The two dimensions PlanFast uses to structure your schedule.
Where does someone work? Service, kitchen, bar, register, storage — the organizational areas of your business.
What can someone do? Shift lead, barista, cashier, first aid — skills that may be required for certain shifts.
A shift has one department but can require multiple qualifications. An employee can belong to multiple departments and hold multiple qualifications.
Set up your departments once — the Setup Wizard suggests industry-typical ones (e.g. "Service", "Kitchen", "Bar" for hospitality).
Every employee can belong to one or more departments. This is common when someone works both service and bar, for example.
If someone belongs to multiple departments, you can set priorities — the algorithm then preferentially schedules them in the higher-priority department. Example: Maria is in "Service" (priority 1) and "Bar" (priority 2) — she's primarily scheduled for service shifts, only for bar when capacity allows.
Qualifications are optional — leave the feature empty if you don't need it. If you do use it, it's a hard constraint: without the right qualification an employee can't be scheduled for the shift.
In the area Settings → Manage qualifications you create as many qualifications as you need, e.g.:
For each employee you set which qualifications they hold. This happens in the employee profile and can be changed later.
On the shift template (or a single shift) you specify which qualifications the shift requires — e.g. "Shift Lead" for an early shift. The algorithm then only assigns employees who have at least one of the required qualifications.
If you as admin manually want to assign someone without the required qualification, PlanFast shows a warning:
"Missing qualifications: Maria Schmidt does not have the qualification 'Shift Lead'."
You can still assign — button "Assign anyway". Useful when you know Maria does have the qualification (just not in the profile yet) or when someone covers exceptionally.
In the area Manage qualifications you can:
Recommendation: start small. Two important qualifications beat 15 rarely used ones.