Checking and publishing a schedule

Before parishioners see a schedule, run a quick Check, then Publish. Publishing makes it visible and feeds it into This Week. It also gives the ministers you have assigned one quiet nudge on their phone, if they use the parish app — and nothing more than that. No email and no text go out from publishing; those you still write and send yourself.

Check it

• 1. On the schedule, click Check.
• 2. Vianney lists every open position: the date, the Mass, the ministry, and how many it is short.
• 3. Any assignment on a ministry that requires Safe Environment clearance where the person is not cleared is listed separately, as "not Safe Environment cleared", so you can act before publishing.
• 4. Availability conflicts left behind by hand edits are counted too.
• 5. When everything is covered you get "Looks complete — every ministry filled for every Mass".

Check now answers a second question underneath the first: can this period be staffed? It lays your rosters against what the period actually needs, worst bottleneck first, in plain words, and suggests the smallest changes that would help. It is read-only — it looks, it never touches. (This is the old feasibility preflight, folded in where you were already looking.)

Needs attention goes further than Check. It gathers everything genuinely waiting on the office — what must be fixed, what needs a decision, and what still needs someone — and lets you act on each item where it sits. It is both a button on an open schedule and a tab of its own covering every schedule at once.

One of its advisories is worth recognising on sight: "A Mass intention is booked [date] at [time], but no Mass is scheduled then — move it in Liturgy → Intentions, or add the Mass." It appears on published periods only, and nothing is ever rebooked for you.

Publish

• 1. Click Publish.
• 2. If positions are still open, Vianney will not publish quietly. It says how many and sends you to Workbench → Review & publish…, where you tick Publish with open positions and then publish. A partial schedule is perfectly publishable — it simply has to be deliberate.
• 3. Vianney answers with a plain receipt: Published ✓ · Ministers with the parish app are notified — no email or text. Ministers assigned on this schedule who use the parish app get one short notification — "A new ministry schedule was published" — with no name and no detail on the lock screen. Anyone without the app hears nothing from publishing. Email and text stay yours: draft your reminders or a revision notice from Messages, and nothing leaves the building until you confirm the send. Publishing also tidies the intention book: an intention already booked at exactly the date and time of one of this schedule's Masses is quietly attached to it, so it will follow that Mass from now on. If any intention sits at a time this schedule has no Mass for, the receipt says so — "2 Mass intentions in this period sit at times with no Mass — see Needs attention" — and they wait for you there. Nothing is moved or deleted on your behalf.
• 4. Need to change something? Unpublish takes it back to draft and it stops showing immediately. On an archived schedule Unpublish is refused, and Vianney says to use Unarchive instead — that is the door with the checks on it, and going round it would skip them.

An archived schedule cannot be published. Bring it back with Unarchive first — it returns as a draft, and publishing it again is its own deliberate step.

The Review & publish screen

Worth opening even when nothing is open, because it puts everything you should weigh on one page:

• how many positions are filled, how many open, across how many Masses,
• anything that must be fixed first,
• how many recorded exceptions stand on this schedule,
• what changed since you last published, and what subscribed calendars will therefore see change,
• who will see it, in plain words, from your visibility setting.

After the period ends

There is nothing to close. As each date passes, Vianney freezes what actually happened for that date — who was first scheduled, who finally served, and any position nobody filled — and when the whole period is behind you it marks the period closed on its own. You will find it under the History tab, where you pick a schedule and read the record. Corrections are always possible; the record is never rewritten silently.

Tips

• Publishing is reversible, so it is safe to publish and then refine — just bear in mind that each publish sends that one short app nudge again to the ministers assigned on it.
• Only published schedules count anywhere else in Vianney — a draft is yours alone. Publishing also opens the schedule in the parishioner portal, where members can volunteer for an open position and ask for a substitute. When somebody offers to cover a request, the minister who asked gets a nudge on the parish app saying their request was claimed — and the office still has to approve the switch before anything actually changes.
• Ask servers to record their availability in the portal so future checks come back cleaner.
• Ministers appear in This Week only from published schedules.
• When the season is finished, Archive the schedule: it leaves the portal, stops counting toward anyone's limits, and frees those dates for the next one. Archiving is about tidying up; the what-actually-happened record under History is written on its own either way — a record, never a rating.