weeks they can expect to be serving (which is especially helpful for parents/carers with young children and the planning of the family diary), but populating the rota with people and roles is a considerably quicker process for those responsible for producing rotas. While a new rota is initially produced using the ministry's teams in rotation, rota members can, of course, still add unavailability and process swaps when they need to.
Of course, some ministries, like Worship, often lend themselves to ad hoc serving, where the mix of band members on each rota date may be a selective mix of musicians chosen on a date-by-date basis. Typically, ministries like Worship and Preaching don't follow a team rotation serving pattern.
When adding rotas, optionally enable/disable Clashes, Accept/Decline and the rota Expiry Reminders that will be sent to the designated ministry overseers when the rota is coming to its end. Rota Sign up through My ChurchSuite can also be optionally enabled and the maximum number of sign-ups per rota date specified - see the related support articles for further information about these features.
Finally, click Save to create the rota.
Create follow-on rotas or extend existing ones?
A rota is always produced for a range of dates – which means that a rota will always come to an end at some point. You may prefer to create new follow-on rotas, but it's also possible to extend rotas, either adding individual dates - perhaps for special services like Good Friday or Christmas - or adding a range of dates. See the related support article Working with rotas for further information about extending rotas.
Newly-created rotas are added with a Draft status, allowing module users and ministry overseers to further manage or make ad hoc changes to the rota without it being visible to the rota's members in My ChurchSuite. Only Published rotas are visible to rota members in My ChurchSuite, but you can make changes to draft or published rotas at any time – see our related support article on Working with rotas for further information about the wide range of rota-management functionality available. Note that rota reminders are only sent for published rotas.
When you are ready to distribute your draft rota and make it available to the rota's members, click Publish.
Note also the options available on the rota page to Communicate, Edit, Download, Print or Delete the rota.
Once a rota is Published, use the Send rota option to distribute the rota to the its members.
From the Send rota pop-up, you can optionally customise the range of rota dates and recipients to send to and the accompanying email subject/message. Each recipient's rota email will contain their curated list of serving dates, but you can optionally include a rota date grid and rota member contact details list.
Sent rotas are logged against each recipient rota member's profile page (not against the rota communication log). A personal rota page link is embedded in the email, giving rota members a curated list of all their serving commitments (accessible even if the rota member doesn't have My ChurchSuite access).
You can view all of your rotas in the Rotas section at any time – click on a rota to view it. The rota Search filters the list as you type, making it easy to find a particular rota within a long list. You can also use the Advanced Search to further filter using other criteria.
