Your shift plan in your own calendar (iPhone, Android, Outlook)

What ends up in the calendar — and what does not

Zeitflex gives you a personal calendar address. Your calendar app fetches it regularly, and your shifts sit next to the dentist and football practice — without you opening the app. Moved shifts move with them.

Included in the subscription:

• Your own published shifts. A draft by management is not a commitment and does not appear.
• Optionally, your approved absences as all-day entries. An open request is not vacation, and a declined one even less so.
• As the shift title, the position (for example “Early shift”), otherwise your business's industry term. The description contains the business name, project and note.
• For absences, only the type is shown (“Vacation”, “Sick”, for half days with the addition “half day”). Comments, sick note and who made the decision stay in the app — the calendar is often on a device that others can see too.

Not included: colleagues' shifts, wages, premiums, supporting documents. The feed hangs on an address; it may only contain what would be bearable in the worst case.

The calendar reaches 60 days back and 180 days ahead, with at most 2,000 each of shifts and absences. It is work planning, not an archive — the records are in the timesheet. A vacation does not block the day in the calendar as “busy”, so that people with access to your calendar do not see an occupied day where you simply have time off.

Creating an access link

In the browser:

1. Open Settings → Calendar tab.
2. Click + Set up calendar subscription.
3. Give the access a name (e.g. “iPhone”, at most 40 characters; without an entry it is called “My calendar”). The name is only for you — so that you know later which access you are revoking.
4. Choose whether to include approved absences, and whether you want a reminder before shift start: none, 15 or 30 minutes, 1, 2 or 12 hours, 1 day before. Your calendar sets the reminder; it has nothing to do with the app's push notifications.
5. After creating it, you see the address and a QR code — **only this one time**. Zeitflex does not store the address in plain text, only a check value. If you lose it, create a new access and revoke the old one.

In the mobile app: More → Shifts in your phone calendar. The app takes you straight to the phone's calendar dialog.

Each person can have at most five active access links — phone, tablet, Outlook on the computer, family calendar. At most three new ones can be created per hour. You can change the name, absences and reminder of an existing access later without the address changing — the subscription on the phone stays in place.

The calendar subscription is not a management privilege and does not depend on the booked plan: every signed-in person can set it up. In businesses without the shift plan module, it then only carries absences.

Setting up on iPhone, Android, Outlook and Mac

The quick guides are also shown right next to the QR code in the app. Scan it with your phone camera: it carries the address in webcal:// form, and with that iOS opens the subscription dialog directly instead of downloading a file.

Why the address is a key

Calendar apps fetch the address in the background and do not sign in when doing so. The secret therefore has to be in the address itself. It follows that:

What Zeitflex does to protect it:

• The address contains 256 bits of randomness and cannot be guessed. The database only holds a check value — as with API keys and terminal tokens. A database leak gives nobody access to a shift plan.
• Anyone who has the address can do exactly one thing: read your own shifts. Write nothing, see nothing from others, cost nothing.
• An unknown or revoked access, or one belonging to the account of a former employee, always gets the same response “not available (any more)” — never a hint that the access exists and only the permission is missing.
• Fetching is throttled: more than 60 fetches per hour from the same address and IP address are rejected for ten minutes.
• The content must not end up in any shared cache (company proxy).

Zeitflex does not log every single fetch — a calendar asks up to 96 times a day, which would be noise. What is logged is the creation and revocation of an access; for each active access you can also see when it was last fetched (to the hour), and for revoked access links the number of fetches.

How up to date is the calendar?

Zeitflex recommends that calendar apps sync every 60 minutes. Whether they stick to that is up to the app: Apple sometimes asks hourly or every 15 minutes, Google rather every few hours, Outlook only every few hours — that is a quirk of Outlook, not a Zeitflex error. Unchanged, the calendar stays in the app's cache for up to 15 minutes.

If you want to see a newly published plan immediately, open the app — that is what it is for. The calendar is not responsible for “Your shift starts soon” — the push notification is, see Notifications.

Phone lost, address sent: revoke

1. Open Settings → Calendar.
2. For the affected access, click Revoke access.
3. For the emergency “address is in the wrong group chat” there is **Revoke all access**.

A revoked access is not deleted but stays in the Revoked access list with its date — including the number of fetches. Anyone who has lost their phone wants to know exactly that: whether anyone fetched it afterwards. The address itself only responds with the note that this calendar is no longer available; whether and how the calendar app displays this note is up to the app.

A single shift without a subscription

Not everyone wants to subscribe to something permanently — anyone who steps in once a month wants that one shift in their calendar. If you are allowed to plan shifts in the shift plan, you will find the Add to my calendar button in the browser when you open a shift, and use it to download the shift as a calendar file. This also helps where a company Outlook blocks internet calendars.

This button only exists in the shift editor, so only for owners and management with planning rights — they can also download shifts of other people as a file. Employees have no such button in the browser; for them, the subscription is the way.

Still stuck?

If your calendar app does not accept the address, Support can help — please state the app and the error message, never the address itself. How shifts are created and published is explained under Planning shifts; how to give away a shift, under Shift swap.