| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Member | A person with a PlanMyRounds account. Members sign in, view rosters, and, if they’re admins, run the organisation. See Members vs. doctors. |
| Doctor | The scheduling record used when generating a roster — department, seniority, hour limits, excluded shifts. A doctor profile can exist without a linked member account, and a member account can exist without a linked doctor. See Staff profiles and user accounts. |
| Admin | A member role with full access: create and publish rosters, manage doctors and shifts, approve leave, invite and remove members. See Roles and permissions. |
| Roster / Duty Plan | The schedule that says who is on which shift, on which day, for a given date range. “Roster” and “Duty Plan” refer to the same thing — the product sidebar calls it Duty Plans. See How rosters work. |
| Shift Requirement | A single shift definition: name, start and end time, required headcount, minimum seniors, and recovery time. Listed under Shift Requirements in the sidebar. See How shifts work. |
| Shift Schedule | A named, reusable weekly pattern built from Shift Requirements — either the same shifts every day, or a different lineup per weekday. Selected when creating a roster or setting up Auto Duty. See Shift Schedules. |
| Auto Duty | A recurring setup that plans a roster for you every cycle: which team, which Shift Schedule, what cadence, and how much of the process runs unattended. See How Auto Duty Planning works. |
| Planning Cycle | One run of an Auto Duty for one period. Moves through five stages: Notify, Availability & Leave, Generate, Roster Review, Published. See Running a planning cycle. |
| Availability | A doctor’s own input, during a Planning Cycle, on which upcoming shifts they can work. |
| Leave | A doctor’s formal, approvable time off. Only Approved leave excludes a doctor from scheduling — pending and rejected leave have no effect. See How leave management works. |
| Shift to Avoid | A soft preference, not a restriction. PlanMyRounds tries to avoid assigning the doctor to that shift, but may still do so if there’s no other way to produce a valid schedule. See Mark shifts to avoid. |
| Excluded shift type | A permanent doctor-profile setting (not tied to a date range) marking a shift type the doctor should never be assigned to. See Doctor profiles. |
| Swap | A doctor-initiated exchange on a published roster: you take a colleague’s shift, they take yours. Shown with a double-arrow icon. Doesn’t need admin approval. See How duty swaps work. |
| Transfer | Like a swap, but one-directional: a colleague takes your shift and gives nothing in return. Shown with a single-arrow icon. |
| Hard constraint | A rule the engine will never violate. If a valid schedule isn’t possible while respecting every hard constraint, generation fails. |
| Soft constraint | A rule the engine tries to honour but may bend if there’s no valid alternative — for example, a shift to avoid. |
This list only defines terms that already exist in the product. If a page uses a term that isn’t here, treat that as a gap to report, not a new term to invent.