ShiftPick — the rota, without the group chat

A manager posts the week’s shifts into a message thread. Three people reply at once claiming the same slot. Somebody’s certification lapsed two months ago and nobody noticed. The rota gets edited, reposted, and now two versions are circulating.

The failure is not scheduling — it is that the rota has no single authoritative copy, and no idea who is actually cleared to work each role.

Shifts are published a single time to one list that everyone reads from. Staff claim what suits them rather than waiting to be assigned, which removes the manager from the middle of every swap and cover request.

Permissions do the safety work. People only see shifts they are cleared for, and clearance comes from documents an admin has actually reviewed — not from a checkbox someone ticked about themselves.

• Three permission tiers, so staff only ever see shifts matching their clearance
• Document review workflow — accounts stay pending until an admin approves the upload
• Shift claiming with a waitlist, so full shifts still capture demand
• Peer-to-peer shift swaps settled by a one-time swap code and completed by a database trigger
• Availability records, so managers publish against what people can actually work
• Announcements broadcast to the whole team from one place
• Auto-issued employee numbers via a database trigger
• Embedded AI assistant with guest and authenticated modes

Swap execution and permissions live in Postgres as row-level security policies and triggers rather than in client code. A user cannot claim a shift they are not cleared for even if they call the API directly.