Planning Options: Weekly Patterns and Annual Planning

With this system, you can use Weekly Patterns to plan blocks of entire weeks, significantly reducing the time needed to build schedules.

First, you need to define the Weekly Patterns, then link them into Sequences, and finally go to the Annual Planning view to assign either individual Weekly Patterns or the Sequences directly.

Defining Weekly Patterns

You can create a new Weekly Pattern by clicking the “Add Weekly Pattern” button.

You can also edit an existing Weekly Pattern by clicking on the three dots ⇒ “Edit” to modify its name and color.
The name and color assigned to the Weekly Pattern will be used later when generating schedules from this pattern.

To define the working hours for a Weekly Pattern, click on each day row to set:

• the start time,

• the end time,

• the scheduled break, and whether or not this break is counted.

You can assign the same hours to multiple days of the week, or set different hours per day.
Once saved, the system will automatically calculate the daily total of counted hours and the overall weekly total.

You can create as many Weekly Patterns as needed for your monthly, quarterly, or annual planning.

From here, you can access the Annual Planning view,
which is also available directly from the Weekly Planning view.

Using the Annual Planning View

In this view, you can assign to each employee the relevant Weekly Patterns from the ones you’ve created, as well as Sequences of Weekly Patterns.

You can also use the copy & paste function to replicate a block of X weeks to another block of X weeks.

To do this, first select the source weeks (they will be highlighted in grey),
then select the starting week of the target block (the target weeks will appear in green).

Note: Applying Weekly Patterns here does not generate schedules. It only assigns Weekly Patterns to employees for the defined weeks.

To actually generate the shifts corresponding to each Weekly Pattern, you must click the button “Apply created annual pattern”.

Generating Shifts from Weekly Patterns

A week selection window will open to define the range of weeks where you want to generate schedules.

The system follows these rules:

1. If Weekly Patterns were already applied before, the existing shifts will be deleted and replaced with the new ones.

2. Vacation days and other absences (e.g. sick leave) are respected.

3. No shifts are created on days where an employee already has a manually created shift (i.e. not generated from a Weekly Pattern).

4. No shifts are generated for the current week, to avoid issues with already started or clocked shifts.

When you click the red “Apply created annual pattern” button, the system starts generating the shifts.
A progress bar will appear showing the status.
The waiting time depends on the date range and the number of employees/shifts to be created.

You must wait for the confirmation message (top right) to ensure the process has finished and all shifts have been generated.

Back in the Planning view, you will see the newly generated shifts assigned to employees.

Manual adjustments can still be made before publishing, and in any case, the Planning must be published.

Important Note

If you later edit Weekly Patterns and reapply them, the system will respect manual changes (for example, if two employees swapped shifts and the swap was approved by the manager).

If you also want to overwrite manually created shifts, you must delete them individually or delete the entire week using the Delete Week option.

Here’s the English translation, keeping Beam’s terminology (Weekly Pattern) consistent:

Additional Notes

It is not currently possible to define multiple time slots within the same day in a Weekly Pattern, or to define absence shifts (for example, “day off” or “half-day off”).
This feature is planned as a future enhancement of the solution but is not yet available.

If you need to assign split shifts within the same day – for example, Morning 10:00–12:30 and Afternoon 14:00–18:00 – you should configure your shift in the Weekly Pattern as follows:

• Start time: 10:00

• End time: 18:00

• Break: starting at 12:30 with a duration of 1h30

• Check the box: “Break does not count as working time”