How to create a ministry schedule

A schedule covers a stretch of time — a month, a season, a quarter — and holds the assignments for every Mass in it. Here is how to start one.

Create the schedule

• 1. Open Ministries → Schedule and click + New schedule.
• 2. Give it a Name, for example "Fall 2026 (Sep–Nov)".
• 3. Set the From and To dates. One schedule may cover up to a year.
• 4. Under Include, tick the kinds of Mass it should cover:
• Weekend Masses — Sundays and the Saturday vigil, at your weekend needs.
• Holy days & seasonal Masses — from your Seasonal Masses setup, each with its own needs.
• Daily Masses — at your weekday needs.
• 5. Click Create.

Weekend and seasonal come ticked; daily Masses do not. Tick at least one — Vianney says so plainly if you tick none.

What you get

Vianney lays out every Mass in the period that matches what you ticked, each titled from the liturgical calendar (moving feasts included) and each asking for the number of ministers its kind of Mass needs. Nothing is filled in yet — that is the next step.

Two live schedules cannot cover the same dates. If they would overlap, Vianney names the other schedule and asks you to archive it or pick different dates: two schedules over one weekend would double-book people and double-count their monthly limits.

Finding your way around an open schedule

• Calendar is the default view — one month at a time, each Mass a small chip, any shortfall shown as "2 open". Click a Mass to work on just that Mass, with a band at the top to get back.
• Cards lists the same Masses in full, grouped by weekend, so the Saturday vigil sits under the same heading as its Sunday.
• Add a Mass at the foot of the schedule adds a one-off — a funeral, an extra service. Leave the liturgical day blank and Vianney titles it from the calendar.
• remove beside a Mass takes it back out again.

Before you build: is it staffable?

Click Check on the open schedule. As well as listing what is still unfilled, it answers "can this period be staffed?" — a read-only look at your rosters against what the period needs, worst bottleneck first, with the smallest changes that would help. It changes nothing, so it is safe to run as often as you like.

Asking people about the season ahead

Everything to do with asking lives on the Availability & Reminders tab, not on the schedule itself:

• Request availability drafts the note that invites everyone who serves to update their can't-serve dates before the rota is built.
• The census underneath it shows who has answered and who has not, and lets you record an answer somebody gave you in the sacristy.
• Draft a nudge writes a note to the quiet ones who have an email. Nothing sends by itself; you release it through the one confirm, as always.

Silence is never read as "available" — it stays "not yet responded", and that is all it ever means. See Availability, monthly caps, and blackout dates.

Tips

• Get your rosters and Mass schedule right first; the schedule is built from both.
• Then let Vianney do the first pass — see What auto-fill does — or assign by hand.
• A new schedule starts as a draft. Parishioners see nothing at all until you publish it.
• There are no phases to move a schedule through and no deadline to set. A period closes itself as its dates pass, and what actually happened is written up for you under the History tab.
• When a season is over, Archive retires the schedule: it leaves the portal, stops counting toward anyone's limits, and frees those dates for the next schedule. Nothing is deleted, and Unarchive brings it back as a draft.