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Business hours rotations

Business hours mode restricts duties to specific hours of the day. Outside those hours the rotation has no user on duty; when business hours start again, the same users come back on duty — unless a scheduled shift change happened in the meantime, in which case the next users in the plan take over.

A typical use case is a support rotation that should only be active during working hours (for example, 9 to 6).

Enable business hours

Section titled “Enable business hours”

You configure business hours from the dashboard at app.roundrobinbot.eu.

  1. Open the rotation and select Configure → Options.

    The Rotation Options page in the dashboard, with sections for the rotation plan, mention settings, and duty notifications

  2. In the Business Hours card, turn on Enable Business Hours.

  3. Select the timezone your time blocks refer to. This is independent of the schedule’s time zone — if the rotation is scheduled, the two can differ.

  4. Define one or more time blocks. Use Add Block to create multiple blocks per day, for example 9:00–13:00 and 14:00–18:00 to keep lunch as off-time. Blocks cannot overlap, and each block must end after it starts.

    The Business Hours card expanded, showing the enable toggle, a timezone selector, and a time-block timeline visualization

  5. Save the rotation options.

Additional options

Section titled “Additional options”
Option Effect
If the rotation is skipping weekends or holidays, consider the skipped days as off-time When the rotation’s schedule skips a day (for example, a working-days rotation on a weekend or holiday), that whole day counts as off-time too: nobody is on duty from Friday evening until Monday morning.
Do not notify channels if a user has multiple business hours shifts in sequence Suppresses the daily on/off-duty channel notifications when the same user stays on duty across consecutive business-hours slots — for example, a user on duty Monday to Friday 9 to 5 is only announced once at the start.

How the rotation behaves

Section titled “How the rotation behaves”

While business hours are active, the rotation works as usual. When a business-hours slot ends, everyone is taken off duty; when the next slot begins, the users who were on duty before come back automatically.

If the rotation is scheduled and a shift change falls inside off-time, no duty switch happens immediately. Instead, the next users in the plan are recorded and go on duty when business hours resume.

Reading the status in the dashboard

Section titled “Reading the status in the dashboard”

Rotation cards and the rotations table show a small status icon when business hours are enabled: a clock while business hours are active, and a coffee cup while the rotation is paused outside business hours.

From Slack

Section titled “From Slack”

The rotation view in Slack shows a business-hours badge with the configured time blocks. Slack renders these times in your own local time zone.

During business hours, the Next on Duty block shows who takes over at the next shift change, marked with a next shift label:

A rotation in Slack showing the business-hours badge and Next on Duty marked with a next shift label

When the rotation is off-business, On Duty shows an off-business hours marker with a coffee icon instead of a user, and Next on Duty shows who goes back on duty when the next slot starts, together with the restart time — usually the same users as before:

A rotation in Slack off-business hours, with On Duty showing Nobody and Next on Duty showing the users returning at 16

If a scheduled shift change occurs before the next business-hours slot begins, Next on Duty shows the following users in the plan instead.

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