Daily, Weekly, Monthly Shift Reminders

Since version 4.9.0

ShiftController can send daily, weekly, and monthly email reminders for shifts for your employees.

Configuration

For shifts reminders to work, you'll need to set up a cron job. Cron job is a process that runs periodically at your web server. To set up a cron jon, you'll need to log in to your web hosting control panel and go to Cron Jobs.

Then in your WordPress admin area go to ShiftController > Administration > Reminders. It will display which command you should add to a cron job on your site that should be running every day once a day.

Here is an example of such a command, please note that the real site address for your setup will be different.

wget -O /dev/null 'https://www.yoursite.com/?hcs=sh4&hca=cron'

Alternatively, you can make use of a web cron service (search the web for web cron), there are plenty of free options. Make them pull your cron URL every day once a day.

https://www.yoursite.com/?hcs=sh4&hca=cron

After you configured the cron job on your site, go to ShiftController > Administration > Reminders and check the Yes, I've set up the cron job checkbox, then click Continue.

Configure shift reminders

The configuration form will change and three more options will become available:

Tomorrow Active Shift Reminder
This option will send reminders to all employees about all their shifts that start sometime next day.
Next Week Active Shift Reminder
This option will send reminders to all employees about all their shifts that start sometime next week. The reminder is sent the day prior to the beginning of next week. For example, if your settings define Sunday as the Week Starts On day, this reminder will be sent on Saturday.
Next Month Active Shift Reminder
This option will send reminders to all employees about all their shifts that start sometime next month. The reminder is sent the day prior to the beginning of next month.

SMS Text Reminders

Since version 4.9.9

If you installed and activated this excellent WP SMS WordPress plugin, it makes available SMS text reminders for shifts in our plugin.

Tomorrow Active Shift Reminder SMS Text
This option will send SMS text reminders to all employees about all their shifts that start next day. Unlike email reminders which combine all the shifts in one message, this one will send a separate SMS text message per each shift due to the length limitation of SMS text messaging.

To take advantage of this option, you'll need to configure the phone numbers for all users who are linked to your ShiftController employee entities.

Edit phone numbers for employees for SMS text reminders

Edit Reminder Templates

The text of every daily, weekly or monthly shift reminder email messages is a list of each shift detail. Each shift detail view template depends on the calendar and it is reused from Email: Shift Published (Employee) template that is defined in Administration > Calendars > Notifications area.

You can change the email subject line of these daily, weekly and monthly reminder templates, go to Administration > Reminders > Edit Templates for this.

Review Reminders

In Administration > Reminders > Review Reminders you can view which reminder emails are sent or are about to be sent for a particular date.

So if needed you can manually fire these reminders.

Review reminders

if the reminders were already sent, you can Clear Logs and manually resend the reminder email messages or SMS texts.