We’ve made several improvements to help you collect better volunteer information, find the right people and spend less time managing schedules and hours. Here’s what’s new in Timecounts.
A more flexible way to collect availability
We’ve been listening to how organizations want to collect and use availability. It needs to reflect how your organization actually schedules people while still being easy for volunteers to complete. With our redesigned Availability fields, you decide which days, dates and times volunteers can select.
General Availability lets you create recurring options, such as mornings, afternoons and evenings, or your own custom time periods.
Date Availability lets you create specific dates and times, making it a better fit for events, festivals and other date-based programs.
You can use either field or both, with an optional space for volunteers to add a note about their availability.
This update also lays the foundation for bringing availability directly into scheduling and, in the future, using AI to help you fill shifts and build schedules.
Still using the old Availability field?
We’re retiring the old field on September 30. Set up your new Availability options in Settings, then contact Customer Support so we can move your existing responses.
Important: Please keep the old field in place until we confirm your responses have been moved, unless you no longer need them.
Filter volunteers based on availability
You can now filter the Directory using the availability options you’ve set up. Search by recurring days and times or specific dates and times, combine options using AND/OR, and save searches you plan to use again.
Find hours credited within a timeframe
You can already report on hours credited within a specific timeframe, and we've seen how useful that same flexibility can be when filtering your Directory. The Hours Credited filter now lets you choose a timeframe or specific day, making it easier to find volunteers based on when their hours were contributed, not just how many they've contributed overall.
We've also renamed Time Credited to Hours Credited throughout Timecounts to better match the language organizations use.
See Tags and Skills in the Directory
You can now add Tags and Skills as columns in the Directory, making it easier to see important information about your volunteers at a glance. Choose which columns you want to display and use filters when you need to narrow down your list.
A more useful skills library
We’ve cleaned up and expanded the Skills Library by modernizing some terms, adding new skills and removing options that were better described as personal attributes. This also gives us a stronger foundation for helping volunteers discover opportunities that match their skills.
If your organization was using an option we removed, we moved it to Tags so the information was preserved. You can manage these under Settings → Tags and choose to keep them for filtering, remove them or assign affected volunteers a more appropriate skill.
Updates to Track and Reports
We’ve made a few improvements to Track and Reports so it’s easier to understand where entries came from and work with your data. You’ll now see the Event or Schedule associated with each entry. Hours to Credit is also pinned in Track, so it stays visible as you scroll through other columns.
Smarter reminder emails
We already group confirmation emails when a volunteer signs up for multiple shifts on the same day within the same Event or Schedule. As more volunteers take on multiple shifts in a day, it became clear that reminder emails should work the same way.
Now, volunteers with two or more confirmed shifts on the same day within the same Event or Schedule will receive one reminder email containing those shifts. Reminders from different Events or Schedules will remain separate, so you can continue adding a custom message for each activity.
We’re rolling this update out to all organizations, so you should see it in your account within the next few days.
