Discussions

Hello 7shifts team and developer community,

We are a restaurant group using 7shifts and are trying to improve the schedule-building workflow for our managers.

Our central requirement is to see, while building a weekly schedule, per-role totals broken into AM, PM, and All Day. For every role and daypart, we need:

• Scheduled headcount
• Scheduled hours
• Scheduled labor dollars

We also need employees who work multiple roles to appear under each role they are scheduled for, while displaying their other-role shifts as contextual information without counting those shifts toward the current role’s totals.

We have built a read-only companion view using the v2 API. It retrieves shifts, including drafts, and reconciles the results with the Scheduled Hours & Wages data. It then calculates the daypart totals that we cannot currently see together on the 7shifts Schedule page.

We are now deciding between several approaches:

1. Continue using an external read-only companion application hosted in Azure and linked through our internal Microsoft 365/SharePoint environment.
2. Expand that application into a draft schedule writer using the Create, Update, and Delete Shift endpoints, while keeping final review and publication inside 7shifts.
3. Eventually publish schedules from the external application through the API.
4. Use a managed browser extension to overlay the summaries on the 7shifts page. This is our least-preferred option because it would be unsupported and vulnerable to UI changes.

We would appreciate guidance on the following:

• Is there a supported way to extend the 7shifts Schedule interface with custom panels, columns, or summary rows?
• Can an approved custom application be launched or embedded inside 7shifts, or does the Embed SDK only support placing 7shifts components inside an external application?
• For an internal customer-built application, is a personal access token supported for creating and updating draft shifts, or should we pursue an OAuth client with shifts:write?
• Is there a documented endpoint for publishing a schedule by department, role, or date range after creating draft shifts?
• Can availability conflicts, overtime warnings, labor compliance issues, and role eligibility be validated through the API before shifts are written or published?
• Are there recommended patterns for concurrency, idempotency, webhooks, and avoiding overwriting schedule changes made simultaneously in 7shifts?
• Are per-role AM/PM headcount, hours, and labor-cost summaries being considered for the native Schedule interface?

Our preference is to keep 7shifts as the system of record and employee-facing application. We want to avoid building an unsupported parallel system if there is a recommended integration or upcoming native capability that better addresses this use case.

Thank you for any guidance or recommended architecture.

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