What auto-fill does in the ministry scheduler

Auto-fill does the first, tedious pass of a ministry schedule for you — fairly, and within everyone's stated limits. You then adjust and publish. It is a starting point, never the last word.

Running it

• 1. Open the schedule and click Auto-fill.
• 2. Vianney asks which ministries to fill. Every ministry your Masses actually need is listed and ticked. Untick any you want left alone, then click Fill selected.
• 3. The button moves while Vianney thinks, then reports what it did: how many places it filled, how many it left open, and — honestly — whether it proved that no arrangement fills more, or simply found the best one it could inside its time budget.

Nothing you placed by hand is ever replaced. Assignments the office made, sign-ups you approved and substitutes you arranged all stay exactly where they are. Only Vianney's own earlier suggestions and the standing assignments are re-laid.

Dates that have already passed

Auto-fill stops at today. If your schedule runs from the 1st and you re-run auto-fill on the 20th, the Masses from the 1st to the 19th are left exactly as they were — nobody is added, nobody is removed, nothing already recorded is rearranged. The result line says so plainly: 4 past dates left as they were.

Today itself still counts as live, because this morning's Masses may not have happened yet.

Both engines behave the same way — the whole-period planner and the simpler quick pass alike — so it makes no difference which one ran.

This is deliberate. Who actually served last Sunday is a record, not a suggestion, and a rule written for the weeks ahead should not be allowed to rewrite the weeks behind. If a past Mass genuinely needs correcting, set it by hand — hand editing is unaffected — or correct what happened under the History tab, where nothing is ever rewritten silently.

The people who served on those past dates still count toward everyone's monthly limits and toward the fair spread, exactly as before. They served; the arithmetic knows it.

How it chooses

Standing assignments go in first — the people you have said always serve a particular Mass. Then Vianney fills what is left, spreading the load across whoever has carried least lately and leaning toward each person's preferred Mass.

It will never place someone who:

• is away that day, whether from their own dates or their household's,
• is at their monthly limit — counted across every live schedule that month — or their family's,
• would break a serving limit, such as at most one liturgy a weekend, a cap on assignments in a week, or a minimum number of hours between commitments,
• is already serving that Mass,
• has a qualification that has lapsed or is paused, or is marked substitute-only.

It also tries to keep crews together, to keep a young server with the adult accompanying them, to avoid asking the same person two weekends running, and to give someone still waiting for a first turn a place. Those are strong preferences rather than rules: they bend before a position is left empty.

Daily and seasonal Masses

If your schedule includes daily Masses, they are filled at your weekday needs — the second column on Setup → Masses & staffing. A ministry that serves only at daily Mass, with nobody on weekends, is offered for filling like any other. Holy days and seasonal Masses use their own numbers from the Seasonal Masses tab.

What it will not do

If a roster is too thin to cover every position, auto-fill leaves positions honestly open rather than inventing people or overloading the willing. Each open one is listed with its date, Mass and ministry, and where nobody was eligible at all, a count of what ruled people out — so you can see exactly where you are short and why.

Safe Environment clearance

On a ministry marked Requires SE the clearance gate applies. In Block mode auto-fill keeps an un-cleared person off and says so; in Warn mode it fills the position and flags it; in Off mode clearance is not checked. See Setting up ministry rosters for how to choose.

Tips

• Run auto-fill, then fine-tune by hand — see Editing schedule assignments.
• The fuller your availability and limits, the better the first pass.
• Check also answers "can this period be staffed?" — a read-only look at your rosters against what the period needs, so you can see *before* you wait on a fill whether the people exist to cover what you are asking. It looks; it never touches.
• Clear empties a schedule back to open positions if you want to start over. A restore point is saved first, and Safety → restore brings it all back.
• Auto-fill never publishes and never notifies anybody. Review with Check before going live — see Checking and publishing a schedule.
• If the whole-period planner is unavailable, Vianney says so out loud and runs a simpler quick pass instead.