Setting up a serving team

The Volunteer Schedule has no roster of its own. It reads empty slots, and a slot only exists once a team has positions and that team sits on a service template with a count against each position. This article walks that chain from an empty Teams page to crews appearing on /schedule.

Why nothing shows up on the schedule yet

Scout builds a schedule in one direction. A team holds the people. Positions on that team are what a slot is for: Vocals, Front Door, Nursery Lead. Adding the team to a service template and setting a count against each position is what creates the empty slots. Every upcoming service generated from that template then gets those slots, and one team's slots on one service render as a crew on /schedule.

A crew only exists where slots exist. Break any link in that chain and the schedule is blank. On By week the blank page reads No upcoming services even when services are on the calendar, which is misleading. The Board view is clearer: with services but no team rows it says No teams configured and offers Configure Template.

Create the team

1. 1

   Open Teams

   In the sidebar, under People, click Teams. You land on /teams.

2. 2

   Click New Team

   With nothing created yet the page reads No teams yet and the button is Create your first team.

3. 3

   Fill in the modal

   Name * is the only required field, placeholder e.g. Worship Team. Description is optional and renders as the subhead on the team page.

4. 4

   Click Create Team

   You land on the new team's page with an empty Positions block and no members.

Team names must be unique inside your church, and an archived team still holds its name. If Create Team fails and you cannot see the conflict, switch the tab to Archived and look there.

Add the positions

Positions live at the bottom of the Positions block on the team page. Type into Add a position... and click Add, or press Enter. Until a team has one, the block reads: Define positions for this team, like "Vocals", "Front Door", or "Nursery Lead". Then assign people who can serve in each position. A duplicate name toasts "Vocals" already exists on this team.

Name them carefully. What a position is called is fixed the moment you save it:

• Positions cannot be renamed or reordered in the app. The team page offers add and delete, nothing else, and positions sort by the order they were created. Add them in the order you want to read them.
• Deleting is instant, with no confirmation dialog, and it takes every person's assignment to that position with it, including their Can train flags. A position that already has slots on a service will not actually delete: the card disappears from the screen, then comes back when you reload.
• The free-text Position field in the Add Member sheet is a different thing entirely. It is a label printed under the person's name on the roster, it cannot be edited after you add them, and scheduling never reads it.

Put people on the roster, then on a position

Click Add Member at the top right. The sheet has a Role select (Member, Co-Lead, Lead), the free-text Position label, and Search people by name... which needs at least 2 characters. Click a result to add them. If they have an app account they get a push notification titled You've joined {Team}.

Then click Add Person on each position card. The Add to Position sheet lists Team Members first, then Search All People. Picking someone who is not on the team yet creates their membership at the same time, with no push notification.

Set Lead deliberately. When a volunteer confirms or declines, the email goes to the team's leads. A team with no lead falls back to owners, admins, and everyone whose role can assign volunteers, so one decline can email your whole staff.

"Can train", and crews of first-timers

Each person on a position card carries a Can train chip. Click it to toggle it on and it turns vermilion. The blurb above the block states the whole promise: Mark anyone who can train someone new in this position. Scout uses it to avoid scheduling a whole crew of first-timers on the same Sunday.

It blocks nothing. Scout will never refuse an assignment because of it. What it changes is one notice, and the flag is the per-team opt-in for that notice: on a team where nobody is flagged, Scout stays silent. The notice fires only when all three hold:

• Somebody on the team carries a Can train flag in some position.
• Nobody assigned to this crew is trainer-capable, meaning flagged, or 6 or more serves in the position they are filling.
• At least two assigned people have 2 or fewer serves in theirs.

Then the crew gets a line reading Everyone on this crew is new to their position. Empty slots are ignored, so a half-built crew never triggers it. Serve counts are counts, not ratings: First time, 2nd time, 3rd time, then N serves, and moving someone to a new position resets them to First time.

Set how many people each position needs

Slot counts are on the service template, not on the team. Go to Services, pick a template under Your templates, and scroll to Serving Teams. Click Add Team and choose your team. Every one of its positions arrives with a count of 1, adjustable with the − and + steppers beside each name. The blurb reads: Teams and positions set here seed the roster for every new service Scout schedules from this template.

Two behaviors to plan around:

• Raising a count adds slots to every upcoming service from that template right away. You do not have to regenerate anything.
• Lowering a count removes nothing. Existing slots stay on every service that already has them, filled or empty, and past services are never touched. Unassign or work around the extras by hand.

If you add a team before giving it positions, the card reads No positions defined for this team. Add positions on the Teams page first. Once slots exist, staffing them happens on the Volunteer Schedule: Scheduling volunteers.

"All Morning" versus "Per Service"

Every team has a service scope, shown as All Morning or Per Service on the template card, in a service's Teams panel, and on the shared Run of Show. It decides how slots get cut when a service is generated. All Morning creates one slot per position for the whole morning, with no service time attached, which is right for worship and production who serve every service. Per Service creates a full set of slots for each service time on the template, which is what kids, greeting, and hospitality usually need.

Who can do what

• View serving teams (view_teams) opens /teams and the team pages. Admin, Pastor, Staff and Volunteer have it.
• Create & edit serving teams (manage_teams) covers everything in this article: creating and archiving a team, adding and removing members, creating and deleting positions, assigning people to positions, and the Can train toggle. Admin, Pastor and Staff have it, Volunteer does not. Without it the Positions block loads empty, so a team with positions looks like a team with none.
• Build services & Run of Show (manage_services) is what adding a team to a service template requires.
• Assign volunteers to slots (assign_volunteers) is what putting a person in a slot requires. Volunteer does not have it, so a volunteer can read the schedule but never staff it.

Grant these under Settings → Permissions: What each permission controls.

What a team does not have

• No team-level or church-level scheduling settings. There is no lead time, no "ask four weeks ahead", and no auto-send. Every serving request is sent by a person clicking a button.
• No per-team notification preferences and no quiet hours.
• No way to rename or reorder a position, as above.
• No team page for volunteers. The member app has a schedule, not a team directory or a roster view: Serving requests and the schedule.
• Archiving a team does not take it off the schedule. Its crews keep appearing and its slots keep being seeded onto new services. To stop that, remove the team from the service template.