If you're a scheduler, the Calendar is where your day happens. It's the single place you can see every team member's week, move bookings around, spot gaps, and react when something changes.
This guide walks through the layout, how to navigate, and the two moves that make Xota fast to work in: drag-and-drop and create-from-cell.
🎥 Watch the walkthrough:
Opening the Calendar
From the sidebar, click Schedule. You land on the Calendar view by default.
Reading the week
The layout is a grid:
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Team members run down the left. Under each name you'll see the number of shifts and total hours for the week — a quick sanity check on workload.
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Days of the week run across the top. Today is highlighted.
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Weekends are greyed out by default but you can still book into them.
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The Unassigned row at the top is a useful parking spot for work that's been planned but not yet allocated to a person. Anything here needs picking up.
Every coloured block inside the grid is a booking. The colour tells you the status at a glance — Active, Complete, Signed off.
Navigating between weeks
Up top you'll find:
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Previous / Next arrows — move one week at a time.
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Current Week button — jumps you straight back to the week containing today, wherever you've wandered to.
Move forward to plan ahead, back to review what just happened.
Filtering the view
Top-right is the Filter dropdown. You can narrow the calendar down to just what you're focused on — by team, by client, by status, or by project. Handy when you run multiple crews or want to check one client's workload without the noise of the rest.
Filters have their own dedicated guide, and you can save filters for one-click switching between views.
Drag-and-drop — the killer feature
Any booking on the calendar can be dragged to a different day, a different team member, or both in the same move.
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Grab a booking.
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Drop it on the destination cell.
That's it. No forms, no confirmations. Xota updates the booking, everyone's totals at the top of their row adjust, and the operative's phone picks up the change next time it syncs.
This is the single biggest time-saver in Xota. Real-world schedules change constantly — someone calls in sick, a job slips, the client moves a date — and being able to resolve it with one drag instead of re-opening a form is the difference between ten minutes of admin and ten seconds.
Creating a booking from an empty cell
Hovering over any empty cell reveals an Add button. Click it and Xota asks what kind of thing you want to add — a booking, travel time, a holiday, or a sick day.
Pick Booking and you drop straight into the booking form with the date and team member pre-filled from the cell you clicked. Fill in the rest (project, name, duration), hit Create, and the card lands on the schedule immediately.
Same modal as the one you see from inside a project — just a different entry point.
Tips
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Zoom in on one person's week — use the filter to pick just their team or select them as a team member filter.
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Spot gaps at a glance — the blue "cell is empty" dashed outline makes it obvious where you've got unassigned time.
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The Unassigned row is your inbox — park work there when you know it needs doing but haven't decided who's doing it.
What's next
That's Getting Started done — you've set up your account, added a client, created a project, scheduled work, and learned your way around the Calendar.
From here, the Feature Deep Dives track covers individual areas in more detail — task templates, absences, schedule filters, the operative's mobile view, the client portal, and more. Browse them in any order based on what your team actually uses.