What are the Scheduling controls on an opportunity?
Scheduling controls is the second section of an opportunity's Schedule settings. Where the User reservation settings decide what a user may do, these decide which shifts they can see and when the door is open.
Use them when you want to release a schedule gradually, stop same-day sign-ups, close reservations for a while, or keep one opportunity's shifts from clashing with each other.
Where do I find these settings?
While creating an opportunity, on the Customize step under Schedule. After it is published, go to Opportunities > open the opportunity > Schedule tab. Open the Scheduling controls card and click a row to edit it.
None of these settings restrict administrators. You can always reserve or assign someone yourself, whatever is set here.
1. Hide fully-reserved shifts from users
When this is on, a shift that is full and has no waitlist policy disappears from the user's reserve shifts page rather than showing as unavailable.
Leave it off if you would rather people see that the shift exists and is popular. Turn it on when a long list of full shifts is making the page hard to read.
2. Reserve shift visibility window
Caps how far ahead users can see shifts when reserving. Your shifts still exist and administrators still see all of them. Three options:
Unlimited. Users see every published shift. The default.
Fixed date. Hide shifts after a specific date. Good for a season or a term that ends on a known day.
Rolling. Show only a window from today, set in any combination of years, months, weeks and days. Good for releasing a schedule a month at a time without editing the setting again.
3. Reservation cutoff
How late a user can reserve or request a shift. By default a shift stops accepting reservations the moment it starts.
Until the shift starts. The default.
Until the shift ends. Users can still reserve a shift that is in progress. Useful for drop-in style events.
Before the day of the shift. No same-day reservations, so you know your headcount the night before.
4. Pause new reservations
A switch that stops the opportunity accepting reservations until you turn it back off. Existing reservations are untouched.
Reach for this when you need to freeze sign-ups while you rebuild the schedule, review a waitlist, or wait on a decision.
5. Reservation overlaps
Decides whether users can reserve this opportunity's shifts when they overlap something else already on their schedule. This refines or overrides your organization-wide overlap setting for this one opportunity.
Inherit organization setting. Use the org-wide overlap rule. The default.
Allow overlaps. Users can always overlap this opportunity's shifts, regardless of the org-wide rule.
Restrict overlaps to this opportunity. Users can have overlapping reservations across other opportunities, but not two overlapping shifts inside this one.
When you pick anything other than Inherit, the row tells you plainly that the organization setting is being overridden here.
6. Schedule when the reservation portal opens
Blocks reservations until a date and time you choose, then opens them automatically. Two options:
Off. Reservations are open now. The default.
Scheduled. Pick the date and time the portal should open.
This is the setting for a registration that goes live at a fixed moment, for example a season opening at 9:00 AM on a Monday.
Summary
Hiding full shifts is presentation only. The shift and its attendees are unaffected.
The visibility window limits what users see when reserving. It does not delete or unpublish anything.
The reservation cutoff decides how late someone can still take a spot, including during the shift if you allow it.
Pause new reservations is a manual on/off switch and it beats the scheduled opening.
The overlap setting can either loosen or tighten your organization-wide rule for this one opportunity.
None of these settings limit what an administrator can do.