Getting Started with Scheduling Assistant

Scheduling Assistant is enabled by Nory, not by you. You will not find a toggle for it in Settings or in your location settings. If the option appears greyed out or locked, that is expected, and it does not mean anything is wrong with your permissions.

To get it enabled, contact your account manager. They will run a short setup with you that covers:

Once Nory has enabled it for your brand, an Admin can grant Can view Scheduling Assistant settings and Can edit Scheduling Assistant rules to the people who need them. See Permissions in Nory. Those permissions do not switch the feature on by themselves.

The rest of this article assumes Scheduling Assistant is already enabled for your location.

Before doing anything, choose one site to start with. Don't try to roll this out across your whole business at once — it gets complicated quickly. Get one site working well first, then expand from there.

A good pilot site is one you know well — ideally one where you already have a strong sense of how many people you need and when. That makes it much easier to spot if something looks off when you review the AI's output. A good pilot site should have at least 12 weeks of manually created schedules in the system.

When you first open the Scheduling Assistant for your site, you'll land on the Shift tab. On the right-hand side of the screen you'll see the Schedule Preview panel — this is what the AI would generate for your site based purely on your sales history, this is not a finished schedule, this is just the first step of setting it up. At this stage we’re only checking the demand (total hours for each day) and not focusing on who fills in the shifts. Later once the rules are set up we will be using this view to verify we’re scheduling correct people!

The Schedule Preview shows:

At this stage, just sense-check the hours. Look at the total for the week and ask: does this feel roughly right? You're not trying to get it perfect yet — you just want to make sure the AI's starting point is in the right ballpark before you start building rules.

💡 What to look for: If the AI is suggesting significantly more or fewer hours than you'd typically schedule, the most likely cause is your Operational Intensity setting — which you can adjust in the next step.

If the AI-generated hours feel too high or too low, you can tune them before adding any rules. Go to the Productivity tab at the top of the screen.

You'll see a section called Operational Intensity with a slider for each day of the week. Each slider runs from Hot on the left to Comfortable on the right, with Standard in the middle.

Here's what each setting means in plain terms:

The number you see on the right (e.g. 1.00x) is the multiplier being applied to the AI's hour calculation. Moving the slider towards Comfortable raises the multiplier and adds hours — for example, 1.05x adds 5% more hours for that day. Moving it towards Hot lowers the multiplier and removes hours — for example, 0.95x removes 5%.

💡 Note: the description in the app says a "higher" setting assumes your team runs faster than average. "Higher" there means hotter (further towards Hot), which gives a lower multiplier and fewer hours — not a higher number.

💡 Our recommendation: leave everything at Standard (1.00) to begin with. Only adjust once you've seen a few generated schedules and have a feel for whether the hours are consistently running high or low. Small changes here have a noticeable impact.

You can set different values for different days — for example, if your weekends are consistently understaffed, you could nudge Saturday and Sunday slightly toward Comfortable while leaving weekdays at Standard.

Once the hours feel roughly right, move on to building your rules.

Rules tell the Scheduling Assistant who should be working the hours it generates. The AI knows how many people you need and when — your rules define things like who opens, who closes, how long shifts should be, and whether a supervisor always needs to be on.

You set rules in the Shift tab, which you'll already be on from Step 2. The left panel lists all the available rule types - click the arrow next to any rule type to expand it and see your existing rules, or click + New Rule to add one.

A few things to keep in mind as you build:

Start with the four rules below. These apply to almost every restaurant and give the AI a strong foundation to work from.

This rule sets the minimum and maximum length of any shift the AI can schedule. Without it, the AI has no constraints on shift duration and may create shifts that are too short to be useful or too long for your team.

Example: the "Min / Max hours" rule in the screenshot below sets a minimum of 4 hours and a maximum of 8 hours, so no shift will be shorter than 4 hours or longer than 8 hours.

💡 Tip: Think about your shortest practical shift, usually the minimum someone would come in for, and your longest typical shift. Set those as your limits. You can always add a second rule with different limits for a specific role or day if needed.

This rule ensures that a specific role or combination of roles is always present while your site is open, from your opening time through to closing. It won't let the AI generate a schedule where that role has a gap during trading hours.

Examples from a live setup:

💡 Tip: Think about the roles that absolutely cannot have a gap — usually a supervisor or manager, and often a split between front-of-house and back-of-house. Add one rule per requirement so they're easier to manage and test individually.

This rule sets how long it takes to open and close your site, and optionally which roles need to be there to do it. The AI will schedule staff to arrive before your opening time (and stay after closing) to cover this.

Example: if opening takes 1 hour and you need a Front of House team member to do it, the AI will schedule at least one FOH person to start 1 hour before your opening time.

💡 Tip: If you don't mind which role opens or closes, you don't need to add a role condition — just set the time. Add a specific role only if it matters who does it (e.g. a manager must always lock up).

This rule sets the maximum number of team members that can be scheduled at the same time. It's a useful guardrail to prevent the AI from overstaffing during quieter periods.

Most businesses find it helpful to set different limits for weekdays and weekends — you do this by creating two separate rules and adding a day-of-week condition to each. You can also apply a limit to specific roles only — for example, the rule in the screenshot below allows a maximum of 3 management team members on shift at the same time.

Example:

💡 Tip: Look back at your busiest week and count the most people you've ever had on at one time — that's a sensible ceiling to start with. You can always raise or lower it after testing.

Once your core rules are in place, hit Test Rules in the top right corner. The Schedule Preview on the right will update to show you what the AI would generate with your rules applied.

Now compare the AI's output against a week your team built manually. The Week Overview graph makes this easy — the green dashed line shows your actual scheduled hours, and the purple line shows what the AI is now generating.

Look for:

Tweak your rules, hit Test Rules again, and repeat. You don't need it to be perfect — you're looking for a schedule that looks like something you'd actually use. A good first draft is the goal.

Once you're happy with how the Schedule Preview looks, you're ready to generate and publish your first real schedule.

A few things to know before you do:

Handling open shifts

Open shifts appear under Open Shifts on the schedule. You can fill them in three ways:

💡 Seeing a lot of open shifts? Check that your team members' availability and positions are set up correctly — the assistant uses these to decide who can work each shift. For more on open shifts, see Creating and Managing Schedules in Nory.