Until now, you could go to your profile and indicate you want to be scheduled with a family member, or that you prefer to not be scheduled with them. However, this was only ever considered from within the exact same service. If you were both being scheduled within the Traditional Service, you were good to go. But if you were scheduled to Traditional Service, and your spouse served in the Nursery, it wouldn't actually show any conflicts. Now it can!

Household Preferences

The old options that included simply "when Linda is scheduled" now have some extra words to let you know those options are for the same service. "Schedule me when Linda is scheduled in the same service." Now in addition, you have new options for "any concurrent service."

When a scheduler is filling out their roster, they see potential conflicts and preferences. If a person's preferences are set to any concurrent service, and a configured household member is scheduled to a position that conflicts with any Service Type in the account, they'll now see a conflict or preference.

Scheduling Conflicts

You can see above that Aaron has a green preferred badge because Linda is scheduled in a different Service with overlapping times.

Auto-Scheduling

If schedulers use Auto-scheduling to fill out their roster, it always takes preferences into account, avoiding conflicts, and prioritizing preferred people. Since these new options are just preferences, it all works as expected, making auto-scheduling that much more powerful.

Conflicts with Assigned Times

Another small, but important change was made with this feature, too. Until now, when determining conflicts with Household Preferences, the system looked at all times within a plan. If a plan had a 9am Service and an 11am Service, but Linda was only scheduled to 9am, it will still show conflicts for 11am.

Now when determining household conflicts, we only consider the services, rehearsals, and other times each person or position is actually assigned to. This is especially helpful if your Service times are far apart, like on Saturday or Sunday. If a person is only scheduled for the Saturday times, their Household preferences will no longer affect the Sunday times.