How the Workforce Scheduling Flow Grades Time Slots

How Grades Are Calculated

The grade reflects how closely the slot adheres to your organization’s business goals. Each candidate slot represents a service resource, a date, and an arrival window. The scheduling engine grades a slot in two stages.

First, the engine calculates the marginal cost of adding the appointment to that resource’s schedule—the difference between the resource’s schedule penalty with and without the new appointment. Only this delta drives the comparison, so pre-existing schedule load won’t affect the grade.

Next, the engine maps each slot’s penalty to a 1–100 grade. The slot with the lowest penalty anchors at 100. Other slots are graded relative to the top slot: (Best Penalty / Slot Penalty) × 100. Grades are set to a baseline minimum of 1, ensuring that even the worst slot isn’t scored 0.

Because grades are proportional to marginal cost, functionally similar slots receive similar grades. Two slots whose marginal costs differ by a small amount appear with grades that differ by a small amount, not by the full 100-point spread.

When the active scheduling policy has no objectives configured, grades aren’t meaningful. In that case, the engine suppresses grades and tags, and the slot list sorts by time.

Search Range and Limits

The candidate search range is capped at 30 days from the appointment’s Earliest Start, regardless of the Due Date. The effective end date is whichever comes first: the appointment’s Due Date, or 30 days after its Earliest Start. Setting a Due Date further out than 30 days doesn’t return additional slots.

When the 30-day cap is in effect, the scheduling flow shows the effective end date so users can see the range that was actually searched.

Reviewing Graded Time Slots

To simplify decision-making, the scheduling flow highlights the best available time slots with tags. The Ideal tag is applied to every slot that shares the highest grade in the candidate set—if multiple slots tie for the top grade, they all get the tag. The Recommended tag is applied to every slot that shares the second-highest distinct grade, giving users a reliable set of high-quality fallback options.

By default, graded slots are sorted from highest to lowest grade (Sort by Score). Users can switch to Sort by Time to order by start time, or narrow the list with Filter by Date. Tags stay attached to their assigned slots when the sort changes, so top options remain identifiable. Users can also switch the active scheduling policy inline. Selecting a different policy submits a new candidate search and returns a fresh set of graded slots.

When the search returns no available slots, users can adjust Earliest Start or Due Date and rerun the search, or switch to a different scheduling policy.