---
title: "The cleaning week: planning shifts, and why this is not a timesheet"
description: "How to plan a week for housekeepers and technicians: what a shift is, where a cleaning's exact hour comes from inside it, and why ATQAR counts no hours worked."
canonical: "https://atqar.com/en/guides/duty-week/"
locale: en
language: en-GB
audience: owner
published: 2026-08-27
updated: 2026-09-03
source: "https://atqar.com"
alternates:
  ru: "https://atqar.com/ru/guides/duty-week.md"
  kk: "https://atqar.com/kk/guides/duty-week.md"
  es: "https://atqar.com/es/guides/duty-week.md"
  pt: "https://atqar.com/pt/guides/duty-week.md"
  de: "https://atqar.com/de/guides/duty-week.md"
  fr: "https://atqar.com/fr/guides/duty-week.md"
  it: "https://atqar.com/it/guides/duty-week.md"
  tr: "https://atqar.com/tr/guides/duty-week.md"
  uz: "https://atqar.com/uz/guides/duty-week.md"
  ky: "https://atqar.com/ky/guides/duty-week.md"
  tg: "https://atqar.com/tg/guides/duty-week.md"
---

A cleaning schedule usually lives in two incompatible forms: a shift plan in a
spreadsheet, and ‘who is doing 204 today’ in a chat. The first shows who is
working; the second shows what they are doing. There is a gap between them, and
the same thing always falls into it: a cleaning assigned to somebody who is not
there that day.

ATQAR closes that gap with one object — the shift.

## A shift is a plan of availability

A shift answers one question: which employees are scheduled for a particular
day, property and time. It answers no other question.

> Product demonstration: The team's week: people down the side, days across the top. A shift says only who is available.

It does not count hours worked, does not measure speed and does not build a
rating. That is a decision rather than a gap: the moment a schedule starts
counting hours it stops being a plan and becomes a timesheet — and a timesheet
changes how people record their work, which makes the data about the work
worse rather than better.

Shifts are set and changed by an administrator or the owner. An employee sees
their own but does not edit it.

## The cleaning hour comes from inside the shift

This is where a shift stops being just a calendar. For a cleaning — a checkout
cleaning or a scheduled one — the planner picks an exact hour, and picks it only
inside the assignee's own shift.

From this follows the core rule of the cleaning schedule: a cleaning
cannot appear for a housekeeper on a day without a shift. Not ‘should not’ —
cannot.

The rule covers cleaning only. Repairs, inspections, replenishment, and general
work can be assigned to any active employee on any day, regardless of shifts:
these kinds of work carry no hour requirement.

Naming the person and the hour of a cleaning by hand is allowed too: an
administrator may overrule the planner. But a hand placement may not step
outside the shift either: if the hour that is needed does not exist, the roster
changes first, and that is the right order: it makes the real reason visible
instead of hiding it in a task nobody can pick up.

## What an employee sees

Their own week, and their own work with an exact hour on it. Other people's
shifts and unassigned tasks do not exist for them — not because they are
hidden, but because there is no shared list at all.

> Product demonstration: The same days as the employee sees them: their own shift, and the work that has an exact hour.

This is not the team table but a different screen: a personal week plan with
days as columns, hours down the side, the shift drawn as a block and the work
standing inside it with exact hours. It is built on the same data.

## What the schedule does not have

No clock-in and clock-out. No counting of hours, minutes or speed. No rating.
No open queue of tasks for an employee to take work from.

The last one is the least familiar and the most important. A queue looks
flexible, but it moves the distribution to whoever can see the least: work gets
taken by convenience rather than by deadline, and nobody answers for what is
left.

More: [Employee shifts](https://atqar.com/en/docs/duty-roster/),
[Daily work](https://atqar.com/en/docs/daily-work/),
[Personal planning](https://atqar.com/en/docs/personal-planning/).