Assigning Work Orders Outside Shift Hours

Overview

This feature allows dispatchers and schedulers to override normal shift restrictions and assign work orders to technicians outside of their scheduled shifts.

In this article, we’ll be covering how to do this, what happens when you do this, and typical use cases where this can be beneficial.

Assigning Shifts outside of a technicians Schedule

Below, you’ll find the instructions on how you can assign a shift to a technician that’s outside of their scheduled shifts:

1. You’ll start by navigating to Workforce > Schedules.
2. Locate the work order, on the right-hand side, that you want to assign.

3. Drag and drop the work order onto the desired technician’s swim lane—even if it falls outside their scheduled shift hours.

   The technician has to be qualified to perform the work order.

4. A warning message will appear:
5. Select Confirm to proceed. Closing the modal will not assign the work order.
6. The assignment will save, and an audit log entry is created in the Activity tab of the work order, showing who made the override and when.

Enabling the permissions

In order to be able to assign a work order to a technician that is outside of their scheduled shifts, you’ll need to have the necessary permissions to do this. To assign the correct permission, follow the below steps:

1. Go to Settings > Roles.
2. Select the role you want to edit.
3. Click Edit Role.
4. Navigate to Workforce > Work Orders > Assign Outside Shift Hours.
5. Toggle the permission on or off.

Recommended usage

This feature is designed for exception-based scheduling and not as routine assignments. Below, we’ve highlighted some example use cases in which this feature could be used and when it shouldn’t be used.

When you could use this feature

• Shift overlap: Job runs 4:30–5:30pm, but the technician’s shift ends at 5pm.
• After-hours emergency: Hard down or an outage occurs at 9pm and a technician needs to be assigned a work order.

When not to use

• Routine scheduling during normal hours. This is not a workaround to assigning actual shifts to a technician.
• Day-to-day assignments that fit within shift coverage—use standard scheduling processes.

Limitations as of September 2025

• Schedule Page Only: You cannot assign outside shift hours from the work order modal—time pickers respect active shift windows. This won’t be a future enhancement.
• Automated Notifications: Technicians receive the same notification as when they are assigned a job during shift hours. This may be a future enhancement.
• No Override Reporting: Reporting on number of outside-shift assignments. This may be a future enhancement.