Rota — the hours behind the page

Your opening hours are not a settings screen in RowFold. They are rows in a table, and the Rota is that table drawn as a week: seven day rows, a column per person, one bar per record. This article explains why hours are records, how to read a week that has been assumed rather than typed, how one row closes a fortnight, and what to do when the page and the rota disagree. Why hours are rows Every other product makes opening hours a settings screen. RowFold makes them records, and the difference shows up the first time you need something a settings screen cannot do: paste a month of shifts in from a spreadsheet, let an automation close the shop on a bank holiday, give one person different Tuesdays, or look back at what the hours were in March. A bar on the Rota is a row. Drag its edge and the times change. Drag it into another column and the staff link is rewritten. Nothing here is a rota-shaped copy of your data — it is your data, drawn as a week. Dashed means assumed When a booking page is set up it is given a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five week, because a page with no hours offers nothing at all and an empty calendar teaches nobody anything. Nobody actually works those hours, so the Rota draws them dashed until somebody edits them. The moment you change one day, that person's whole week goes solid — once you have told us what a week looks like, the rest is your choice too. If your hours genuinely are nine to five, confirm them and the dashes go. The product would otherwise tell you forever that something true was an assumption. A holiday is one row Give a time-off row a date and an until-date and the whole range closes. A fortnight is one row, not fourteen — and any one of fourteen forgotten is a bookable morning in the middle of somebody's holiday. Leave a time-off row with no times and it closes the whole day. Leave it attributed to nobody and it closes the page for everyone, which is what a bank holiday or a refit actually is. Working rows are the opposite and deliberately so: a working row with no times means nothing and is ignored, because the one direction this must never fail in is inventing availability. When the page and the rota disagree The commonest cause is the roster — the list of people a booking page actually offers. Somebody can have a full week of hours and still never appear, because the page was never told to offer them. The Rota marks that on their own column header, with a one-click fix. The second cause is the shape of the row itself. A row the reader cannot use is drawn inert and says why, rather than sitting there looking like availability that nobody can book. Tips • Alternate Saturdays and first-Monday-of-the-month are sayable: give the row a repeat and it narrows which of those weekdays fire. Nothing is written out in advance, so the rule never runs out. • The dated panel below the week is where the exceptions live — one person's fortnight, a closure, a one-off extra clinic. Good to know • An overnight shift is one row that crosses midnight, drawn clipped at both ends. Drag the visible edge, not the chevron. • A row whose until-date is before its date covers the single day it started on. Mistyping a year clamps rather than refuses, so read the line back. Who can do what • Anyone who can see the availability table can read the week; editing a bar is an ordinary record write, so it follows that table's permissions. • Fixing a roster is admin-only, because the roster decides whose name a public page publishes.