Overview
On-Call Scheduling runs rotations, takes pages from your monitoring tools, and routes them to whoever's actually up, skipping anyone on approved leave or already over their overtime cap. It's a paid add-on, available on any plan. Email [email protected] to turn it on for your workspace.
Once it's on, three surfaces appear:
- Management > On-Call Scheduling (admin): build rotations, connect monitoring tools, and view the hours report.
- The Team On-Call board (manager): see who's up right now and set manual coverage overrides.
- The on-call widget (employee dashboard): see your own upcoming windows and request a swap.
Setting up a rotation
Go to Management > On-Call Scheduling and click New schedule. A schedule has:
- Timezone: anchors the handoff, so a team spanning regions doesn't hand off at a strange local hour for whoever's next.
- Rotation cadence: daily or weekly.
- Handoff time (and, for a weekly cadence, a handoff day).
- Participants: the ordered list of who's in the rotation. Reorder or remove anyone from this same screen.
Save it, and the rotation hands off automatically from that point on. Editing a schedule later reopens the same form.
The team board
Managers see their reports' schedules on the Team On-Call board, with who's on call right now and the upcoming handoffs for each one. From there, Set override puts a specific person on call for a specific window, covering for one person or standing in regardless of who the rotation would otherwise pick. An active override is flagged on the board so it's clear coverage isn't coming from the plain rotation. Admins and owners can set an override for anyone; a manager can cover the window themselves or hand it to one of their own reports.
Swaps and handoff reminders
Employees see their own upcoming on-call windows right on their dashboard. From there they can ask a teammate on the same schedule to cover a window: the teammate accepts or declines, and an accepted swap becomes a coverage override automatically. Either side can revert an accepted swap before the window starts.
Each employee can also opt in or out of handoff reminders for themselves, right from the same widget. When it's on, TimeLeaf notifies someone ahead of a rotation change so a handoff doesn't catch them off guard.
Routing alerts from your monitoring tools
Under Sources, connect a monitoring tool one of two ways:
- Webhook: click New source to generate a per-source URL and secret. Every inbound request is HMAC-signed with that secret. The secret is shown exactly once, right after creation, so copy it into your monitoring tool immediately: TimeLeaf can't show it to you again.
- Email: one inbound address per workspace, restricted to a sender allowlist you set under the Email intake tab.
Under Rules, click New rule to decide what an incoming payload actually does. A rule is a set of conditions on the payload (equals, contains, or a regex on a field like {{_payload.entity.id}}), evaluated first-match-wins against your ordered list, plus a template for the resulting alert's alias, title, message, and priority. A rule can also close an existing alert instead of opening one, so a monitoring tool's own recovery signal clears the page automatically.
Manual alerts and the alert feed
Not every page comes from a monitoring tool. Under Alerts, Raise alert opens one by hand for a schedule, and every alert (manual or automated) shows up in the same feed, filterable by status. From there, Acknowledge an open alert to stop it from escalating, and Resolve it once it's handled.
Escalation
Set an escalation window on a schedule and TimeLeaf re-pages if nobody acknowledges the alert within it. Escalation stops re-notifying after a bounded number of cycles rather than paging indefinitely; the alert stays open for manual attention.
Who actually gets paged
Most on-call tools only know the rotation. TimeLeaf also knows your leave and overtime data, so when it's time to page, it walks the rotation from the person who'd normally be picked and skips anyone on approved leave or already at their daily or weekly overtime cap, landing on the next eligible person instead. A manager's explicit override is never second-guessed this way; only the automatic rotation pick is filtered. If everyone in the rotation is ineligible, TimeLeaf pages the original pick anyway and flags it: paging someone is better than paging no one.
Notifications
A new alert notifies the on-call person by SMS, email, and in-app notification.
Hours and payroll
Under Hours, the report breaks down two kinds of on-call time per person, over any date range:
- Active hours: approved worked time tagged as on-call work.
- Standby hours: time spent carrying the pager, derived directly from each schedule's rotation windows, no manual entry needed.
Whether standby time is paid, and at what multiplier, is set per overtime policy. Active hours can carry their own premium multiplier on top of whatever they're already paid. Both feed straight into overtime accrual, so on-call time is never a separate reconciliation step.