The ShiftKit help book

Getting startedWhat ShiftKit Is For

ShiftKit is a roster and recovery app for people who work rotating shifts. It assumes your week does not start on Monday, that your sleep happens whenever the roster allows, and that "next Tuesday" is a much less useful idea than "the second night of this swing".

There are three things it tries to do well. It holds your roster in a form that matches how rotating work actually behaves — swings, blocks, on-call, standby, leave — rather than forcing shifts into a Monday-to-Friday calendar. It keeps a short daily log of the things that decide how you feel on shift: how long you slept, how well, how tired you are, how much water and caffeine you have had. And it gives you a single readiness figure so you can see the shape of a swing before it flattens you.

Everything else supports those three jobs. Checklists stop you leaving the house without your torch. The journal gives you somewhere to put the shift down at the end of it. Insights show the pattern across weeks instead of the noise of a single day. Partner sharing means the person you live with can see your roster without you photographing it. Calendar sync puts your shifts where the rest of your household already looks.

What it is not

ShiftKit is not a medical device. It does not diagnose anything, it does not assess your fitness for duty, and it does not clear you to work. The readiness figure is arithmetic performed on numbers you typed in yourself — nothing more. If you feel unfit to work, that is a conversation with your employer and your clinician, not a number on a screen.

It is also not a system of record. Your employer's rostering system remains the source of truth for what you are paid to work, and your employer's clinical documentation remains the place patient information belongs.

Getting startedFinding Your Way Around

It is the same app on every device, but the navigation differs to suit the screen. Learning where the nine areas live once is enough for all three platforms.

On Mac

A sidebar down the left holds the nine areas: Today, Roster, Calendar, Readiness, Intake, Checklists, Journal, Insights and Settings. The current area carries a signal-coloured bar on its left edge. The window is resizable, and the week planner keeps its seven columns down to a fairly narrow width; below that it scrolls horizontally rather than squashing the days.

On iPhone

A bottom tab bar holds the five areas you touch most often — Today, Calendar, Intake, Checklists and Insights. Roster detail, Journal and Settings are reached from inside those tabs. Logging water and caffeine is deliberately two taps from anywhere, because you will be doing it one-handed.

On Apple Watch

The Watch app is a glance, not a workstation. It shows your next shift, your current readiness figure, and buttons to log water and caffeine. Complications put the readiness figure or the next shift on your watch face.

Today is the front door

Wherever you are, Today is the screen worth opening first. It shows the countdown to your next shift, your readiness figure and its band, last night's sleep, hydration against your daily target, caffeine on board with your cut-off time, and the checklist attached to the shift you are about to work.

Getting startedYour First Week

First run

Setup has five pages: welcome, about you, shift defaults, notifications and done. The about-you page asks for your display name, role title and home base; those details fill in Settings › Profile. Nothing has to be filled in, and you can change every choice later.

You do not need to set the whole app up before it becomes useful. Fifteen minutes on the first day, and two minutes a day after that, is enough. This is the order that works.

1. Put in your next swing. Open roster and add the shifts you already know about. If you work a repeating pattern, build it once in the pattern builder and let it generate the rest instead of typing each shift.
2. Set your sleep window. In Settings, tell ShiftKit roughly when you try to sleep before a day shift and before a night shift. The caffeine cut-off is worked back from this, so it matters more than it looks.
3. Set your hydration target. The default is 3.0 L. Adjust it to something you will actually hit — a target you miss every day teaches you nothing.
4. Log one day properly. Enter last night's sleep and rate fatigue, energy, stress and soreness. This is the first day your readiness figure means anything.
5. Build one checklist. Start with the shift you work most. Five or six items is plenty. Mark the ones you must not leave without as required.
6. Turn on calendar sync, if you want it. Settings › Calendar. Pick a dedicated calendar so ShiftKit's events stay separate from everything else.
7. Invite your partner, if you share a household. Settings › Sharing. Start with Overlay only and change it later if you want their shifts merged in.

After that the daily habit is small: log sleep and how you feel when you wake up, tap water and coffee as you go, and write two lines in the journal at the end of a shift worth remembering. Readiness needs a handful of days before its trend is worth reading, and Insights needs a couple of weeks before the pattern across a swing becomes obvious.

Getting startediPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch

ShiftKit is one app on four kinds of device. One purchase of Pro covers all of them on the same Apple Account, and with iCloud sync on, a shift added on one turns up on the others.

iPhone

The everyday device. Five tabs along the bottom: Today, Calendar, Log, Insights and Settings, with everything else in Settings or the More list. The iPhone is the only device that reads from and writes to Apple Health, reads the weather, and dims itself face down on a charger.

iPad

The same app with a sidebar down the left instead of tabs along the bottom, wider cards, and the quick logs in the toolbar. Everything the iPhone does, the iPad does, apart from Apple Health where the iPad has no Health app.

Mac

A full Mac app with a sidebar, a Today board you arrange panel by panel, keyboard shortcuts and the menu bar. Your roster, logs, journal, pay and reports are all there. Apple Health and the weather panel are not, because the Mac has no Health app and the weather panel belongs to the phone.

Apple Watch

A glance at the next shift, the day's figures and a page of quick log buttons, with pages you choose and put in order from the iPhone. The watch app is installed with the iPhone app and has nothing to set up of its own.

Getting startedYour profile and base time zone

Settings › Profile holds the few details about you that the rest of the app leans on: your name, your role, the town or site you work out of, and the time zone your roster is written in.

Name, role and location

Your name and role are printed at the top of a report. Location is the town or site you work out of. Fill these in from a contact copies them across from your own card in Contacts, so there is nothing to type twice.

Full name and date of birth

These two are only used on the letterhead of a report you take to a health professional, and nowhere else. Put these on printed reports decides whether they appear at all. Leave them blank if you never print that kind of report.

Base time zone

This is the zone your roster is written in: your employer's base, not wherever the phone happens to be. Days, daily totals, payslip dates and the midnight a day turns over on are all worked out in it. Someone who lives in Perth and flies to a Queensland site sets the zone the roster is written in, and a shift that starts at 06:00 stays at 06:00 however far the phone travels.

It starts as the zone your device was in the first time you opened ShiftKit. Change it only if your roster is written in a different one.

Getting startedThe tutorial and running setup again

Two things walk you through the app, and both can be run again whenever you like. Neither removes anything you have recorded.

The tutorial

A tour of the whole app in a couple of minutes: what each screen is for, where the quick logs are, and where Settings keeps the figures, reminders, backups and iCloud. You can leave at any point with the Skip button on every page, or the Escape key on a Mac.

To see it again, open Settings and choose Run tutorial. On Mac it is Run Tutorial in Settings.

Setup

Setup is the first-run walk through your name, role, shift defaults, the things you want to track and your reminders. Settings › Reset › Show setup on next launch brings it back next time you open the app. On Mac, Run Setup Again walks through it straight away. Anything you change in setup writes over the matching setting; anything you leave alone stays as it was.

Planning your rosterThe Week Planner

The planner is a seven-column grid, Monday to Sunday, with a time gutter down the left. Shifts appear as coloured blocks positioned and sized by their start and finish, so a twelve-hour night reads as a tall block crossing midnight and a four-hour training session reads as a short one. The point of the grid is that you can see the shape of a swing at a glance: where the turnarounds are tight, where the two days off actually fall, and where a night block runs into a morning commitment.

Adding a shift

1. Click or tap an empty area of the day you want. On Mac you can also press ⌘N.
2. Choose the shift kind, set the start and finish times, and add the crew or location if you use them.
3. Save. The block appears immediately in the grid, and on the Today screen if it is your next shift.

Drag a block to move it to another day or time. Drag its top or bottom edge to change the start or finish. Blocks that cross midnight stay as one shift rather than splitting into two, which keeps your hours honest.

Colour

Each shift kind has its own colour, so you can read a week without reading any text. Nights are indigo, days are signal orange, Travel is violet, and leave is green. A partner's shifts, if sharing is on, appear as semi-transparent striped blocks labelled with their name, so there is never any doubt whose shift is whose. Their included markers and comments appear with the shared-roster overlay. A small legend sits under the grid.

Moving around

Arrow keys step between weeks and the Today button snaps back to the current week. On iPhone the planner scrolls horizontally week by week, and the day view gives you a single column with more room for detail.

Planning your rosterDays, Nights and Afternoons

A single default shift kind suits a straight day job. It does not suit a rotation. If you work seven days and then seven nights, a default of Day means half of every roster you enter arrives stamped wrong. On a three-crew rotation through days, afternoons and nights it is wrong two thirds of the time, and correcting each one by hand is exactly the sort of work the app is meant to remove.

So the baseline offers three choices. One kind suits a straight day job. A rotation of shift kinds suits a swing. Casual or locum, no set roster suits work with no pattern at all.

A rotation

A rotation is a list of runs, each one a kind of shift and how many days of it come in a row, listed in the order you work them. Give it one date that began the first run and it works out what a new shift should start as from the date it falls on.

Setting a rotation up

1. Open Settings. On Mac press ⌘, and go to the Shifts tab; on iPhone or iPad the Baseline section sits under New shifts.
2. Choose a rotation of shift kinds.
3. Open Common rotations and pick the closest match. Seven days and seven nights, four and four, five and five, days-afternoons-nights in sevens, fives, fours or twos, afternoons and nights in fives, and days then on-call in sevens are all there.
4. Adjust it if you need to. Change the kind on any run, use the stepper to set how many days that run lasts, add a run, or remove one — up to eight runs, and any of the eight shift kinds can be a run, including On Call, Standby, Training and Travel.
5. Set the first day of the rotation to a date you know began the first run. Any such date does, past or future.
6. Read the line underneath. It says where today sits in the rotation and what a shift added today would start as, so you can check the dates line up before you rely on it.

What it does and does not do

• It decides what a new shift starts as, and nothing more.
• The runs are read in the order they are listed, then it starts again from the top.
• It never changes a shift you have already entered.
• You can change the stamp on any shift after you add it, as always.
• Days off are not runs. It answers one question — which kind — for a shift you are adding.

Casual and locum work

Agency, casual and locum work has no pattern to read, so nothing is assumed. A new shift starts as whatever kind you set on the last shift you entered, which for work taken as it comes is a better guess than any roster, and you set the times as you go. Choosing it also turns on casual and locum mode, which adds the Work section for sites, placements and availability.

If your roster is days, off, nights, off, use the pattern builder to lay the whole block in and choose the stamp for each day of the block there. The baseline is for the shifts you add one at a time afterwards.

Planning your rosterShift Details

A shift holds a kind, a start, a finish, and optional detail: crew, location, a marker, a comment and a checklist. The kind does the most work, because it drives the colour in the planner, the checklist templates offered before the shift, and how the shift is counted in Insights.

Shift kinds

There are eight: Day, Night, Afternoon, On-call, Standby, Training, Leave and Travel. On-call and Standby exist because they behave differently from a rostered shift — you may or may not be called in, and treating them as a normal shift distorts both your hours and your recovery picture. Leave is included so a swing reads correctly across the planner rather than leaving suspicious empty space.

Crew and location

Both are free text and both are optional. They are useful if you move between stations or sites, because Insights can then show whether a particular roster line or site is where your readiness dips. Keep them short — "Rescue Crew", "North Site" — so the planner blocks stay readable.

Comments and markers

Open the day editor from the calendar to add a marker or a comment to the shift, or to the day itself. Use the comment for practical detail: a handover, a vehicle, an appointment or something to remember next time. The separate articles below explain how those two levels work.

Shifts that run past midnight

A night shift usually starts on one date and finishes on the next, and rosters are written both ways: some mark the night against the day it starts, others show it filling both days. ShiftKit lets you choose. In Settings › Shift defaults, Night shifts fill both days puts the badge on the night it starts and again on the morning it ends. Turn it off and the badge sits only on the day it starts.

This changes the calendar and nothing else. The shift keeps the same start and finish either way, so hours, pay, Insights and calendar sync all read the same. Tapping a day to place or remove a shift always works on the day the shift starts, whichever setting you use.

Deleting and duplicating

Deleting a shift removes it from the planner, from Today, and — if calendar sync is on — from your calendar at the next sync. Duplicating is the fastest way to build a block by hand: create the first night, then duplicate it across the following days and adjust anything that differs.

Planning your rosterTime Steps

Choose how far a shift time or length changes with one tap in Settings › Shift defaults › Time steps. The choices are 15 minutes, 30 minutes and an hour. The default is 30 minutes.

Time steps affect the controls for changing a shift's start, finish and length, so you can make the common adjustment without repeated taps. They do not round an existing shift or alter its recorded times.

One limit of the time wheel

Apple's time wheel accepts steps up to half an hour. If you choose an hour, the time wheels still offer half hours, while the length steppers move a full hour. This is how the system control behaves, rather than a different setting in ShiftKit.

Planning your rosterShift Colours and Custom Colours

ShiftKit includes 42 preset colours for shift stamps. Pick one when you create or edit a stamp to make the roster easier to scan.

Mix your own

Choose Mix your own to open the system colour picker, with its wheel, sliders and eyedropper. When you have the colour you want, tap Add this colour. It joins the grid for every shift stamp, not only the one you are editing.

ShiftKit keeps up to 24 custom colours. To remove one of your own colours, press and hold it in the grid, then confirm its removal.

Planning your rosterTravel Shifts

Travel is a roster kind for drive-in or fly-in days. Choose it when the journey is part of the work, rather than leaving the day blank or calling it leave. It sits alongside Day, Night, Afternoon, On-call, Standby, Training and Leave.

Travel blocks are violet and carry an aeroplane icon in the calendar, so they are easy to pick out from work days and days off. Set the start and finish around the trip as you would for any other shift.

Travel time counts as worked time in month totals. It is time you are awake and away from home, and treating it that way gives a more honest picture of a FIFO swing.

Planning your rosterMarkers on Calendar Entries

A marker is a short visual cue on a calendar entry: an emoji, or a few characters of text. Use one when a quick symbol says more than another line of detail in a busy week.

Three levels of marker

1. Shift type marker. Fill in the Marker field in the shift type editor and every shift of that type inherits it. Change it once and every shift stamped with that type follows.
2. Individual shift marker. Open the day editor from the calendar and add a marker to one shift. It overrides the marker inherited from the shift type, for that shift only.
3. Day marker. Add a marker to the day itself when it applies to the date rather than to a shift. A day marker works on a blank day too.

Keep markers brief. They are there to make the calendar easier to scan, not to turn each cell into a note.

Planning your rosterDay and Shift Comments

Comments hold the practical details around a roster. Open the day editor from the calendar to attach free text to an individual shift, or separately to the calendar day. A day comment works even when no shift is rostered, which is useful for an appointment, a swap arrangement or a reminder.

Any day with a comment shows a small dot in its calendar cell. That lets you see there is a note to read without opening every day in the week.

Comments are not the Journal

Use comments for quick operational notes about what is arranged or needs doing. Use the Journal for a reflective post-shift entry: workload, how the turnaround felt, a workload rating and tags that help you read a pattern over time. The Journal remains separate from the calendar day editor.

Planning your rosterRepeating Rosters and Swings

Most rotating work follows a pattern, and typing that pattern out shift by shift is exactly the kind of work an app should be doing for you. The roster pattern builder lets you describe one cycle and repeat it forward as far as you like.

Building a pattern

1. Open roster and choose the pattern builder.
2. Describe one full cycle, day by day — for example four twelve-hour days followed by four days off, or two days, two nights, three off.
3. Set the date the cycle starts. This is usually the first day of your current swing, not the first of the month.
4. Choose how far ahead to generate. A few cycles is usually enough; you can extend it later.
5. Review the preview in the planner before you commit. It is much easier to correct a pattern than to unpick fifty generated shifts.

Patterns that work well

Fixed blocks such as 4-on 4-off, 5-on 2-off and 2-2-3 map directly onto a cycle. FIFO swings do too — a two-week-on, one-week-off swing is a twenty-one day cycle with travel days entered as Travel shifts, so their time is counted correctly. If your roster is a repeating pattern with occasional exceptions, generate the pattern and then edit the exceptions individually.

When the roster changes

Rosters change. Editing a single generated shift affects only that shift, so a swapped night stays swapped without disturbing the rest of the cycle. If the whole line changes, it is usually cleanest to delete the future shifts and build a new pattern from the date the change takes effect.

Sharing & calendarShare Your Roster with a Partner

Roster sharing exists so the person you live with can stop asking when you are next on nights. It uses Apple's own CloudKit sharing, which means there is no ShiftKit account, no server in the middle, and no file to send. You send an invitation, they accept it in their copy of ShiftKit, and your shifts appear in their planner.

Sending an invitation

1. Open Settings › Sharing.
2. Choose Share my roster.
3. Pick how your shifts should appear to them: Overlay only, Let me copy, or Merge automatically.
4. Send the invitation however you normally would — Messages, Mail, or a link.
5. They open it on a device signed into their own Apple Account with ShiftKit installed, and accept.

The three modes

Overlay only shows your shifts in their planner as striped blocks labelled with your name. They can see them; they cannot edit them, and they are not mixed into their own roster. This is the right default for most households.

Let me copy does the same, and adds the option for them to copy one of your shifts into their own roster — useful when you deliberately match days off.

Merge automatically folds your shifts into their roster view without asking each time. Use this only if you genuinely want one combined picture, because it makes the planner busier.

What is shared, and what never is

The shared roster includes shifts, their markers, and any day or shift comments the sender has chosen to include. Your sleep, fatigue, energy, stress and soreness entries, your hydration and caffeine logs, your readiness figure, your checklists and your journal are never shared with anyone, in any mode.

Stopping

Remove the person in Settings › Sharing. Sharing stops immediately and no further shifts are sent. If you would rather keep the arrangement but reduce what they see, switch the mode back to Overlay only instead of removing them.

Sharing & calendarSharing Markers and Comments

Markers and comments travel with a shared roster in both directions. When a partner shares their roster with you, their included markers and comments appear on the shared-roster overlay alongside their shifts.

There are two controls in Settings › Sharing. One controls whether your own notes are included when you send a roster. The other is set per person and controls whether you want to see that person's notes. Adjust either setting without changing the rest of the sharing arrangement.

These controls apply to day and shift comments as well as markers. Journal entries are different: they remain private and are never part of a shared roster.

Sharing & calendarMerge a Partner's Shifts Automatically

If you are on the receiving end of an invitation, you decide how their shifts sit in your app. Merging is the most integrated option: their shifts appear alongside yours in the same planner, so you can read both rosters as one week.

1. Accept the invitation you were sent. ShiftKit opens and asks how you want their roster handled.
2. Choose Merge automatically. You can change this later in Settings › Sharing.
3. Their shifts appear in your planner as striped blocks carrying their name, so the two rosters never become indistinguishable.

Reading a merged week

The useful part of a merged week is the overlap. Two night blocks stacked on the same days means nobody is home; a signal-orange day against an indigo night means one of you is sleeping while the other is awake. Turning the overlay off for a moment is often the quickest way to check your own week in isolation.

Editing

You cannot edit a shift that belongs to someone else — it is their record and it stays theirs. To keep a copy of one of their shifts in your own roster, they need to have chosen Let me copy or Merge automatically when they shared. You can then copy the shift across, where it becomes yours to edit.

Sharing & calendarSync Shifts to Apple Calendar

Calendar sync writes your shifts into Apple Calendar as ordinary events, so anyone who already checks the family calendar can see when you are working without opening ShiftKit at all.

Turning it on

1. Open Settings › Calendar.
2. Switch Sync to Apple Calendar on, and grant calendar access when asked.
3. Choose the calendar to write to. A dedicated calendar — for example one called "ShiftKit" in iCloud — keeps your shifts separate and easy to hide.
4. Choose Automatic or Manual sync mode.
5. Adjust the window if you want to. The default is 60 days ahead and 14 days back.

Automatic and manual

Automatic keeps the calendar in step as you edit your roster: add a shift and the event appears, move it and the event moves, delete it and the event goes. Manual holds everything until you press Sync now, which is the better choice if you do a lot of speculative planning and would rather not have half-finished rosters appearing on a shared calendar.

Sync is one direction

ShiftKit writes to the calendar; it does not read your calendar as a source of shifts. Editing an event in Calendar does not change the shift in ShiftKit, and the next sync will put the event back the way ShiftKit believes it should be. Make roster changes in ShiftKit.

Cleaning up

Settings › Calendar › Remove ShiftKit events deletes every event ShiftKit wrote and leaves everything else in the calendar untouched. Use it before you switch calendars, and if you ever turn sync off for good.

Sharing & calendarWork, Google and Other Calendar Accounts

ShiftKit writes through the calendar database built into iOS and macOS, so it has always been able to write to any calendar account your device holds — iCloud, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Exchange, Google, Fastmail, or a calendar that lives only on the device. What it did not do was tell you which account a calendar came from, which is awkward when three of them are called Work.

What the calendar list shows

• Calendars grouped under the account they belong to, with the account named.
• Accounts ordered iCloud, then Outlook or Exchange, then Google, then anything else, then on-device.
• Read-only feeds — subscribed calendars, birthdays and holidays — hidden, because nothing can be written to them.
• Each calendar in its own colour, so it reads the same here as it does in Calendar.

Adding a work account

ShiftKit can only offer accounts the device already knows about, so add the account in the system first.

1. On iPhone or iPad, open Settings › Apps › Calendar › Accounts and add the account. On Mac, open System Settings › Internet Accounts.
2. Check that Calendars is switched on for that account.
3. Back in ShiftKit, open Settings › Calendar and refresh the calendar list.
4. Pick the calendar you want your shifts written into.

If an account is missing

Either Calendars is switched off for it in the system settings, or it carries only subscribed and read-only calendars, which are hidden. Check as well that ShiftKit still has calendar access under Privacy & Security. A freshly added account can take a moment to appear; refresh the list.

Nothing else about calendar sync changes with the account you pick. It is still one-way, it still touches only the events it created, and Remove ShiftKit events still clears them.

Casual & locum workCasual and Locum Mode

A permanent roster repeats. Casual and locum work does not. You take a run of seven days at one site, have two off, fly out to a different site for four, and the whole shape changes again next month. Casual mode adds the parts ShiftKit needs to keep up with that: the sites you work at, the blocks of work you accept, the days you are free to accept more, and what each block was worth.

Turning it on

1. Open Settings.
2. Find the Casual & Locum section.
3. Switch on Casual or locum mode.
4. Set the currency symbol and which month your financial year starts in.

On Mac, a Work item appears in the sidebar. On iPhone, Work takes a place in the tab bar and Checklists moves into the More list on the Today screen — still one tap away.

What it changes

• A Work screen collecting your current block, your money, your free runs and your sites.
• Site and placement pickers when you edit a shift.
• Two extra CSV exports: placements and site totals.
• Nothing else. Your roster, readiness, intake, journal and checklists are untouched.

Casual & locum workSites

A site is somewhere you actually turn up: a mine, a hospital, an ambulance station, a clinic. Recording it once means every shift you work there is tagged, counted and — if you track pay — costed, without typing the place name again.

Adding a site

1. Open Work, then choose Sites.
2. Tap or click the plus button.
3. Enter the site name. Everything else is optional.
4. Add the employer or agency if the site is worked through one.
5. Pick a colour. You will recognise sites by colour long before you read the name.
6. Set the typical one-way travel time. New shifts at this site prefill it.

Rates

Rates are a Pro feature. Each site holds its own, because the same work rarely pays the same at two sites. Choose how the site pays you:

• Hourly — paid per hour worked, with unpaid breaks already deducted.
• Daily — a flat figure for each day on site, regardless of hours.
• Not tracked — you work here but do not want ShiftKit costing it.

Two extras sit alongside: a travel day rate, applied instead of the normal rate to any shift you mark as Travel, and a per-shift allowance added to every shift at the site. A travel rate of zero means travel is unpaid here, which is common, rather than meaning "use the normal rate".

Archiving

When you stop working at a site, archive it rather than deleting it. Archiving keeps every shift, placement and figure intact but moves the site out of the pickers. Deleting a site removes its placements and unlinks its shifts — the shifts themselves stay in your roster.

The free version holds three sites. If you work more than three, the sites you already have keep working; Pro is needed to add a fourth.

Casual & locum workPlacements

A placement is a single engagement: "eight days at Curragh, starting the fourteenth". It is the unit agencies talk in, the unit you invoice in, and the unit that tells ShiftKit which days you are not free.

Creating one

1. Open Work.
2. Tap or click the plus button and choose New Placement.
3. Pick the site.
4. Set the first and last day of the block.
5. Set the status — usually Enquiry or Confirmed.
6. Add the agency and their reference number if there is one.

The statuses

• Enquiry — someone has asked. Nothing is locked in, and your availability is unaffected.
• Confirmed — you have accepted. These days now count as committed.
• Completed — the work is done and ready to invoice.
• Invoiced — the invoice has gone out and you are waiting on payment.
• Paid — money received. The block is closed.
• Cancelled — it fell through. Kept for your records, and your days are free again.

Moving a placement to Invoiced stamps today's date on it, and moving it to Paid does the same. That is what lets the Work screen tell you an invoice has been outstanding for thirty-one days.

Attaching shifts

A placement is the frame; the shifts inside it are the detail. Create your shifts as you normally would and choose the placement in the editor. If you add a shift on a day that already sits inside a confirmed block, ShiftKit selects that placement for you.

A different rate for one block

Sometimes a block pays above the site's usual rate — a hard-to-fill roster, a short-notice callout, a better negotiation. Switch on Use a different rate for this block in the placement and set the figures there. They apply to every shift in the block and leave the site's own rate alone.

Casual & locum workAvailability

The question every casual worker gets asked, always at short notice, is when they are next free. The availability screen answers it from a calendar rather than from memory.

How a day gets its state

ShiftKit works out most of it for you, and you only mark the rest.

• Working — there is a shift on that day. A fact, not a choice.
• Committed — the day sits inside a confirmed placement.
• Available — you have said you can work.
• Pencilled — you are probably free, but something might land on it.
• Unavailable — you have said no. A wedding, a holiday, a rest block you are protecting.
• Unmarked — you have not said either way.

Working and Committed days cannot be marked, because a shift or an accepted block already decides them. Tap one and ShiftKit shows you what owns the day so you can open it.

Marking days

1. Open Work, then Availability.
2. Tap a day in the grid.
3. Choose Available, Pencilled or Unavailable.
4. Add a reason if it helps — "Kids' school holidays" is worth more than a blank square in six weeks' time.
5. Clear removes the marking and returns the day to unmarked.

The two quick actions mark a whole week at once and skip any day that is already working or committed, so you cannot accidentally overwrite real work.

Free runs

Underneath the grid, ShiftKit lists every run of two or more consecutive free days in the next ninety days. That list is the answer to the phone call. A run breaks at the first day that is working, committed or marked unavailable.

Casual & locum workEarnings

Earnings adds up what you have recorded. It is a Pro feature, and it is arithmetic on your own figures — nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing here is financial or tax advice.

Periods

• Financial year — from the month you set in Settings. Australian users normally want July.
• Last 12 weeks — a rolling window, useful mid-year.
• All time — everything you have ever recorded.

What each figure means

• Total — every shift in the period costed at the rate that applied, before tax.
• Paid hours — worked hours with unpaid breaks already deducted.
• Days worked — distinct calendar days, so two shifts on one day count once.
• Per hour — the total divided by paid hours. This is the number worth comparing between sites, because it accounts for a day rate on a short day.
• Owed to you — completed work not yet invoiced, plus invoices not yet paid.

Comparing sites

The per-site breakdown is the honest version of "which job is actually better". A site paying a strong day rate on twelve-hour days can be worth less per hour than a quieter site on an ordinary hourly rate, and the bar chart makes that visible.

Casual & locum workInvoicing and Chasing Money

ShiftKit does not send invoices. It gives you the numbers an invoice needs, correct and in one place, so you are not reconstructing a fortnight from memory.

From a single placement

1. Open Work and choose the placement.
2. Scroll to the invoice card.
3. Check the day-by-day rows and the total.
4. Tap or click Copy summary.
5. Paste it into your invoice, your accounting app, or an email to the agency.

From your whole history

The Data section of Settings on iPhone, and the export panel on Mac, add two CSV files when Casual mode is on. Placements gives one row per block with dates, status, days, hours and amount. Sites gives lifetime totals per site. Both open in any spreadsheet and both are Pro features.

Chasing what you are owed

Keeping statuses current is what makes this work. Mark a block Completed when you finish it, Invoiced when the invoice goes out, and Paid when the money lands. The Work screen then shows what is ready to bill, what is outstanding, and how old the oldest unpaid invoice is.

Do the status change on the last day of the block, while you are still thinking about it. Three sites later, the details blur.

Daily trackingHow Readiness Is Calculated

Readiness is a single figure from 0 to 100 that summarises the entries you made today. It is deliberately transparent: there is no hidden model. It is a weighted average of six things, all six of which are set by you on the check-in screen. With Apple Health connected the sleep hours arrive already filled in, but they are still only a starting figure you can move, and nothing else from Apple Health goes anywhere near the calculation.

Sleep carries half the total weight between duration and quality, because for shift workers it is the input that moves most and matters most. Fatigue is next, because it captures accumulated load that a single night's sleep does not explain. Soreness is deliberately small — it is real, but it is a poor predictor of how a night shift will go.

The bands

The figure is most useful as a trend rather than a daily verdict. A single 52 means very little. A 52 on the third night of a swing when your first night was 74 tells you exactly how that swing is going.

Missing entries

If you skip an input, readiness is calculated from what you did enter and the Today screen notes that the figure is partial. Skipping sleep is the one to avoid, since it is half the weighting.

Daily trackingHydration Logging

Hydration logging is built to be fast, because the only hydration log that survives a busy shift is one that takes a single tap. Set a daily target, then log as you drink.

Setting your target

The default target is 3.0 L per day. Change it in Settings to something realistic for your climate and your work. A night on a ward and a summer day on a mine site are not the same problem, and there is no value in a target you never reach.

Logging

1. Open Intake, or press ⇧⌘W on Mac from anywhere in the app.
2. Tap one of the quick amounts — a glass, a bottle, or your own custom size.
3. The Today screen updates immediately, showing progress against the target with a teal bar.

Custom quantities exist for the container you actually carry. Setting your bottle's real volume once turns hydration logging into one tap per refill.

Reading it back

Insights shows hydration by day and lets you compare day shifts with nights. The pattern most people find is not a general shortfall but a specific one: nights, or the first day of a swing, or hot afternoons. That is a much easier problem to fix than "drink more water".

Daily trackingCaffeine and the Cut-off

The free quick log records coffee, espresso, energy drink or tea with a milligram figure and a time. ShiftKit places each entry on an on-board curve and shows a cut-off worked back from your planned sleep window.

How the estimate works

ShiftKit models caffeine on a five-hour half-life. In the model, a 95 mg coffee at 2pm becomes about 48 mg at 7pm, about 24 mg at midnight, and about 12 mg at 5am. This keeps every quick-log entry in the same on-board view across the next sixteen hours.

The cut-off time

Your cut-off is calculated back from the sleep window you set for the shift you are about to work, so it moves with your roster instead of being a fixed clock time. The Today screen shows it beside your current caffeine figure. It is a planning prompt, not a block: every entry can still be logged.

Logging

1. Open Intake, or press ⇧⌘C on Mac.
2. Choose a quick source and set its milligram figure, or use a named product from the Pro drink library.
3. Adjust the time if you are logging after the fact so the entry sits in the right place on the curve.

Daily tracking · ProThe Drink Library

ShiftKit Pro includes named products with published Australian label values at a stated serve. It covers common energy drinks, soft drinks, coffee, tea, tablets and pre-workout, so you can log the product instead of estimating its caffeine figure.

What a library entry holds

• The product name, brand, category and stated serve in millilitres where relevant.
• Caffeine and sugar, plus other figures declared for the drink.
• A plain-language note for every ingredient.
• Published label values current when the library was prepared.

Finding a drink

1. Open Intake and choose the drink library.
2. Search by product or brand, or browse the categories.
3. Open the drink to check its stated serve and label figures.
4. Choose Log drink when it is the product you had.

Labels change over time. You can edit a built-in drink to match the can or pack in front of you, then restore the published figures later if needed. A 250 mL can and a 473 mL can are separate entries because their label figures differ.

Daily tracking · ProLooking Up a Drink Online

When the library does not have your drink, you can look it up instead of typing every figure by hand. ShiftKit searches Open Food Facts, a public product database that volunteers fill in, and shows you what it found so you can check it before anything is added.

Adding a drink this way

1. Open the drink library and use the add button in the toolbar.
2. Choose Look up a drink online.
3. Type the product name, the brand, or the full barcode off the can.
4. Pick the result that matches what is in front of you.
5. Check every figure on the review screen and correct anything that differs from the label.
6. Choose Add to put it in your library.

What comes back, and what does not

Coverage is uneven, because that database is filled in by the public rather than by manufacturers. Serve size, sugar, sodium and kilojoules come through often. Caffeine is the figure most often missing, and it is the one that matters most here, so expect to read it off the can and type it in yourself.

• Entries that carry figures, and products sold in your country, are listed first.
• Where the ingredient list names something without stating an amount, the field is added at zero and named for you on the review screen.
• Every drink added this way keeps a note recording the barcode and the date it came from.
• A drink you already have at the same serve size cannot be added twice.

What is sent

Only the words you type into that search box. No roster, no logs, no journal, no health figures and no identifier go with the request. This is the only part of ShiftKit that reaches the internet on its own, and it runs only when you press that button. The privacy policy sets it out in full.

Daily tracking · ProLogging a Drink

Logging from the drink library records the product, its stated serve and the number of serves you chose. Half a can is fine. Set the time you had it so the caffeine curve has the right place in your day.

Log a product

1. Open Intake and choose Log drink.
2. Pick a drink from the library or search for it.
3. Set the number of serves. Use 0.5 for half a can or half a prepared drink.
4. Set the time, then save the entry.

What is recorded

• The drink name, stated serve and number of serves.
• The time you set for the entry.
• Caffeine, sugar and every declared ingredient in that drink.
• The figures as they were when you saved the entry.

The saved entry is a snapshot. Editing a drink's label figures later does not rewrite earlier logs. Your history remains a record of what you logged at the time.

Daily tracking · ProSugar and Ingredients

Drink entries can hold more than caffeine. ShiftKit records published label figures for sugar, taurine, guarana, glucuronolactone, inositol, ginseng, L-carnitine, B vitamins, sodium and kilojoules when they are declared for that drink.

Reading the label record

1. Open a drink in the library, or open a logged drink in Intake.
2. Select an ingredient to read its plain-language note.
3. Check the figure against the stated serve and the serves in the entry.
4. Use the entry detail to see the frozen figures saved with that log.

Your sugar figure

Set the daily sugar figure you want to use in Settings. ShiftKit shows the day's logged total in grams and as a rough teaspoon equivalent on Today and in Intake. It compares the total with the figure you set; it does not set that figure for you.

Charts and export

Insights and Mac Reports include a sugar chart across the selected period. The caffeine-by-source chart separates coffee from cans and other drink categories. Export adds a drink-library CSV with every ingredient column and a drink-log CSV with each entry's frozen figures.

Daily tracking · ProProtein Tracking

Protein tracking is part of ShiftKit Pro. Turn it on in Settings, set the daily figure you want to compare against, and a protein card appears on Today, on the Mac Today board and in Intake.

Where the grams come from

• The protein log — a quick add by source, or a named product from the library.
• Meals — each meal entry can carry a protein figure of its own.
• Drinks — a product whose label declares protein counts on the day it was logged.

All three are added together for the day, and each is counted once. Intake shows the split, so you can see which of the three a day's total came from.

The product library

1. One hundred products sold in Australia are built in — powders, bars and ready-to-drink shakes — with serve size and label figures.
2. Add your own product with the editor, or look one up by barcode with the camera.
3. Figures are frozen against the entry at log time, so editing a product later never rewrites the past.

The figure you set

The daily figure is yours to choose in Settings, between 20 and 400 grams. ShiftKit makes no suggestion about what it should be. Change it whenever you like; existing entries stay exactly as logged and only the comparison moves.

On the wrist and on the Home Screen

• The Apple Watch has its own protein screen with four presets and one undo.
• A Home Screen and Lock Screen widget shows the day's grams against your figure, with a log button.
• A watch complication carries the same ring.

Charts, export and print

Insights and Mac Reports include a protein chart with your figure marked across the period. Export adds a protein-log CSV and a protein-library CSV. The printed report gains a protein column on the daily tracking table, along with protein averages.

Daily trackingApple Health

Apple Health is off until you switch it on in Settings. When it is on, ShiftKit can fill in parts of the readiness check-in from records you already keep in Health, and can write the water, caffeine and protein you log back to Health.

Turning it on

1. Open Settings › Apple Health on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap Connect Apple Health.
3. Choose each permission in Apple's own sheet. ShiftKit cannot read or write that item unless you allow it there.
4. You can withdraw permission later in Settings or in the Health app itself.

What it reads

• Sleep analysis — asleep time and, where the device records them, sleep stages. This can fill in last night's sleep on the readiness check-in.
• Resting heart rate and heart rate variability — shown alongside the ratings you enter yourself.
• Body mass, workouts and mindful minutes — read from Health when present.

Apple Watch sleep tracking is a usual source of the sleep record. If you did not wear the watch, the sleep field stays empty and you can type it in by hand.

What it writes

Water you log is written as dietary water, and caffeine you log is written as dietary caffeine, so other apps that read Health can see those entries too. Nothing is written until you give the matching permission.

What the figures are for

Figures pulled from Health are shown as a record, not as an assessment. ShiftKit does not diagnose anything or judge fitness for duty.

Where Health data goes

Health data is never used for advertising or sold. It is not written into ShiftKit's iCloud sync or into a backup file.

Turning it off

Turn the switch off in Settings › Apple Health to stop all reading and writing. It does not remove water or caffeine already written to the Health app.

Daily trackingBuilding Checklists

Checklists exist for the things you only forget when you are tired: the head torch, the second water bottle, the charged radio, the meal you meant to take. ShiftKit attaches them to shift kinds, so the list you are shown before a night is the night list.

Creating a template

1. Open Checklists and create a template.
2. Name it after the shift it belongs to — "Night", "Day shift", "Training day".
3. Add items. Keep them concrete and short.
4. Mark the items you must not leave without as required. Required items are shown separately and are harder to skip past.
5. Choose which shift kinds the template applies to, so it is offered automatically before those shifts.

Using one before a shift

The Today screen shows the checklist for your next shift — in the inspector on Mac, in a card on iPhone. Tick items as you pack. Ticks belong to the individual shift rather than to the template, so the template stays clean for next time and you get an honest record of what you actually did.

Keeping them short

A checklist of twenty items gets ignored. Six items, four of them required, gets used. If a template grows, split it — one for the bag and one for the vehicle beats one long list.

Daily trackingThe Journal

The journal is a short post-shift note. It is not a diary you have to keep up with, and it is not a clinical record. Two lines about how the shift went, written before you go to sleep, turn into something genuinely useful when you read three months of them back next to your readiness trend.

Writing an entry

Open Journal and add an entry against the shift you just worked. Entries are dated and linked to the shift, so a night entry stays attached to that night even if you write it the following afternoon. Write about workload, sleep, food, how the turnaround felt — the things that will explain a readiness figure a month from now.

What it is good for

Patterns show up in the journal that no number captures: which roster line consistently wrecks you, which turnaround is too tight, whether the third night is always the hard one. Insights can show you that your readiness drops mid-swing; the journal is where you find out why.

History

The free tier keeps 30 days of journal entries; ShiftKit Pro keeps them without limit. Entries live on your device and in your own private iCloud database, and are never shared with a partner even when roster sharing is on.

Daily trackingReminders

Reminders are timed to your roster rather than to a clock, so a pre-shift prompt on a night swing arrives in the afternoon and not at breakfast. They are in Settings › Reminders. The first time you turn one on, the device asks whether ShiftKit may send notifications; the top of the screen says plainly what the device has allowed and offers the button that fixes it if the answer was no.

Free

• Pre-shift reminder — a prompt before your next shift starts. The lead time runs from 15 minutes to four hours, in quarter-hour steps, and starts at 90 minutes.
• Daily readiness prompt — a nudge to do the morning check-in, at an hour you pick between 04:00 and midday.

With Pro

The pre-shift reminder is set for every shift in the next fortnight rather than only the next one, and four more become available:

• Hydration reminders — every 45 minutes to three hours while you are on shift. The notification has a button to log water without opening the app.
• Checklist reminder — a prompt to run the checklist for that kind of shift before you leave.
• Wind-down reminder — a prompt an hour after a shift ends.
• Caffeine cut-off reminder — a prompt at the point where a serve logged afterwards is estimated to still be on board at your planned sleep time.

A reminder you put off with Remind me in 30 min comes back half an hour later.

Reading a roster inPaste a roster from a photo

If your roster arrives as a photo, a screenshot or a PDF, open Calendar, tap Import and choose the file or the picture. ShiftKit reads the dates and times it can find and shows you every shift it thinks it found before anything is saved.

Nothing goes into your roster until you tap to accept it, so a bad read costs you nothing but a look.

Reading a roster inChecking what it read

The review list shows one row per shift, with the date, the times and the kind it guessed. Change any row that is wrong, switch off any row that should not be there, then save the rest.

A row it was unsure about is marked, so you look at it rather than trusting it.

Reading a roster inOdd dates, odd times

Rosters are written a hundred different ways. ShiftKit accepts day-first and month-first dates, two-digit and four-digit years, full stops, slashes and dashes, times with and without a colon, am and pm in either case, and 24-hour times.

A finish time earlier than the start is treated as overnight. Where a date could be read two ways, ShiftKit tells you which reading it used.

Reading a roster inIf it cannot read your roster

On the import screen there is a button to send the file to the developer. It attaches the roster you were trying to read and nothing else, and it opens as a message you can look over before you send it.

Rosters sent that way are used to teach the reader that shape, and are not kept beyond that.

Reading a roster inShifts you already have

An import never quietly doubles up your roster. Where a shift being read in lands on a day you already have one, the review list says so, and you choose whether to keep what you have, replace it, or keep both.

The same check runs when you restore a backup or accept a shared roster.

Reading a roster inReading an itinerary in

Fly-in fly-out and travelling work usually comes with an itinerary: a PDF or Word document listing the flights, the hire car and the hotel. ShiftKit reads it and offers what it finds to your roster, so the travel days are filled in without retyping a booking reference.

1. Open the itinerary in Mail or Files, tap Share, and choose ShiftKit. On a Mac, drop the file on the ShiftKit window.
2. ShiftKit reads the flights, the hire car and the accommodation, with their dates, times and references.
3. Check what it read before anything goes on the roster.
4. Choose which bookings go onto your roster, and on which days.

The reading happens on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere to be read.

Keeping the documents

The original document is kept beside the bookings read out of it, because the document is the record of what was booked and the bookings are only the app's reading of it. Settings › Calendar › Itineraries decides how long they are kept: after a month, three, six or twelve months, two years, or for as long as you keep them. The bookings already on your roster stay either way.

Reading an itinerary in is part of ShiftKit Pro.

Sleep and your body clockWriting down a sleep

Open Log, then Sleep. Put in the time you got into bed and the time you got up, then, if you want, roughly how long it took to fall asleep, how many times you woke, and how long you were awake.

Time in bed and time asleep are worked out from those and are kept apart, because they are not the same thing.

Sleep and your body clockMore than one sleep a day

A day sleep after a night shift counts. So does a nap before one. Add as many sleeps to a day as you actually had, and the charts add them up rather than keeping only the longest.

Sleep and your body clockThe body clock charts

Insights holds a group of body clock charts, switched on under Settings › Tracking. Your days on the clock lays each day out as a 48-hour strip, so a string of nights is visible at a glance. Sleep timing consistency puts a single figure on how much your sleep times move about. Your sleep timing compares your mid-sleep on days off with your mid-sleep on work days.

Quick returns lists every gap under eleven hours between finishing and starting again. Night blocks groups runs of nights with the days off that followed. When you ate shows your first and last intake each day. Awake before each shift counts the hours since your last recorded sleep.

Sleep and your body clockWhat the body clock charts are not

They are a picture of what you wrote down. ShiftKit does not predict how alert you will be, does not score your roster, and does not say anything about whether you are fit to work.

Where a chart names a figure from published research, the study behind it is listed under Settings › References.

Sleep and your body clockChoosing a sound

Open the Sleep sound & alarm screen, or Breathing & Meditation, and pick a piece from the library. There are 80, in four families of 20: Ambient tones, noise and held notes; Nature recordings made outdoors, mostly in Australia; Guided sessions where a voice gives instructions, with a different voice on each; and Immersive 3D, where one sound is placed around you and moved along a path while a bed stays still.

Eight of the 80 are inside the app download and are free for everyone. The other 72 are fetched on demand and need Pro. The guided sessions, paced breathing and the meditation timer are Pro as well.

Ambient, Nature and Immersive loop. A guided session has an end. The immersive pieces are binaural stereo through an HRTF, positioned in three dimensions as they play, so they work on any headphones, and on AirPods they also follow your head.

Sleep and your body clock · ProDownloading and removing a sound

Eight pieces are inside the app download and are free for everyone. The other 72 are Pro, and are fetched one at a time, only when you choose one of them, so nothing arrives on the device on the chance you might want it.

The list shows what is already on the device and what is not. Anything you have downloaded can be removed again from the same list, and fetched once more later if you want it back.

Sleep and your body clockA sleep sound, an alarm, and the fade

The Sleep sound & alarm screen is free. So is the wake alarm: a wake time you set, a fade-in ramp, snooze, and backstop repeats if the first one does not wake you. So is the overnight session, the dark screen that plays a sound all night.

Ambient, Nature and Immersive can each be set as the overnight sound and as the alarm sound, because they loop. Any of the eight pieces in the app download can be used for either without Pro. Guided is not offered in either place and is not listed there: a voice giving instructions is neither a sound to sleep through nor a sound to be woken by.

The fade eases the sound out after a set time rather than stopping it dead. Audio you choose for bedtime and alarm sounds is kept on the device.

Sleep and your body clockPlaying your own music instead

If none of the library pieces is what you want, choose your own music from your library and it plays in their place on the sleep sound and alarm screen. The timer and the fade behave the same way.

Sleep and your body clockDo not disturb, and your Focus

Do not disturb sits with the sleep sound and alarm, and is free. It gets the Focus profile you choose turned on for a night session and turned off again in the morning. ShiftKit does not turn a Focus on or off: no app on any Apple platform can, so the setting hands the job to something that is allowed to do it. There are two paths.

While the night screen is open is the one to use. iOS turns your chosen Focus on whenever ShiftKit is open and off again when you leave, and you set that up once in the Settings app: Settings › Focus › your profile › Turn On Automatically › Add Schedule or Automation › App › ShiftKit. Nothing has to be run at bedtime, nothing appears on screen, and it releases by itself in the morning.

Run one of my shortcuts uses the Shortcuts app, which is allowed to set a Focus, so ShiftKit asks it to run a shortcut you wrote. That works from any screen rather than only the night screen. The trade-off is that the Shortcuts app flicks up for a second: fine at bedtime, unwelcome at six in the morning. Type the shortcut name exactly as you named it, then use Try the bedtime one now to check it, because a name that does not match fails silently.

You name the Focus profile yourself. Sleep, Do Not Disturb, Personal and Work are offered from a menu, and anything else is typed in by hand, because there is no way for an app to read the Focus profiles on your device either. Turn it off again in the morning is on by default, and the morning hand-off fires on every path that ends a session: the alarm, closing the night screen, or the music player taking the audio. Searching Settings for “dnd”, “focus”, “silence” or “mute” finds the setting.

Sleep and your body clockCircadian load

Circadian load is one figure from 0 to 100 for the day, drawn as a ring. It adds up what your roster and your own figures say the day has asked of your body clock: the shifts you have worked, the run of nights you are in, the hours since you woke, and the sleep you have logged.

What goes into it

• Your roster — night shifts, quick returns and how many nights in a row. A run of nights holds the figure up on its own, so night three reads high whatever else the week looked like.
• Your sleep — how much of it there was, and when it fell.
• Your heart figures from Apple Health, on iPhone, as a difference from your own baseline. These stay out until there are 14 days of history to compare against. Until then the figure comes from your roster and your sleep alone, and the card says so.

A figure with nothing behind it does not count as zero. Its share is spread over the figures that do have something, so a missing reading cannot quietly drag the number down.

The bands

• Low — under 30.
• Moderate — 30 to 54.
• Elevated — 55 to 74.
• High — 75 or more.

It is switched on with the sleep card in Settings › Sleep, and it is part of ShiftKit Pro.

Food and drinkMeals and protein

Open Log, then Food. A meal takes a short description, the kind of meal and, if you care about it, the protein in grams.

The protein library holds the foods you use often, so you are picking rather than typing.

Food and drinkDinners you cook at home

The home dinners library holds meals as you actually make them, with the portions you serve. Pick one and it goes in as a meal with its description already written.

Add your own, and edit any of the ones the app ships with.

Food and drinkCamp and mess food

Camp kitchens serve the same rotation for weeks. The camp food library carries the usual mess and crib room items, so a night shift meal takes two taps instead of a sentence of typing.

Food and drinkSave a plate, log it again

Once you have put a plate together, save it. Saved plates sit at the top of the food screen and go in whole, with everything that was on them, including the condiments.

Rename or delete a saved plate from its context menu.

Food and drinkCondiments

What went on the plate goes on the record: sauce, gravy, butter, mayonnaise, dressing, and how much. It is recorded as an item alongside the meal.

ShiftKit says what went on and nothing more than that.

Food and drinkSnacks and sugar

Snacks go in by serving or by grams, from a library of Australian chocolate, lollies, biscuits, chips and ice cream, plus any products of your own.

If sugar tracking is switched on in Settings, the sugar in a snack or a drink is added to the day, with your own ceiling as the line to compare it against.

Food and drinkAlcohol

The alcohol day screen records standard drinks against the day, from a library of the usual beers, wines and spirits with their sizes.

Figures are Australian standard drinks.

Food and drinkQuick logging without retyping

A quick log button carries over the amount you used last time, so the second cup of coffee is one tap.

Press and hold any quick log button to change the amount it carries, or to log a different one.

Food and drinkSweeteners

Many energy drinks and diet soft drinks swap sugar for a sweetener such as sucralose, aspartame or stevia. When a drink or snack in the library declares one on its label, ShiftKit notes which, and Insights shows which sweeteners turned up in your logging and in what.

Serves, not weights

An Australian ingredient panel has to say which sweetener is in a product, but not how much. So ShiftKit counts serves, never milligrams: two drinks logged whose labels declared sucralose reads as two serves of sucralose. Nothing here is an intake figure, and nothing here is a health claim.

Where a product's label carries the phenylalanine statement, as products with aspartame must, the drink's detail shows it.

Entries whose labels were never recorded are counted and shown as unknown, rather than quietly left out, so the panel owns up to what it does not know.

Medicines and supplementsMedicines

Open Log, then Medicines. Pick what you took and the amount taken, and the time fills itself in.

The catalogue carries the medicines shift workers most often ask about, and you can add anything that is not there. It is a diary, not advice, and never a reason to change what you take.

Medicines and supplementsEverything you are taking

Settings › Everything you are taking is one list of every medicine, supplement and sleep aid you have recorded, with the amount taken and when.

It is the page to show a pharmacist or a doctor, and it prints.

Medicines and supplementsSupplements

The supplement library records what you take and the amount taken, and carries the vitamins, minerals and other figures the label declares into the day.

ShiftKit does not say what a supplement is for or what it does, because that is not something a log can tell you.

Medicines and supplementsMelatonin

Melatonin is in the catalogue with its usual forms and amounts, recorded the same way as anything else you take. In Australia most forms are prescription only.

ShiftKit records what you took and when, and gives no guidance on whether, when or how much to take.

Medicines and supplementsHow long something stays in you

Where the reference pages give a half-life it is always a range, because the figure differs between people and between products.

A detection window, where one is given, is how long a test can pick something up. It is not how long an effect lasts, and it is not a clearance time.

Medicines and supplementsDiabetes and insulin

If diabetes tracking is on, the diabetes screen holds blood glucose readings and the insulin library holds what you use, recorded as units taken at a time. You can also see the share of your readings inside your own range, and an estimate of insulin still active from a published model.

ShiftKit records what you enter and does not calculate an amount to take.

Medicines and supplementsThe cannabis diary

The cannabis diary sits beside the medication diary with a switch of its own, because deciding who sees it is the point. Turn it on in Settings › Daily targets › Keep a cannabis diary. Until you do, it appears nowhere: not on the Log screen, not on Insights, and not in a report.

You are asked which it is: Prescribed, My own use or Prefer not to say.

Logging

Keep your own products with their route, unit and amount, and log one in a tap. Logging the last one again copies the product, route, unit, amount and release from last time and sets the time to now, so a repeat is one tap without carrying across an old note. The Apple Watch can do the same from its Cannabis page.

The reference library

Each entry in the library gives the published half-life range for its route and what the published work says about detection, with its source. Swallowed THC has a much longer published half-life than inhaled, and how long THC stays detectable in urine is a different question again, because what is measured is a fat-stored metabolite rather than THC itself.

The cannabis diary is part of ShiftKit Pro, with the medication diary.

Symptoms and cycleWriting down a symptom

Open Log, then Symptoms. Pick what you noticed, how bad it was and when, from a library of 144 symptoms across twelve body systems, searchable by the words you would actually use.

Add a note if there is something worth remembering about it, and add symptoms of your own when the published wording does not match yours. A row of six shortcuts on the Log screen covers the ones you log most.

Symptoms and cycleBy day, week and month

The symptom screen groups what you wrote down by day, by week or by month, so you can see a run of headaches across a swing of nights rather than a list of single entries.

What you see is a count of what you recorded. Severity is shown as you set it and is never averaged into a score.

Symptoms and cycleCycle length and ovulation window

If cycle tracking is on, ShiftKit works out your usual cycle length from the periods you have recorded and marks the days a fertile window is likely to fall on. Bleeding days take a flow level and a note.

Both figures are worked out from your own dates, both change as you record more, and neither is a test or a diagnosis. Predictions can be paused whenever you want.

Say which of the three stages you are in and the app follows it: perimenopause and postmenopause bring in the symptom set named by Jean Hailes for Women’s Health and the Australasian Menopause Society, including hot flushes, and drop the expected dates a changing cycle cannot support. Bleeding days stay loggable throughout.

MovementWorkouts

Open Log, then Workouts. Record what you did, for how long, and, for anything with sets, the reps and the weight. Sets are kept per exercise, so you can see what you lifted last time.

There is a library of 265 exercises, one tap for a walk or a run, and workouts brought in from your Watch without turning up twice.

MovementEnergy figures

Where a workout shows an energy figure it is an estimate worked out from the Compendium of Physical Activities and your weight, not a measurement.

Workout minutes recorded in ShiftKit are never added to Apple’s exercise minutes, so nothing is counted twice.

Smoking and vapingOne tap for a cigarette or a vape

If nicotine tracking is on, Today and Log both carry a one-tap button. Tap it and what you smoked or vaped goes on the record with the time.

Press and hold to pick a different product or change the amount. Cigarettes go in by the stick, vapes by the strength on the label and the millilitres you got through, added up for the day in milligrams against a figure you choose.

Smoking and vapingWhat is recorded

The product, the amount and the time. ShiftKit records what you smoked or vaped and nothing about what it does.

There is no quit plan and no countdown unless you build one yourself out of your own targets.

PayAdding a payslip

Open Work, then Payslips, then add. Choose the PDF or the photo your employer gave you.

ShiftKit reads the pay period, the hours paid and the amounts it can find, and shows them to you before anything is saved.

PayWhat the figures mean

Every figure shown is the figure printed on your payslip: gross, net, tax withheld, superannuation and paid hours. ShiftKit reports them as printed.

It does not check them, does not say whether a payslip is right or wrong, and gives no advice on tax, superannuation or entitlements. If something looks wrong, that is a conversation with your employer or your union.

PayGraphs and the coverage calendar

Pay over time shows gross, net and hours across the payslips you have added.

The coverage calendar shades the days your payslips cover, so a missing period is obvious without you keeping a list.

PaySending payslips on

From the payslip list you can export the files you have stored, one or several, as they were when you added them.

Useful for a tax agent, a loan application or a rental form. The files stay on your device and in your own backups until you export them deliberately.

InsightsWhat is on Insights

Everything you record has a chart: sleep, readiness, fatigue, fluids, caffeine, sugar, protein, meals, snacks, alcohol, medicines, supplements, symptoms, mood, mindful minutes, workouts, checklists, journal entries, shifts worked, pay, smoking and vaping, and the body clock group.

If you have logged it, it is represented.

InsightsChoosing which charts you see

Tap the arrange button on Insights. Drag the charts into the order you want and switch off the ones you do not use.

A chart that needs a setting switched on says so, rather than sitting there empty.

InsightsThe period

The control under the title sets how far back a chart looks.

Charts that need a longer run of days to mean anything say how many days they need and how many you have.

InsightsWeather and conditions

Insights can show the weather beside your own figures: the conditions now, the next twelve hours, and the daily high and low behind you. It is useful for the plain reason that a 40-degree day shift and a cold night on the road ask different things of your fluids and your sleep.

1. Open Settings › Weather and turn on Show weather on Insights.
2. Choose a place. Either type a town or suburb and tap Find this place, which needs no location permission, or turn on Use my current location.
3. Pick How far back the high and low chart reaches.

Nothing is fetched while the switch is off. With current location on, your position is used for the forecast lookup only. It is never saved, synced or backed up.

Radar

Bureau of Meteorology radar opens the Bureau's own radar page in your browser. Radar images belong to the Bureau and are shown on their site rather than inside ShiftKit.

Weather figures come from Apple Weather. The weather panel is on iPhone and iPad, and is part of ShiftKit Pro.

Fit for workThe self declaration

If you have to sign something before a shift, ShiftKit can hold your own declaration: what you declared, the time you declared it, and a snapshot of the figures as they stood at that moment.

The snapshot is frozen, so it cannot be edited afterwards.

Fit for workShiftKit does not make the call

It is your declaration and your words. ShiftKit does not assess you, does not say you are cleared or passed, and shows no countdown to being fit for duty.

That call is yours and your employer’s.

UnitsMetric or imperial

Settings › Appearance › Units. Metric gives millilitres, litres, grams, kilograms and centimetres. Imperial gives fluid ounces, pints, ounces, pounds, feet and inches.

It is one global setting. The switch changes how figures are shown everywhere, including on the watch and in a printed report, and nothing you have already recorded changes.

BackupsWhat a backup holds

Everything: your roster and shift stamps, sleep, readiness, fluids, caffeine, food and drink, condiments and saved plates, medicines, supplements, symptoms, cycle, workouts, checklists and their runs, journal entries, sites and placements, payslips, declarations, your libraries, and every switch and target in Settings.

BackupsTaking one

Settings › iCloud and backups › Back up now. The file is written where you choose, and can be put in iCloud Drive, in Files, or sent to yourself.

Take one before a reset, before restoring, and before a device change.

BackupsRestoring

From the same screen, pick a backup and restore it.

Anything that lands on a day you already have a record for is flagged and you choose what happens, so a restore never silently doubles up your roster.

Review & referenceThe Today Screen

Today is designed to answer one question in about ten seconds: what is coming, and how am I placed for it. Everything on it is either a countdown or a current figure.

At the top sits the date and the time to your next shift — "Night shift in 6h 20m" — because a countdown is more useful than a clock time when your days start at odd hours. Below that, a row of stat cards: readiness with its band and a coloured dot, last night's sleep, hydration against target with a teal progress bar, and caffeine on board with your cut-off time. The numerals are tabular, so the figures do not jitter as they change.

Under the cards, the next shift card shows the full detail — times, kind, crew and location — with the shift-kind colour as a badge. On Mac the inspector on the right holds the pre-shift checklist, so you can tick items without leaving the screen.

Putting the cards in your own order

Which card matters most depends on the job. Every card, including the shift card, can be moved into any order or switched off. Use Arrange these cards at the bottom of the More list, or the arrows in the navigation bar, to make the change.

Using it well

Open Today when you wake up and log sleep and how you feel; open it again before you leave and work the checklist. Those two visits are the whole daily routine.

On iPhone, the More list contains Roster, Checklists — casual mode only, Readiness, Journal, Print, Settings, About this app, Help and Arrange these cards. Tapping one opens it, and the back arrow returns you to Today.

Review & referenceArranging the Today Screen

Open Arrange these cards at the bottom of the More list, or use the arrows in the navigation bar. The arrangement screen lists every Today card.

1. Drag a card to put it anywhere in the stack.
2. Switch a card off when you do not want it on Today.
3. Leave the arrangement screen when the stack reads the way you want; the order and visible cards are kept.

No card is fixed at the top. That includes the shift card. When a later version adds a card, it appears in its default position rather than going missing from your layout.

The Mac arranges Today differently, as a board rather than a stack. See The Today Board on Mac below.

Review & referenceThe Today Board on Mac

On iPhone and iPad, Today is a stack of cards you reorder from Arrange these cards. A Mac window has width the phone does not, so on the Mac the Today page is a board: a four-column grid you fill with panels and rearrange by dragging.

The panels

Six panels can sit on the board — Roster, Readiness, Fluids, Caffeine, Hours and Next Shift. Pick one up and drop it into any position in the grid, and the panels around it move aside to make room.

Sizing, hiding and moving a panel

Right-click a panel to open its context menu. A panel can be a quarter, a half, three-quarters or the full width of the grid, so the thing you check first can be the widest thing on the page. The same menu hides a panel, or moves it to the end when you want it out of the way without losing it.

The Layout menu

Four arrangements are built in:

• Standard — the board as it arrives.
• Alphabetical — the panels in name order.
• Compact — narrower panels, more of them in view at once.
• Single Column — one panel per row, the way Today reads on iPhone.

The rest of the menu handles arrangements of your own. Save Current Layout keeps the board as it stands under a name you give it, Rename and Delete tidy that list, Add Panel puts a hidden panel back on the board, and Reset to Default returns everything to Standard.

Where the layout is kept

There is nothing to save by hand. The board writes itself down as you change it, travels to your other Macs through your own iCloud database, and is included in every backup, so a restore brings the board back the way you left it.

Review & referenceInsights and Charts

Insights is where the daily logging pays off. It draws your readiness, sleep, hydration and caffeine over time with Swift Charts, and lets you cut the data by shift kind so you can compare nights with days rather than looking at one undifferentiated average.

What to look at first

Start with readiness across a single swing. Most people find a shape rather than a flat line — a strong first day, a dip on the third or fourth, and a recovery that takes longer than they expected. Then look at sleep duration by shift kind, which usually explains the dip. Hydration and caffeine are worth checking against nights specifically.

Ranges

The free tier shows the last 7 days of analytics. ShiftKit Pro opens the full history along with reports and export, which is where cross-swing comparison becomes possible.

Review & referenceExporting Your Data

Export is manual and local. Nothing leaves your device unless you choose to send it somewhere, and ShiftKit never uploads your data to the developer.

1. Open Settings › Export, or press ⇧⌘E on Mac.
2. Choose the format — CSV for spreadsheets and analysis, PDF for a readable report.
3. Choose the date range and what to include: shifts, readiness entries, intake, checklists, journal.
4. Save the file, or send it wherever you want it. The file is yours.

CSV gives you one row per record with plain column headings, which imports cleanly into Numbers or Excel. PDF is formatted for reading and printing — useful if you want to take a summary of a swing to a conversation with your employer or your GP.

CSV and PDF export are part of ShiftKit Pro.

Review & referencePrinting a Report

Export hands you files. Printing hands you pages. Print opens as a sheet that slides up; it does not push you to another screen. The sheet lays your roster and your own figures out on A4 with a masthead, page numbers and ruled tables, so it can go on a fridge door, into a folder, or across a desk without looking like a screenshot.

1. Open Print in the More list, or choose Print a report in Settings.
2. Choose the date range and the sections to include.
3. Use the share sheet to print, save a PDF or send the report.

What you can put on the pages

• Month calendar — one page per month, Monday first, with each day's shift stamps in the box.
• Period summary — shifts worked, paid hours, night shifts, days without a shift, longest and average shift.
• Shift list — every shift with its date, day, times, paid hours and location.
• Daily tracking figures — the sleep, readiness, water and caffeine you logged, with the figures you set beside the averages.
• Every drink logged — each entry with its serves, caffeine and sugar.
• Shift and day notes — anything you typed against a shift or a day.

Pay and earnings are deliberately left off these pages. If a conversation is about money, your payslip is the document for it; the printed roster is there to show what you actually worked.

Printed reports are part of ShiftKit Pro.

Review & referenceKeyboard Shortcuts

On Mac, the eight shortcuts below cover almost everything you do repeatedly. Logging water and coffee works from any screen, so you never have to navigate to record a drink.

Standard macOS shortcuts behave as expected as well — ⌘W closes the window, ⌘Q quits, and the sidebar can be toggled from the View menu.

Review & referenceSync Across Your Devices

ShiftKit is a Universal Purchase and one app across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. Your data moves between them through your own private iCloud database using CloudKit. There is no ShiftKit account and no ShiftKit server: sign into the same Apple Account on each device and the data follows.

Requirements

• The same Apple Account signed in on each device.
• iCloud Drive enabled, and ShiftKit allowed to use iCloud in your iCloud settings.
• A network connection at some point — sync catches up when a device comes back online.

Your settings can travel the same way. See Sync Your Settings below for what is shared and the two switches that stay on the device that set them.

The Watch

The Apple Watch app syncs through its paired iPhone, not directly with your Mac. If your Watch looks out of date, open ShiftKit on the iPhone it is paired with and give it a moment; the Watch will follow. A Watch that has been away from its iPhone shows the last figures it received.

If a device looks stale

1. Confirm all devices are on the same Apple Account.
2. Check iCloud is on for ShiftKit on the device that is behind.
3. Open the app on the device holding the newest data and leave it in the foreground briefly so it can push.
4. Check the network. CloudKit will not sync on a device with no connection.

Review & referenceSync Your Settings

Records have always moved between devices. Settings do now as well. In the Sync across devices section of Settings there is a Sync your settings as well switch, and it is on by default.

With it on, set the backup frequency, the calendar window, the app icon or the app lock once and your other devices follow. Settings travel over the same private iCloud database your shifts already use, so there is nothing extra to sign into and nothing to copy across by hand.

Two settings stay on the device that set them

Two switches deliberately do not travel, for the same practical reason: each device has to be able to decide for itself.

• The iCloud mirroring switch. Whether a device mirrors into iCloud at all is a decision for that device. A shared Mac can stay out of it while your iPhone stays in.
• Whether this device writes to the calendar. Each device keeps its own record of which calendar event belongs to which shift. If two devices wrote the same roster into one calendar, neither would recognise the other's events and you would end up with duplicates.

Everything else in Settings is shared. Turn the switch off if you would rather each device kept its own arrangement; your records go on syncing either way.

Review & referenceiCloud Sync and Dated Backups

These are two separate mechanisms and they answer two different questions. Sync answers “how do I get my data onto a new phone?”. Dated backups answer “how do I get back the shifts I deleted last Tuesday?”

Live iCloud sync

With sync on, the ShiftKit database mirrors into your own private iCloud account. Sign a new iPhone into the same Apple Account, open ShiftKit, and it fills itself in — after a new phone, a lost phone, or a phone that goes in the drink. Mirroring keeps every device identical, which is the point and also the limit: a deletion on one device is a deletion on all of them.

Dated backups

A dated backup is a copy of the database as it stood at one moment, written into ShiftKit's own folder in your iCloud Drive. Mirroring cannot return something you deleted, because the deletion mirrored too. A backup made before the deletion can.

• Choose how often they run: every few hours, twice a day, daily, weekly, or manual only.
• ShiftKit keeps the newest eight, plus one per day for a fortnight.
• A backup you made by hand is never pruned. Delete those yourself when you are done with them.
• Each entry lists when it was made, which device made it, what it holds and how large it is.
• Each backup carries your settings as well as your records — see What a Backup Contains below.

What it needs, and where it stops

• You signed into iCloud with iCloud Drive turned on.
• If iCloud is unavailable, ShiftKit writes a local-only copy instead and says so on screen. A local copy goes wherever the device goes.
• A backup still downloading from iCloud cannot be restored until the download finishes.
• A backup written by a newer version of ShiftKit cannot be restored by an older one. Update the app first.

Review & referenceWhat a Backup Contains

A backup used to be the database on its own. It now holds every record and every setting, so restoring one gives you back the app as you had it set up rather than a bare copy of your entries.

The records

Shifts, roster patterns, shift types, checklists, journal notes, drinks, the targets and figures you set, and your defaults.

The settings

Your preferences are written alongside the database in the same backup: the app icon you chose and the Mac Today board layout, together with the device switches — the backup frequency, whether this device writes to the calendar, how far ahead the calendar is written, and the app lock.

Restoring brings them all back

A restore puts the records and the settings back together. It takes two launches rather than one, because the settings are read at startup; see Restore from a Backup for the sequence.

Review & referenceRestore from a Backup

Restoring replaces the database ShiftKit is using with the contents of a backup you pick. It is the route back after a deletion you regret, an import that went wrong, or a device that never had sync switched on.

1. Open Settings › Backup.
2. Choose the backup you want from the list.
3. Press Restore and confirm.
4. Quit ShiftKit completely.
5. Open it again. The swap happens during launch and a banner tells you what was restored.
6. Quit and open it once more, so every device switch reads its restored value.

Why it takes two launches

The first launch swaps the database in. The settings restored alongside it — the backup frequency, the calendar switch and window, the app icon, the Mac Today board layout and the app lock — are read when the app starts, so they take effect on the launch after that. Nothing is lost in between; the second launch is only what it takes for every switch to pick up its restored value.

The data you have now

The database being replaced is kept aside rather than deleted, so picking the wrong backup is a recoverable mistake.

If a restore will not start

The two usual reasons are a backup that has not finished downloading from iCloud, and a backup written by a newer version of ShiftKit than the one you are running. The message on screen names the specific reason — read it before trying anything else.

With sync on, a restore is mirrored out to your other devices like any other change. If you want the older data on this device only, turn sync off, quit and reopen, then restore.

The app lock is the one setting a restore treats differently: it comes back only on a device that has a face, a finger or a passcode to answer it, so a restore cannot leave you standing in front of a lock this device cannot open.

Review & referenceReset

Four options sit together for the times you want the app put back the way it started. On iPhone and iPad they are in Settings › Reset, the last group on the screen. On Mac they are in ShiftKit › Settings › Reset, the last tab in the window. They range from showing the setup pages again to clearing the lot, so read the one you are about to use before you use it. Each asks you to confirm, and each spells out what it covers underneath.

Show setup on next launch

This puts the setup pages in front of you the next time you open ShiftKit. Nothing is removed. Anything you change while walking through setup writes over the matching setting, and anything you leave alone stays as it is. It applies only to the device you tapped it on.

On Mac there is also Run Setup Again, which walks through setup immediately in the same window rather than waiting for the next launch.

Erase all settings to default

This puts every preference back to the value a new install starts with, and leaves every record alone. It covers your fluid, caffeine and sugar figures; your sleep target; the default shift length, unpaid break, shift kind and time step; the day your week starts on; whether an overnight shift shows on both days; every reminder, which is hydration, pre-shift, checklist, wind-down, caffeine cutoff and the readiness prompt; appearance, accent and any custom shift colours you mixed; casual mode; the currency symbol; the financial year start; and the device switches for backups, syncing across devices, calendar writing, app lock and the chosen app icon.

Your roster, journal, drinks, meals, checklists and shared rosters are untouched. There is no undo inside the app, so the way back is a backup made beforehand.

Erase all data on this device

This clears every shift, roster, note, journal entry, drink, meal, checklist and setting from the device you are holding, and leaves the records in iCloud where your other devices can still read them. Syncing across devices is switched off on this device at the same time, so nothing is pulled straight back down. Turning syncing on again brings everything back. This is the one for handing a device on, or for a clean start on one device.

Erase all data, including iCloud

This clears the same records from the device and removes them from iCloud as well, so they go from every device signed into the same Apple Account, including any you set up later. There is no undo from inside the app. Only a backup brings it back.

After either erase, close ShiftKit and open it again. If you kept the iCloud copy, a line in Settings confirms that the device was cleared and that syncing was switched off. The setup pages appear afterwards, because an erase asks for them.

Review & referenceApp Lock

ShiftKit can ask for Face ID, Touch ID, your device passcode or your Mac password before it opens. It is available on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and it is off until you turn it on. A roster, a journal and a set of daily entries are personal enough that some people would rather they were not one tap away on an unlocked phone left on a bench.

Turning it on

1. Open Settings and turn the app lock switch on. Onboarding also asks about it on first run, so it can be set up before you have entered anything.
2. Answer the prompt your device shows.
3. Choose when the lock asks again: immediately, after one minute, after five minutes or after fifteen minutes.

The delay is the difference between a lock that asks every time you switch apps and one that leaves you alone through a shift. Immediately is the strictest. Fifteen minutes suits logging drinks and check-ins across a long day without answering a prompt each time.

Locking straight away

The same screen has a button that puts the app behind the prompt now, without waiting for the delay to pass: Lock now on iPhone and iPad, Lock Now on Mac. It is the one to use before you hand the phone to someone.

If you cancel the prompt

Cancelling the prompt while turning the lock on leaves the switch off. Nothing is half-set, and a mis-tap on the switch cannot leave you in front of a lock you have no way to answer.

What the lock does, and what it does not

It stands in front of the app on the device it is set on. It does not change how or where your records are stored, and it is not a replacement for a device passcode. If Sync your settings as well is on, the app lock setting travels to your other devices, but it only takes effect on a device with a face, a finger or a passcode to answer it.

The setting is included in a backup, and comes back on a restore under the same condition.

Review & referenceChange the App Icon

ShiftKit ships with twenty alternate app icons. They are cosmetic, and they are there because an app you look at on the worst morning of a swing may as well look the way you want it to.

1. Open Settings › App Icon.
2. Pick an icon from the grid.
3. It applies immediately. On iPhone the Home Screen icon changes; on Apple Watch the app glyph follows the iPhone.
4. With Sync your settings as well on, the icon you pick is used on your other devices too.

Review & referenceAbout this app and In-App Help

About this app and Help are both in the More list: after Settings and before Arrange these cards. Settings also provides a route to both screens.

About this app

This screen shows the current app icon, the app name, the version and build number, the developer, a short summary of what ShiftKit does, and the note that it is not a medical device. It also links to Help, the website, privacy information and terms.

Its Contact Developer button opens a pre-addressed message with the app version and your system already filled in. Add what happened and the steps that led to it before sending.

Help

Help is the searchable in-app manual. It has 109 topics across 24 groups, including Getting started, The Today screen, Roster and shifts, Logging your day, Reading a roster in, Sleep and your body clock, Food and drink, Medicines and supplements, Symptoms and cycle, Movement, Smoking and vaping, Pay, Insights, Fit for work, Units, Backups, Checklists and journal, Printing and sharing, Casual and agency work, Watch widgets and iCloud, and Pro. Each topic opens from an expandable row, and the search field is at the top.

Review & referenceReviews and feedback

ShiftKit is written by one person. Michael Blach is a rescue paramedic in central Queensland, and the app was built in the hours between shifts because nothing on the store understood a swing roster, a night shift, or the strange sleep that follows one.

There is no company behind it, no team and no marketing budget. What it has instead is the people who use it and say something. Reviews that point at a rough edge are the reason the next version is better than the last, and they are also the only way a new person finds the app.

When the app asks

Once you have opened ShiftKit on five separate days, it asks how the app is going. Each device counts its own days, so an iPhone, iPad and Mac ask in their own time. It asks once per release and never again within ninety days of the last time. Once you answer it on a device it does not come back there.

How to leave one any time

1. On iPhone or iPad, open Settings › About this app › Leave a review.
2. On Mac, open the ShiftKit menu › About ShiftKit › Leave a Review.
3. Say whether the app is working for you. If it is, the App Store rating sheet opens. If it is not, a message to Michael opens instead, already addressed and with your version in it.

If something is wrong, the message is worth more than the review, because a review cannot be replied to and a message can.

Review & referenceApple Watch and Widgets

Apple Watch

The Watch app shows your next shift and lets you log water and caffeine from the wrist. Add a complication to show either the readiness figure or the next shift on a watch face.

Widgets

Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets can show the next shift and the day's fluids. They give you a quick view without opening the app.

Review & referenceShiftKit Pro

ShiftKit is useful without paying for it. The free tier is not a trial: unlimited shifts, unlimited readiness and intake logging, the full Today screen, two checklist templates, 30 days of journal, 7 days of analytics, one reminder, and the sleep sound and alarm screen with its wake alarm, its overnight session, the Do Not Disturb hand-off and eight sleep sounds.

What Pro adds

All thirty-one, by the names they carry in the app:

• Trends & Reports
• Unlimited Templates
• Shift-aware Reminders
• Export & Backup
• Printed Reports
• Home & Lock Screen Widgets
• Watch Complications
• Unlimited Journal
• Roster Pattern Builder
• Pay & Earnings
• Energy Drinks & Sugar
• iCloud Backup & Sync
• Apple Health
• Itinerary Import
• Roles & Sites
• Shift Time Library
• Travel Logistics
• Protein Tracking
• Supplement Tracking
• Workouts & Exercise Library
• Nicotine Tracking
• Glucose & Insulin
• Medications
• Cycle Logging
• Perimenopause & Menopause
• Symptom Tracking
• Mood Logging
• Breathing & Meditation
• Circadian Load
• Read Report
• Weather & Conditions

Pricing

Pro is AUD $7.99 per month or AUD $44.99 per year, with the 7-day free trial attached to the annual plan only, or AUD $119.99 once for lifetime access. Those figures are in Australian dollars and are subject to App Store pricing at launch. Buying from outside Australia means the App Store charges you in your own currency, and the paywall in the app always shows the figure that applies to your account.

It is a Universal Purchase, so buying it once covers iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch on the same Apple Account. Purchases and restores are handled entirely by Apple through StoreKit; the developer never sees your payment details.

Review & referenceIf a Purchase Does Not Unlock

Open Settings › ShiftKit Pro › Check purchases again. ShiftKit asks the App Store what the current account holds and prints the answer on screen. You can send that result to the developer with a short description of what is not unlocked.

If it reports no purchase, the usual explanation is that the purchase was made with a different Apple Account. Sign in with the Apple Account used to buy Pro, then check purchases again.

Sandbox testing is for app testing, not a step for people using the released app. For a purchase that will not unlock, start with the Apple Account and Check purchases again.

Review & referenceTroubleshooting

My shifts are not showing on my other device

Check that both devices are signed into the same Apple Account and that iCloud is enabled for ShiftKit. Open the app on the device holding the newest data and leave it open briefly. A device with no network connection will not sync until it has one.

My Apple Watch is showing yesterday's figures

The Watch syncs through its paired iPhone, not directly with a Mac. Open ShiftKit on that iPhone and wait a few seconds.

Shift events are missing from my calendar

Confirm calendar access is granted — System Settings › Privacy & Security › Calendars on Mac, Settings › Privacy & Security › Calendars on iPhone. Then check the sync mode: if it is Manual, nothing is written until you press Sync now. Then check the window, since shifts more than 60 days ahead or 14 days back sit outside the default range.

There are duplicate shift events in my calendar

This usually happens after switching target calendars. Use Settings › Calendar › Remove ShiftKit events to clear everything ShiftKit wrote, then sync again. Your own events are not affected.

My checklists appeared several times over

This happened when several devices each set up their own copy of the built-in checklist templates before iCloud had finished passing the records around, so the library ended up carrying each template once per device. ShiftKit now collapses the copies back into one every time it starts and every time the checklist library is opened. It keeps the oldest copy of each template, brings across any items that only existed on one of the copies, and points completed checklist runs at the template it keeps, so no history is lost. If you still see copies, open the Checklists screen once on each device.

My readiness figure looks wrong

Check that all six inputs were entered for the day. A partial day is calculated from what is present and flagged as partial on Today. Remember that sleep duration and quality carry half the weighting between them, so an omitted sleep entry moves the figure a long way.

My caffeine cut-off looks too early

The cut-off is worked back from the sleep window set for your next shift kind. If that window is wrong — a night-shift sleep window still set to a day-shift time, for instance — correct it in Settings and the cut-off moves with it.

Apple Health is on but the sleep figure is not appearing

Three things to check, in this order. First, that the day has no saved check-in already — ShiftKit only offers a figure for a day you have not filled in, so it never writes over something you entered. Second, that there is a sleep record in the Health app for that night: open Health › Browse › Sleep and look. Third, that ShiftKit is allowed to read it, in the iPhone's Settings › Privacy & Security › Health › ShiftKit. That permission sheet only ever appears once, so if Sleep was turned down the first time, this is the only place to turn it back on.

The Insights figures from Apple Health are blank

Each item is allowed separately, so heart rate variability can be off while sleep is on. Check them in Settings › Privacy & Security › Health › ShiftKit, then tap Read again in ShiftKit's Settings › Apple Health. Body mass and mindful minutes only appear if something is recording them — body mass usually means a connected scale or an entry you make yourself.

A setting I changed on one device has not reached the others

Check that Sync your settings as well is on in the Sync across devices section, and that the other device has been opened with a network connection since the change. Two switches never travel by design: whether a device mirrors into iCloud, and whether it writes to the calendar. Both are set on each device.

My settings did not come back after a restore

A restore takes two launches. The first swaps the database in; the second is when each device switch reads its restored value. If a setting still looks wrong, quit and reopen once more before changing anything by hand.

The app lock did not come back after a restore

The lock is only restored on a device that has Face ID, Touch ID or a passcode set. If the device has none of those, the switch stays off. Set a device passcode, then turn the app lock on again in Settings.

A partner's shifts have stopped appearing

Sharing is one direction per invitation and can be revoked from either side. Check in Settings › Sharing that the share is still active, and ask them to confirm they have not removed you. If the share was removed, a new invitation is needed.

I have lost data

ShiftKit has no server-side backup, because it has no server. If you have Pro and dated backups were running, open Settings › Backup and restore the most recent one from before the loss. Otherwise your data lives on your device and in your own iCloud, and if you deleted the app from every device on the Apple Account the iCloud copy went with it — restoring from an iCloud or Time Machine backup of the device is then the only route.

Still not right?

Email the developer with your device, OS version, and what you were doing. A short description of the sequence that produced the problem is worth more than a screenshot.

Review & referenceThe read report

The read report is one page for a day, a swing, or any dates you pick: the rings and the daily figures from Today, every curve from Insights, and an itemised list of every meal, drink, snack and shift behind them. It is built to be read on screen first, a card at a time, and printed or saved as a PDF only if you want it on paper.

1. Tap the Read report card on Today.
2. Choose the period: today, the last seven days, a fortnight, 30 or 90 days, or your own dates. The report remembers what you last chose.
3. Choose which panels appear, and drag them into the order you want.
4. Read it, or print it, or save it as a PDF.

The panels

The medical sections — medications, the cannabis diary, glucose, symptoms and workouts — only appear when you track them, and each has its own switch, so a report for your manager need not carry the same pages as one for your GP. Your full name and date of birth go on the letterhead only if you allowed it in Profile.

The read report is on iPhone and iPad. The Mac has its own Reports window instead, laid out for a bigger screen. The read report is part of ShiftKit Pro.

Review & referenceArranging the Apple Watch

The watch app is arranged from the iPhone, in Settings › Apple Watch. Changes are passed to the watch by the phone.

Watch pages

Choose which pages the watch shows and the order you swipe through them: Glance, Quick log, Hydration, Caffeine, Protein, Readiness, Sleep, Checklists, Breathing, Shift controls, Fit for work, and, if you track them, Smokes and vapes and Cannabis. A page you hide stays hidden, and a page added in a later version does not appear on a watch you have pruned until you add it.

Glance lines

The Glance page is the first thing you see. Pick the lines it carries and the order they sit in: the shift card, readiness, water, caffeine on board, sugar today, circadian load, protein, last night's sleep, and the last glucose reading.

Watch quick log buttons

Add up to ten buttons and they appear on the Quick log page in that order. Tapping one records the figure you set for it, and anything logged today can be swiped away on the watch. Until you add one, the page offers your water and caffeine buttons instead. Buttons that need Pro say so on the watch rather than doing nothing.

Put the watch layout back to standard returns all three to the arrangement the app started with.

Review & referenceDimming on a bedside charger

A phone left on the bedside table with ShiftKit open, for a sleep sound or the wake alarm, should not light up the room. Settings › Appearance › Dim when face down on a charger takes the screen to its lowest while the app is open, plugged in and turned face down.

Both have to be true, so a phone in your pocket on a charger lead is not affected. Picking it up or unplugging it brings the brightness straight back to where you had it.

Review & referenceWhere the figures come from

Every figure in ShiftKit's libraries comes from somewhere you can check: a product label, a food standards database, a regulator's product information, or a published study. Settings › References lists every source behind the figures, library by library, with a link to each.

Where a figure has been worked out rather than entered — an estimated blood alcohol level, or how much of a medication might still be on board — it comes from a published average applied to a whole population. It is a rough shape, not a measurement of you. Where the sources disagree, the range is shown and the sources are named, rather than quietly averaged.

Where nothing numeric was published, the app says so rather than inventing a figure.

Review & referenceReporting a problem and the error log

Settings › Data and information › Report a problem or ask for a feature asks three short questions and opens Mail with a plain text file attached. The file holds the app version, the device, how many records of each kind you have, and the last of the error log. It holds none of the records themselves.

The error log

Keep an error log writes down what went wrong inside the app, such as a sync that failed or a document that could not be read, so a report can show what happened rather than relying on memory. You can read the log before sending anything, and it stays on the device unless you attach it.

If a roster, payslip or itinerary could not be read, the reading screen offers to send that document in with the subject already set, so it can be looked at and the reader improved.