Church Admin Plugin

Schedule

⭐ Premium

The Rota (Schedule) module lets you build and manage a rota for your services — assigning volunteers to specific roles for each date. Participants can see their upcoming slots on your website or the Our Church app, and you can send the rota out by email or SMS manually or automatically each week.

Setting up the rota follows three steps in order. Each step must be completed before moving to the next.

Step 1 — Set up your sites and services

The rota is built around your services — the rota can’t exist without them. If you haven’t set up your services yet, go to Church Admin → Sites & Services → Add service first. See Sites and Services overview and Service schedule for the full details.

The Schedule module on the main Church Admin dashboard screen shows a prompt if no services are configured yet.

Schedule module on the Church Admin dashboard
Add a service screen

Step 2 — Set up schedule jobs

A schedule job is a role that needs to be filled each week — worship leader, preacher, meeting host, welcome team, sound desk, children’s workers, and so on. You define what jobs exist before you start filling them with names.

Go to Church Admin → Schedule → Schedule jobs and click Add a schedule job.

Add a schedule job screen

The fields for each job are:

  • Job name — the role title as it appears on the rota
  • Schedule order — the order this job appears in the rota. Lower numbers appear first — set your most prominent role (e.g. Preacher) to 1.
  • Use initials on PDF — tick this to show initials rather than full names on PDF rotas, useful for jobs with long names that would otherwise overflow the column
  • Services — if you have more than one service, select which services this job applies to. A sound desk job might only apply to the morning service, for example.
  • Show on calendar — tick to display who is filling this role on the calendar entry for that service
  • Ministry — link this job to a ministry. When you fill the rota, Church Admin shows only people from that ministry as options, making selection much faster. You can also create a new ministry from this screen if one doesn’t exist yet.

Click Save schedule job. Repeat for every role in your services.

Schedule jobs list

Step 3 — Build the rota

Go to Church Admin → Schedule. The rota defaults to the current month and your first service. Use the dropdowns at the top to switch between months and services.

Schedule screen
Month and service selector on the schedule screen

Every service date for the month is shown automatically. There are two ways to fill in slots:

Quick entry — click to enter data

On a larger screen, click Click to enter data on any slot. A field appears where you can type free text — a name, a sermon title, or any note — or select a person from a dropdown if that job is linked to a ministry. Pressing Tab moves to the next slot and saves automatically.

Click to enter data on the schedule

Full edit form

Click Edit on any service date to open a form showing all jobs for that service at once. Fill in all the slots for that date and click Save.

Full service schedule edit form

Copying a service to another date

If the same team serves on multiple dates, use the copy function on the right of any service row to duplicate that service’s rota to another date — saving you from filling in the same names twice.

Copy schedule to another date

Volunteer availability

Church Admin lets volunteers declare in advance when they are not available to serve. If someone has marked themselves unavailable for a date, they are greyed out in the rota so you won’t accidentally book them. You can set up a page on your website where logged-in volunteers manage their own availability using a shortcode or block. See Not available and Not available to serve.

Showing the rota on your website

Logged-in volunteers can see their upcoming rota slots on your website using the shortcode or Church Admin block:

[church_admin type=”schedule”]

This shows each person only their own slots — not the full rota — so volunteers can check when they are next serving without seeing everyone else’s details. The rota is also available in the Our Church app. See Getting started with the app.

Sending the rota out

Once the rota is built, you can notify volunteers by email or SMS:

  • Manual email — send the rota to all scheduled volunteers immediately. See Email the schedule manually.
  • Manual SMS — send SMS notifications to all scheduled volunteers. See SMS the schedule manually.
  • Automatic email — set up a scheduled email that goes out automatically each week without any admin action needed. See Auto email schedule.
  • Automatic SMS — set up automated weekly SMS reminders. See Auto SMS schedule.

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