Library staff scheduling software, minus the spreadsheet
Stacks schedules your whole library — staff and volunteers, recurring shifts, time off, and a live today board — on one screen you can update from anywhere.
Free to pilot · No desktop install · Export your data anytime
Build the whole week on one screen.
Not a dated spreadsheet you have to decode. People down the side, the week across the top, every shift in its place. Flip to Service points to read the same week by desk — split shifts and all.
The parts you'll feel in week one.
A few things that turn the monthly spreadsheet rebuild into a few minutes on your phone.
Run the schedule from your phone
The whole tool is a real web app, not a desktop program with a read-only website bolted on. Check who's on the desk right now, move a shift, or approve time off from your car or a conference hotel. Everyone sees the change instantly.
- No install. Works on any phone, tablet, or browser.
- Today's board, live, with who's on right now
- Edits go live the moment you save
Their shifts, in the calendar they already use
Everyone subscribes once and their shifts land in Google or Apple Calendar, and the feed keeps itself current as the schedule changes. No app to open, no screenshot to text around. And when the whole schedule needs to be out in the open, share one read-only link: post it in the staff room, send it to a partner org, hand it to a sub. No login required.
- Subscribe once. Shifts sync to Google & Apple Calendar.
- Changes show up automatically, never a stale copy
- Share a read-only schedule link, branded and printable
- Rotate any link anytime if it travels too far
9:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Information Desk
2:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Circulation
10:00 AM – 2:00 PM
Children's
stacksforlibraries.com/s/…Build the week once. It repeats itself.
Lay out your recurring pattern a single time. It repeats on the cadence you set: weekly, every other week, or monthly. It skips the days you're closed, and lets you tweak any single shift as a one-off, so you're never re-typing the schedule every month.
- Daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly patterns
- Skips the days you mark closed
- Edit any single shift without breaking the pattern
Repeats
Every other Tuesday, 9–1 · skips closures · until Aug 30
Split a day across desks by dragging, not typing
One person rarely sits at one desk all day. Maybe it's the Info Desk until noon, Shelving until two, then an outreach visit. Lay the whole shift on a single bar: each block is a desk, drag it to move, pull an edge to resize. It snaps to clean fifteen-minute marks, so you skip the stack of start-and-end dropdowns.
- Drag colored blocks to move them, pull the edges to resize
- Overlaps stack into their own lanes and turn red, so no one's booked at two desks at once
- "Add desk" adds the next unused desk and finds it an open slot
- "Even split" divides the shift evenly across every desk in one click
Info Desk
9a–12p
Shelving
12–2p
Outreach
2–5p
Drag a block to move it, or its edges to resize. Snaps to 15 minutes.
See what's covered at a glance
Tell us how many people each desk needs. Every desk reads green, amber, or red the moment you look: covered, thin, or empty — down to the hour, so a desk that's only staffed until 1:30 doesn't pass as covered. And every gap is a button: click it and the shift form opens with the desk and hours filled in, plus a list of who's actually free.
- Per-desk, per-hour coverage: covered, understaffed, uncovered
- Click a gap to fill it — desk and times arrive pre-filled
- Warns on double-bookings, PTO conflicts, and training mismatches
Reference Desk is unstaffed
Saturday · 2:00–5:00 PM
The volunteer hours your board keeps asking for
Hours by person, by assignment, PTO used, and total volunteer time. The figures grant applications and trustee meetings always seem to need. Export to CSV in a couple of clicks.
- Volunteer and staff hour totals
- Break down by person, assignment, or date range
- Export everything to CSV anytime. No data trapped.
See your whole week on one screen.
Pilot Stacks free, set up your library this afternoon, and schedule a real week — staff and volunteers together.