Volunteer scheduling is not a spreadsheet problem

A daylight saving change cost me an entire day. That is the day we built CovalFlow.

We built a tool because a daylight saving change cost me an entire day.

I manage the volunteers of an association that runs parties and concerts. The schedule is on me. Four to five hours in a spreadsheet for a single event, matching everyone's availability against the shifts to cover.

That time the event ran over two days. With one hour disappearing in the middle of the night.

And a string of cancellations the day before.

Everything had to be redone. Not fixed, redone: when you move one person, you move six.

That is when we understood something. This is not a spreadsheet problem, it is a constraint problem. Availabilities, shifts, rules that contradict each other. Excel was never designed for that, and no extra column will change it.

It is called CovalFlow.

Volunteers declare their own availability. An optimisation solver generates the schedule in seconds. A cancellation no longer destroys anything: you rerun it, and it is settled.

Two events later: 80 volunteers managed, 68 contracts signed online from a phone, zero paper printed.

The real surprise is not the time saved on scheduling.

It is that I no longer spend my evenings chasing people for a signature.

If you run events and this sounds familiar, write to us.

And if it is another spreadsheet holding your company together, it is the same subject.