Weekly work schedule templates for Excel

The eight files answer three different questions, and the right one depends on how your shifts move, whatever your industry. For most small teams, that’s the weekly employee schedule template: Sunday through Saturday on one landscape page, with everyone’s shifts and hours at a glance.

When the times change from day to day, take a schedule with an In and an Out in every cell: the weekly or the biweekly one. Coffee shops, restaurants, retail with long days, anywhere the question is who is on at 4 PM. The cells hold real clock times, so the file can work out hours, overtime and wages. The daily schedule takes one busy day and lays it out hour by hour, so a dinner rush with one person too few shows before the doors open.

When people work set shifts, take a code grid: the monthly schedule, or one of the three 24/7 rotations. A letter per person per day is quicker to fill and easier to read across a month than a wall of times, and the small shift table under the grid turns the letters into hours. Move an opening from 7:00 AM to 7:30 AM in that table and every total follows.

The time card is the other half of the story. The schedule is the plan; the time card is what one person actually worked in a week, lunch punches included. Keeping the two apart is what makes a payroll question quick to answer.

All three keep a site covered around the clock with four crews. They differ in how a week feels.

• 2-2-3 (Pitman). 12-hour shifts, and each crew stays on days or on nights. Short runs of two or three shifts, and every other weekend is a three-day weekend off. The easiest of the three to live with if some people prefer nights.
• DuPont. 12-hour shifts rotating between days and nights over a four-week cycle, with a block of seven days off once a cycle. Popular in plants because of that week off; the stretches of four nights are the price.
• Rotating 8-hour. Day, swing and graveyard, seven shifts in a row on each before moving on. Shorter shifts, more of them: 21 in four weeks against 14 on the 12-hour patterns, the same 42 hours a week on average.

A grid of days is the easy part of any schedule template. The files earn their keep with the arithmetic behind the grid.

• Hours from clock times. A shift from 10:00 PM to 6:30 AM is eight and a half hours; a plain subtraction gives a negative number, and that is why so many downloaded templates go wrong on nights. A half-filled pair counts as zero, so a forgotten Out cannot invent hours.
• The unpaid break. The weekly and biweekly schedules take one break length per person and subtract it from every shift that person works. The time card takes the real lunch punches instead.
• Overtime by the week. Hours past the threshold in the yellow cell are overtime, paid at the rate you set there. The biweekly file counts each week on its own and then adds the weeks, so 45 hours plus 35 hours shows 5 hours of overtime. Set the threshold and the rate to the rules that apply to your business.
• Coverage. Under every code grid a row counts who is on each shift each day and turns red below the minimum; in the daily file you type how many people each hour needs, and the Short by row does the same. The red is conditional formatting, so it moves with every edit. In the monthly sample one week of PTO leaves four evenings with a single closer, and you can see which ones while you plan.
• Dates from one cell. Type the Sunday your week starts on, and every day name and date in the header follows. Next month is one changed cell.

Everything is a plain formula: IF, SUM, MIN, MAX, COUNTIF, WEEKDAY. There are no macros, and the files open in Excel, in LibreOffice and in Google Sheets. For Sheets, upload the file to Google Drive and open it, or use “File” → “Import” in a new spreadsheet; the formulas keep working.

A spreadsheet is a perfectly good schedule for one location and a small team. It stops working at a point that is easy to recognize once you know it.

• The team works from different copies. The schedule goes out as a photo in a group text. After two swaps, three versions are in circulation and one of them is last Tuesday’s.
• A change reaches nobody. Move a shift and the file changes, and that is all. The person finds out if they happen to open it again.
• A call-out at 6 AM. A file cannot ask the whole team at once who can come in. A manager can, one text at a time.
• The second location. Two files, and every question about the other site costs a phone call.
• It does not notice mistakes. The same person twice on one day, an evening with nobody closing, someone scheduled on the day they asked off. The coverage row catches the second; the other two the grid accepts without a word.

That is no reason to skip the templates: download them, use them, there is no form to fill in. It is a way to tell when the team has outgrown them. When it has, the same week built in the InShift work schedule maker goes to every phone with one button, and the hours land in the timesheet on their own.