Shift Demand

September 3, 2025

Shift’s Demand feature allows you to store your labor needs for each day per location, calendar day, and job role to ensure your scheduling team is creating shifts according to your company’s specific labor plan.

Once you determine your company’s labor needs, you’ll import that labor forecast into Shift via API, which will then give your scheduling teams live feedback on whether they're overscheduled or underscheduled as they're building the shift schedule on Fountain’s Schedule page.

Want to learn basic navigation of the Schedule page? Review this article.

Initial Setup

In order to use Demand, you’ll need a technical resource on your team to set up the API call needed to communicate your labor forecast from an external system to Fountain Shift. Detailed API instructions can be found in Fountain’s Developer Docs.

Using Demand

Once Demand has been set up via API, your users will see a Demand section to the right of the location on the Schedule page in both the weekly and monthly views. This tells users the percentage of shifts from the uploaded labor plan that have been created in Fountain Shift.

Each day on the calendar will also have a Demand Progress bar. This progress bar measures the progress of shifts scheduled and assigned relative to the demand received for that day and location via the Demand API call. The progress bar has the following colors and meanings:

• Dark Green: The percentage of Demand shifts that have been created and assigned to a worker.

• Light Green: The percentage of demand shifts that have been created but are unassigned or claimable.

Users can hover over the Demand Daily Progress Bar to view the Demand Overview for that day. In the hover screen, you’ll also see Demand grouped by role for each location, which includes:

• A section for each role with the demand received
• Start and end times for each demand block
• Headcount for each demand block
• Scheduling status relative to demand, including:
  • Scheduled: Shifts meet demand at 100%
  • Overscheduled: Shifts are too long or have too many workers
  • Underscheduled: Shifts are too short or have too few workers

Important Note:

If a shift is outside of demand and doesn’t have a tag that removes it from demand, a blocker icon will appear next to the role associated with the shift. The main use case for tags is for Fountain users to be able to pull reports based on those tags. When creating a tag, there's a toggle that turns the tag off for Demand, which results in shifts with the tag not counting towards Demand.

Fulfill Demand

To fulfill demand, you can either manually schedule shifts as outlined in this article or hover over the shift progress bar and click "Fulfill Demand" in the hover box. Remember to review the Demand Overview before clicking Fulfill Demand to avoid over-scheduling on a calendar day.

Tip! If you have a calendar day that is overscheduled with demand, Fountain recommends dropping the shift from the assigned worker or deleting the shifts if they are unassigned or claimable.