Yes! You can use the auto-scheduler in passes to make sure that the most important ministries are run first, and then others are filled. This is often used when you have important roles, like a Lead Usher who could also be an Usher if needed.
- First, you need to make sure the roles you want to schedule first are their own ministry. In our example, I might have a ministry of Ushers with subdivisions of Lead and main. In this case, I will want to go to the Ministries pane in the desktop software and use the "Breakup into separate ministries..." button on the right to separate these out.
- Now, go to the schedule where you want to schedule your volunteers. Click "Commence Scheduling..." in the upper right.
- Choose the second option, "All empty positions in just particular ministries..."
- In the next box, choose the ministries that you need to be scheduled first. In my example, this would be the head usher ministry. You can also select any other ministries that you want to prioritize or ones that would not affect this ministry (like maybe the Offering Counters do not overlap or also need to be prioritized).
- Click "Commence Scheduling" to schedule only the selected ministries.
Once you are finished and like your schedule, you can go back and run the auto-scheduler for the rest of the schedule either by selecting the second option and choosing the remaining ministries you want to be scheduled, or by choosing "All remaining empty positions in this schedule," as running the auto-scheduler again will never remove a volunteer that has already been placed on the schedule.