[Product Updates] October 2026

October was one of our busiest months yet, headlined by a Hero Schedule first: you can now connect an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT directly to your account. Alongside that, we delivered a major expansion of accruals, a new way to see exactly where your emails are landing, and a long run of improvements across bidding, certifications, shift trades, and open shifts. Here’s what shipped and why it matters for your agency.

Connect your AI assistant to Hero Schedule

You can now connect a Claude or ChatGPT agent to Hero Schedule to look up employees and read detailed schedules, including time off and overtime. If you allow it when connecting, your assistant can also approve or reject time-off, overtime, and open-shift requests, so approvers can clear their queue just by asking their assistant. It’s a new, conversational way to stay on top of the day-to-day without logging in and clicking through screens.

A major expansion of accruals

Accruals got a lot of attention this month. Administrators can now run an Accrual Statement report, and employees can open a new My Balances page. Both show earned, used, and balance for each accrual account by pay period, month, or total, including projected amounts for open pay periods, with an Excel export so the numbers are easy to review and share.

Assigning accrual schedules got much simpler, too. You can now set them right on the Create/Edit Employee screen, with an as-of date for existing employees, or update many people at once using the new Assign Schedules button on the Employees list. The employee import and export spreadsheet also gained a column for every grouping and a column per accrual account, so group memberships and accrual schedules can be updated in bulk. Schedules no longer need to be set up separately on the accrual screens.

On the Accrual Balances page, column headers now stay visible as you scroll, and your selected employees stay selected after you add a transaction or assign schedules, so you can keep working with the same group without reselecting.

See exactly where your email is going

A new Message Delivery page gives administrators full visibility into email. You can see every email the system has sent and which addresses are blocked after bounces or spam reports, then unblock addresses and resend missed emails yourself, without contacting support. The employee editor now warns you when an employee’s email address is blocked, so you can catch delivery problems before they cause confusion. We also fixed an error that was preventing password reset emails from being sent.

A better bidding experience

Shift bidding kept improving throughout the month. With the new Allow Preview of Bid setting, bidders can see a bid’s shifts and the bid order, read-only, before pre-bidding or bidding opens, so employees can review the lines and check their place in the order early. Bidders now also see a countdown to when preview, pre-bidding, or bidding opens, and admins can use View User Bidding as soon as employees can see a bid, so everyone knows exactly when a bid goes live.

On phones, each shift now fits on two compact lines with its activity shown above the time, making it far easier to review and rank shifts with less scrolling. In bid results, an employee’s ranked choices now group identical shifts on one line and note which shift they were assigned, so admins can review rankings more easily. And if you’d rather identify bidders by a familiar ID, admins can now show each bidder’s badge number instead of their bid order number on the bidding screens and the schedule export.

Certifications that follow through to the schedule

Building on the certification work from previous months, you can now attach supporting files to a certification, including PDFs or photos taken right from a phone camera. When an employee’s certification is renewed, they’re now automatically invited to existing open shifts in their pools that they newly qualify for, so admins don’t have to re-invite them by hand.

Most importantly, qualifications are now enforced consistently everywhere scheduling happens. During bidding, employees are blocked from taking or ranking a shift that includes an activity they aren’t qualified to work, with a clear explanation of why. Shift trades enforce qualifications as well, and importing or copying schedules now surfaces notifications about qualification issues. In ranked bidding, employees who are no longer qualified for a shift, for example due to an expired certification, are no longer pre-assigned or locked into it; their bids are simply skipped and marked as unqualified.

More flexible shift trades

On the Shift Trade page, employees can now swap overlapping shifts on the same day, such as a swing and a night shift, so more swaps are possible than before. When a shift can’t be traded, it now shows a short reason, so employees understand why a coworker isn’t available instead of being left guessing. We also polished the page itself: the date header stays in place as you scroll, and button color contrast is improved. And supervisors can now change the activity or time of a shift after its trade has been approved without running into a save error.

Open shifts, handled right from the schedule

Open shifts are easier to manage directly from the schedule. Supervisors now see open shift circles for open shifts they weren’t invited to and can assign them to an employee right there, without a trip to the Approvals page. And when you cancel overtime that was filling an open shift, you can now reopen the shift to offer the vacated hours again.

Clearer time cards, rotations, and pay periods

The Time Card report gained a Show work details option that lists the activity, start-stop times, and hours for each part of a shift worked each day, so reviewers can see exactly what was worked without going back to the schedule. The Excel download includes these details too. A new Actual Hours Rounding work rule rounds each worked time segment on the Time Card and Pay Period Report, so Actual Hours line up with your rounded overtime and comp time calculations.

For open shift rotations, the Manage Rotation State dialog now offers a full history for each employee, showing every change to their rotation value, whether a manual edit, an automatic update from an open shift assignment, or a reset, along with who made the change and when. It’s now clear how an employee’s rotation standing was reached. And on the Pay Periods admin page, you can make a one-time change to a single pay period’s length, with the dialog pre-filled with the current schedule and each upcoming period showing its length in days, so irregular pay periods are much easier to set up.

Quality-of-life and reliability

A handful of smaller improvements round out the month. On the Broadcast Message page, you can now choose Send later so announcements go out at the right time without anyone needing to be at their desk. Unexpected errors now show a friendly message with a short error ID you can give to support, instead of technical details. Employee first and last names can be up to 50 characters and wrap neatly on the schedule, and schedule import problems now name the worksheet row and column so the cell is quick to find and correct. We also improved the schedule editor’s save menu, refined the default role memberships for newly created employees, and fixed an issue where some browsers could get stuck on an old version of Hero Schedule. Rounding things out is a batch of fixes across bidding, rotations, and shift patterns to keep everything running smoothly.

Looking ahead

A complete log of our updates is always available on our release notes page. October was a packed month, and we’re grateful to our dev team for everything they shipped. If you have questions about any of these features, or want help getting them set up for your agency, our team is here to help. And if there’s something you’d love to see in Hero Schedule, let us know. Much of our product development starts as customer feedback.