The rota module allows rotas to be created for all service teams in the church. For each team there is at least one leader who is responsible for maintaining the rota. They assign the team members to work on particular dates. The team leader may add or remove people from the teams, this is done using the people module. A service team might not be ministring in every event (or event group), so the team leader can set the event groups his team is ministring in.

An overseer, the moderator, controls and checks the whole rota. He ensures that all team leaders create their rotas by the deadline. Once this is done, they may send the rota to the team members be email or by post office mail. Each team member will receive a personal rota on which is shown their duties.

Permissions

The authorisation stages are applied to each login for each team. A login can have different authorisation stages for different teams, as a person (Defined by a login) will normally only be responsible for a few teams. These team leaders should be assigned authorisation stage 3 (Edit), as this allows them to create settings for the team and assign or remove people from the team.

A user with authorisation stage 2 (create), may create rotas using the people already assigned to the team. No new people may be added, and no settings may be changed at stage 2. This could be assigned to a deputy team leader who can make alterations to the rota.

Authorisation stage 1 (view) does not allow any changes to settings or rotas, the rota may only be viewed. This allows a team leader to ensure he is not assigning people in a way

that clashes with their service on another team.

The highest authorisation stage is 4 (moderator). This allows a user, in addition to all the actions described above, to delete teams, create them, to create the rota and send it off. Also months may be closed or opened. More information on this follows below.

Team leader, and team members

There are two ways to assign people to a rota team as leader or member:

Method 1:

A team leader is not defined as a login, but as a person from the people module. It would be possible, though it has no benefit, to have a team leader who has no permission to create a rota because they have no login. Normally the team leader will have a login with authorisation stage 2 or 3.

To assign a team leader you can edit this person's record in the people module and choose the appropriate rota team. If the user does not have permission to edit personal details, buttons appear below the address list which may be used to edit teams.

Similarly the team leader may be removed from a team. It is also possible to assign several leaders to a team. The assigned team leader can be seen in the team list:

A list of team leaders can be shown using a filter in the people module.

Team members are assigned in the same way as team leaders. A list of people in a team may be shown using a filter in the people module. It may be a good idea to store this filter as a preset, so that a list of all team members may be easily shown.

Method 2:

Each team may be assigned one or more groups. The people assigned to these groups will then be used for scheduling the rota of these teams. This allows you to organize your team members in the same hierarchy as all the other group assignments you may have.

The distinction between team leaders and members is done by a role within the group. These roles should be specified in the settings for the rota module.

Administering teams

New teams may only be created by a moderator. Also, only a moderator may delete existing teams. However, authorisation stage 3 (Edit) is sufficient to modify a team's settings.

A team has the following settings;

A name
Maximum number of team members
List of event groups

The maximum number of team members is the number of selection boxes shown in the scheduling screen, so if it is set too low, there will not be enough spaces to enter the team members. If it is set too high, the scheduling screen will become cluttered with selection boxes, so it is best to set it to a reasonable value.

Last is a list of event groups. Select the event groups at which this team serves. In the example, the Stewarding team is only needed for the Sunday Meetings event group.

Administering Months

A rota is always created a month at a time. The current month can be selected from a Submenu. A month can have the following statuses:

- not yet open: A future month is not open, so no rotas may be created during this month as yet. It is good practice to only open a month, when all it's events are certain. Otherwise unnecessary changes to the rota may be required.

- open: The month was opened by the moderator and is available for rotas to be created by the team leaders.

- closed: The month is closed for further modifications to the rota. This is normally done just before the production and dispatching to rotas to team members.

The moderator may change the status of all available months at any time. The available months extend over a period of a year.

A user with a lower authorisation stage than moderator can only view whether the months are open or closed. No changes may be made to closed months.

Scheduling

A user with authorisation stage 2 or higher may schedule rotas. The month of the rota to be created is selected from the month submenu. The teams to be shown may be selected using the filter in the submenu titled "Teams". All teams may be shown, so long as the user has authorisation stage 1 or higher. However the teams will be in read only mode for a user with authorisation stage 1.

The events during the selected month are shown in chronological sequence, with the teams underneath. For each team the number of people that can be selected was defined in the team settings. In the example, up to two sound engineers, and four stewards were defined. However the current user may not schedule the rota for the sound engineers as they do not have sufficient privileges. This can be seen as the drop down list boxes are set to inactive (grey). The teams are colour coded, red means that there is nobody serving at that event, green means there is at least one person registered to serve.

If "Free text for scheduling" is defined for the team under the settings, a text field appears next to the drop down lists, in which any text can be placed. This text appears on the rota.

All changes to the scheduling screen must be saved using the "save" button, otherwise they will be lost.

Presets

The people in all teams serving at an event may be stored in presets, so the same group may be assigned to another event (e.g. next month) with a single click. There are three presets (1-3) and a global preset available for each event group. The first three are only available within the same event group, but the global preset may be used for all event groups.

To store the people assigned in a preset, all people must be assigned to the teams and saved. Now simply click on the appropriate memory icon (1-3) to store the assignments. Only the assignments the current user has permission to edit are stored in the preset.

When using a preset, any current assignments will be overwritten. Additionally only the teams contained in the preset which the current user has permission to edit are filled out.

Note: To use a preset from one event group to populate another event group, store it in the global preset and use that to populate the other event group.

Setting up and creating rotas

If all rotas are scheduled, the rotas can be created as a PDF file ready for download. Before this is done, some settings may be changed.

Title: Text which forms the title when the rota is created.
Font size: The size of the font to be used in the rota.
Name layout: The names of the team members may be written in one of five different formats.
Teams: A rota may be created for all teams, or just for the selected ones.
Mark empty entries: If set to Yes empty entries in the rota are marked. Otherwise these will just be blank.
List separator: Define the string used to separate several names serving in the same team. Use <br> to include a line break after each name.

If these settings are changed, they must be saved prior to creating the rota.

A general rota may be created for everyone, or a personal one may be created for each particular member. The rota may be sent to all team members. An email subject and body may be entered. Each email automatically contains a personal rota in PDF format. Once it is sent a list of team members can be viewed as an Excel spreadsheet, which also contains the addresses of people with no email addresses, so they can be informed by another method.

To allow people without a kOOL login to access the rota, kOOL allows the rota to be created for the current and next month which may be opened on the rota front module on the home page. Two PDF icons are available, which may be used to create the rota with the current settings in a PDF file. The month and year are used as a link to this file.

The month must be closed to allow the rota to be created for the front module.

Assigning events to the rota

In addition to options such as room, colour and time, an event group also has the "Use in the rota" option. If this is set, all events in this group are used in the rota for the appropriate month. This option does not apply to events which have already been created, because it is a default when creating new events. This can be changed when editing the individual event.

Each individual event has the "Use in rota" option. This can be selected or deselected to define whether it should appear in the rota.

Informing team leaders

When a new month is opened, it can be helpful to inform the team leaders when they must schedule their rotas. The team leaders to be informed may be selected in the team list view. The email text contains some variables which are substituted depending on the team and the month:

<TEAMNAME>: Name of the team.
<MONTH>, <YEAR>: Month and year of the rota for which a reminder is being sent.
<EVENTS>: A list of events which require people from the team. If assignments have already been made, they are also sent so that the team leader can view them in the email.
<DEADLINE>: The date until when the assignments should be entered. This is being calculated according to the values given in the settings.

The addresses of team leaders who do not have email addresses assigned in the people module, are written to an Excel spreadsheet.

Settings

The following settings may be changed:

Select roles for each group: If this is set to yes then the group selection when creating a rota team will not only show groups but also roles, otherwise only groups may be selected and the role will be used from the setting "Group role for members" if set.
Group role for members: Only available if "Select roles for each group" is set to no. If so you may select a role which distinguishes the team members from the team leaders in all the groups assigned to rota teams.
Group role for leaders: Set the role to be used as team leaders in all the groups assigned to rota teams.
Order people select by: Switch between ordering the people by first or last name when schedulling.
Use presets for scheduling: Choose whether the preset buttons should appear or not.
Display comment row using this field from the events: The schedulling and the export view can both show comments from the events. Choose here which field(s) should be displayed.
Use colors for eventgroups in PDF: Set to yes to have the different events in the export highlighted with their respective color.
Number of months back still available: Choose the number of months back you and other users should be able to go back.
Free text for scheduling: For teams selected here, a text field appears when creating the rota allowing free text to be entered. This can be used e.g. for a guest speaker.
Email Text Templates. These are:
- Reminder email: A form letter to remind team leaders to schedule the rota for the next month
- Rota email: A form email to which the rota is attached when sending to the team members.
Deadline for the rota to be scheduled. The deadline for the rotas to be scheduled may be included in the reminder email to the team leaders using the following string: <DEADLINE> This deadline is determined by the data given in the deadline section.
Superteams: This defines whether superteams should be used. (More information on superteams below)

Super teams

If there are a large number of teams, the rota can become cluttered. To prevent this, teams, as long as they match certain conditions, may be combined into superteams, which appear on the rota as one team.

The following example may help. Imagine a church has two worship teams, One plays only at youth events, and the other only plays at adult events. There are two teams created in kOOL, a worship team, and a youth worship team. On the rota these appear on their own lines, even though the two teams will never both play at the same event. They could both be on one line without losing any information, as the people from the youth team do not play at adult events and vice versa.

So a superteam "Worship teams" may be created and the two teams "Worship team" and "Youth worship teams" assigned to it. Now when scheduling the rota only one line is used, and it contains events for both the teams. This is only possible if the teams are not assigned to common event groups. If this does happen it is not possible to group the teams and kOOL will display an error message.

Any number of teams can be assigned to one superteam. In the above example, the kids praise team could also be added to the superteam, so long as it did not play at any events in the other two teams event groups.