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Auto Populate fills empty rota slots automatically by picking people from the linked ministry for each job, using a combination of serving history and per-person frequency weighting to distribute the load fairly. Rather than manually working through every slot for the month, you run auto populate and the rota is filled in for you — leaving only genuinely complex decisions for manual attention.
Go to Church Admin → Schedule → Auto populate schedule.
Before you start
Auto populate only works for schedule jobs that are linked to a ministry. Any job without a ministry link is skipped and must be filled manually. Make sure every job you want to auto populate has a ministry assigned in Church Admin → Schedule → Schedule jobs. See Schedule jobs.
Step 1 — Set relative frequency for ministry members
Before running auto populate for the first time, click Set relative frequency of people in the various ministries in the schedule on the auto populate screen. This opens a form showing every ministry linked to a schedule job, with each member listed and a frequency weighting field next to their name.
The frequency weighting controls how often each person is selected relative to others in the same ministry. The values are relative — they work as a ratio between people in the same ministry:
- Everyone set to 1 — all members are selected equally often
- Someone set to 2 while others are 1 — that person is selected roughly twice as often as the others
- Someone set to 0 — that person is never selected by auto populate for that ministry, but remains in the ministry and can still be assigned manually
Use this to reflect real-world constraints — a worship leader who is only available once a month gets a lower weighting than one who can serve every week. A new volunteer who is still learning gets a lower weighting until they are ready to serve more frequently. Someone on a sabbatical or reduced serving season can be set to 0 temporarily without removing them from the ministry.
Click Save when done. These settings persist until you change them — you don’t need to set them again each month.
How the selection algorithm works
For each job slot, Church Admin scores every member of the linked ministry and selects the highest-scoring available person. The score combines two factors:
- Serving history — people who have served least recently score higher and are chosen first. People who have served most recently score lower and are passed over until others have had a turn.
- Frequency weighting — the per-person weighting you set adjusts how aggressively each person is rotated in. A higher weighting means they are pushed to the front of the queue more often; a lower weighting means they are held back.
Availability is also checked — anyone who has declared themselves unavailable for a date is excluded from selection for that date regardless of their score. See Not available and Not available to serve.
Step 2 — Run auto populate
Select service and month
Choose which service and which month to populate from the dropdowns. Only empty slots are filled — any slots already containing a name are left untouched, so it is safe to run auto populate on a rota you have partly filled in manually.
Select jobs to populate
A list of all schedule jobs linked to a ministry appears with a checkbox next to each one. Tick the jobs you want to populate automatically. Leave a job unticked if you prefer to fill it manually — for example you might auto populate most slots but always choose the preacher yourself.
Run
Click Auto populate. The screen shows which names have been placed in which slots. The rota is saved immediately — no separate save step is needed.
Reviewing and adjusting
After auto populate runs, review the rota in Church Admin → Schedule and make any manual adjustments needed. Auto populate is a starting point, not a final answer — swap people, correct any slot where the automatic choice doesn’t suit, and fill in any jobs that were skipped.
If you run auto populate again for the same month and service, only slots that are still empty are filled — slots you have manually adjusted are not overwritten.
What happens if a ministry has too few members
If a ministry has fewer available members than there are dates in the month, people will appear more than once. The weighting system still tries to spread the load as evenly as possible, but with a small team some repetition is unavoidable. The best remedy is to add more people to the ministry.
If all members of a ministry have declared themselves unavailable for a particular date, that slot is left empty for you to fill manually.