> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.linkiasoft.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Shifts and working hours

> Setting up rotas, including overnight shifts, and how Ready time is measured against them.

Shifts record when each agent is expected to be working. They are what turns raw presence
data into a report you can act on — without them, "Ready time" is a number with nothing to
compare against.

## Creating a shift

**Settings → Inbox → Shifts → Add shift** (admins only).

| Field         | Notes                                                                               |
| ------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Name          | "Morning", "Night", "Weekend"                                                       |
| Start and end | Overnight is supported — an end time earlier than the start rolls into the next day |
| Working days  | Which days it applies to                                                            |
| Grace minutes | How late someone can go Ready before it counts as late                              |
| Default shift | Applied to agents with no shift of their own                                        |
| Agents        | Who is on it                                                                        |

<Note>
  Grace minutes exist so a two-minute delay does not show up as lateness. Set it to what you
  would actually treat as late — commonly 5 to 15 minutes.
</Note>

## Overnight shifts

A shift from 22:00 to 06:00 is understood as crossing midnight rather than being invalid.
Working days refer to the day the shift **starts**, so a Friday night shift ending Saturday
morning is a Friday shift.

## What shifts do and do not do

**They do**: give reporting something to measure against — the Ready Time report compares
when agents were actually Ready with when they were scheduled, showing late starts, early
finishes and gaps.

**They do not**: control chat distribution. That is decided by
[presence and channel grants](/help/routing/how-assignment-works), not by the rota. An
agent who is Ready outside their shift still receives chats; an agent scheduled but not
Ready does not.

This separation is deliberate — the rota is the plan, presence is what actually happened,
and the report is the difference between them.

## Reading the Ready Time report

**Analytics → Ready Time**. For each agent it shows scheduled time versus Ready time.

* Consistently short → late starts, early finishes, or forgetting to go Ready at all.
* Ready far beyond the shift → unrecorded overtime, or a stale session left open.
* Zero Ready time on a scheduled day → they never signed in, or presence is not being set
  at all.

Note that Busy time counts as working time. Someone on calls all afternoon is working, just
not taking new chats.