The first step is to get your hub set up correctly. This involves creating your organisational modules — the building blocks of how Tempo understands and groups your sites, teams, and patients.

Think of modules as the logical units within your organisation. In many cases, these map closely to your practice sites. Each site often has its own staff group (GPs, nurses, receptionists) and a defined patient population who usually attend that site.

However, we use modules rather than sites because people often work across multiple locations or for the whole organisation at once. For example:

👉🏻A GP doing a triage shift may be working from home but serving all patients across the organisation.

👉🏻A receptionist might be based at one site but taking calls for all practices.

👉🏻A nurse may provide a clinic specifically for one patient group but run it from a different site.

So, a module represents the group of patients and the team responsible for them, not necessarily the physical site itself.

Start by thinking at site level — one module per practice site — then consider whether you have smaller, well-defined patient groups (e.g. micro-teams) that would need their own module.

Many organisations also create an “organisation-wide” module for services that cover all patients, such as triage hubs or management sessions.

We set this up for you during onboarding, but you’ll need to let us know the details during the setup process.

This step defines what a standard working day looks like for each staff type, which allows Tempo to calculate rotas, leave, and time off in lieu accurately.

For example, GPs usually work in sessions — a full day often being two sessions. Each session might be 4 hours and 10 minutes, meaning a full day would total 8 hours and 20 minutes. This structure helps Tempo understand how your practice defines a working day and ensures that leave, HR, and rota calculations are consistent across the system.

Once your setup is complete, you can view these settings at any time in Time Off Settings within Tempo.

This information is also used for:

👉🏻Leave management

👉🏻HR calculations

👉🏻Overtime and bank holiday planning

🎥Video Guide🎥

Now you’ll create admin accounts for those who’ll manage your organisation in Tempo.

There are two account types in Tempo:

👉🏻Standard user accounts: for all individual staff members.

👉🏻Admin accounts: for people who manage teams, rotas, HR, finance, or the organisation as a whole.

Common admin roles include practice managers, HR leads, rota managers, finance leads, and sometimes lead partners.

Each admin can have tailored permissions, including whether they can:

👉🏻View pay rates

👉🏻Manage leave or HR

👉🏻Manage rotas

👉🏻View specific teams

Your main admin (often the practice manager or hub lead) can assign these rights in the Hub Admin Permissions area.

🎥Video Guide🎥

Once your admin users are set up, it’s time to add your staff into Tempo.

You can do this in two ways:

👉🏻Bulk import from the National Workforce Reporting Service (NWRS) – This is our preferred approach. Your NWRS submission usually includes most of the details Tempo needs, and we can import this directly.

👉🏻Manual entry – For any remaining users or roles that don’t appear in your NWRS extract.

At this stage, you can also add each user’s basic workplan hours. This defines their normal working pattern — for example, the number of sessions or total hours they work each week. Setting this up early ensures Tempo can accurately manage rotas, leave entitlements, capacity planning, and reporting right from the start.

When first adding users, tick the placeholder account option. This creates accounts without notifying users immediately, allowing you to finish setup before inviting staff to log in.

You can also:

👉🏻Add fictitious users for modelling recruitment or other types of capacity planning.

👉🏻Create generic locum or midwife accounts for rota and room planning.

👉🏻Link with the GP Networks locum system, allowing locums with existing accounts to book into your sessions directly.

Videos:

🎥Managing Workforce Settings🎥

🎥Managing Workplans and Pay Rates🎥

Once all users are added, move on to setting up each person’s workforce settings.

You’ll find this under Workforce → View and Manage. This area holds all detailed staff attributes, including:

👉🏻Employment type (partner, employed, contracted, etc.)

👉🏻Appraiser and line manager

👉🏻Compliance documents

👉🏻Capabilities and additional roles

👉🏻Induction status

👉🏻Contract and leave dates

👉🏻Holiday and sickness entitlements or overrides

🎥Video🎥

If you didn’t add work plan hours during the ‘Adding Staff’ step, this is the point to set them up. If you have already done this, you can use this stage to review and check that everything is correct.

You can add or edit work plan hours in two places:

👉🏻The Add Staff User page, which gives you a quick overview, or

👉🏻Each person’s individual profile in the Manage Workforce screen for more detailed editing.

When setting up work plan hours, make sure to:

👉🏻 Define how many hours they work and on which days
👉🏻 Add any rotational or alternating patterns (for example, Week A/Week B schedules)

Setting this up accurately gives Tempo a clear understanding of your organisation’s real capacity.

Once complete, you’ll be able to see this visually in the Annual Planner, which provides an overview of:

👉🏻 Each person’s work plan
👉🏻 Capacity across modules and teams

Teams in Tempo are groupings of staff. You can find them under Workforce → Teams.

Tempo comes with a set of default, role-based teams for the key staff types, including:

👉🏻GPs

👉🏻Registrars

👉🏻Nurses

👉🏻Receptionists and Admin

👉🏻HCAs

👉🏻Managers

👉🏻Paramedics

👉🏻Pharmacists

👉🏻Other healthcare professionals

You can also create bespoke teams to reflect the way your organisation actually works.

When to Create Custom Teams

You may want to create additional teams when:

👉🏻You have new or specialist roles not covered in the default list (e.g. Care Coordinators, Social Prescribers).

👉🏻You want to group staff whose leave is inter-dependent — for example, paramedics and GPs who cover the same service and need joint leave planning.

👉🏻You need to assign line management responsibility for a mixed team (e.g. a team lead managing staff across several roles).

👉🏻You want to sub-divide existing role types, such as having “GPs – Module A” and “GPs – Module B”.

Each custom team helps you organise your workforce, plan leave, and manage rotas more effectively.

Ensure that line managers are correctly assigned both within individual users’ workforce settings and as team managers in the team setup.

🎥Video🎥

Week types allow you to define different service patterns across the year — for example, if your organisation runs reduced services at Christmas or operates differently during school holidays.

By default, you’ll have a standard week type. You can create additional week types for variations such as:

👉🏻Christmas or bank holiday weeks

👉🏻Summer service patterns

👉🏻Half-term or winter pressures

This flexibility allows you to apply different operational designs automatically throughout the year.

🎥Video🎥

Within the Teams setup, you can also define team-based leave rules. These rules help you regulate how many staff within a team can be off at any one time.

Team-based leave rules allow you to:

👉🏻 Set a limit based on a percentage of total hours for that team
👉🏻 Apply different rules depending on week types (for example, a reduced staffing allowance during peak periods)
👉🏻 Create simple, predictable rules that line managers can rely on

Once a leave rule is in place, Tempo uses it to guide line managers during approval decisions.

How Team Leave Rules Are Used When Approving Leave

When a line manager reviews a leave request, they can see how the request sits against the leave rule for that team. This is done in the Time Off screen when viewing the leave calendar.

To view team-based leave capacity:

👉🏻 Go to Time Off
👉🏻 Switch the dropdown to Team Capacity
👉🏻 Select the team you want to review

In this view, Tempo displays:

👉🏻 A blue line showing the total amount of leave the rule allows for that team
👉🏻 The current leave taken or approved for that period
👉🏻 Any new leave requests filling up towards the limit

This makes it easy for a manager to ask:

👉🏻 If I approve this request, will we still be within the allowed leave for this team?
👉🏻 Are we close to or exceeding the safe level we’ve set?

The visual dials and indicators in the calendar help line managers make clear, consistent decisions based on the rule that has been set for that team.

Role of Team Leave Rules vs Organisational Template-Based Leave Rules

Team-based leave rules are a good starting point and work well early in onboarding.

Later, many organisations move towards Organisational Template–based leave rules (covered elsewhere in your onboarding document), which focus on minimum service levels rather than headcount.

Team leave rules are still useful for:

👉🏻 Administrative teams
👉🏻 Non-clinical groups
👉🏻 Situations where team capacity is more relevant than service design

🎥Video🎥

Next, review your time-off settings to make sure all your organisational entitlements and rules are correct.

You can find this under Workforce → Time Off and Overtime → Time Off Settings.

Here you can configure default rules for:

👉🏻Annual leave entitlements (by role type)

👉🏻Bank holiday calculations

👉🏻Study and appraisal leave

👉🏻Holiday rollover

👉🏻Sick pay allowances and pay rates

👉🏻Maternity and paternity reimbursements

👉🏻Organisational leave rules and exceptions

🎥Video🎥

For any staff have:

👉🏻Bespoke entitlements

👉🏻Different start dates for leave and sickness to the organisational default

👉🏻Any in-year adjustments that you want to make to the amount of leave etc

You can edit these individually by the click the ‘Edit Attributes’ button in the ‘Manage Workforce screen’.

Once your organisation-wide settings are ready, you can:

👉🏻Import existing leave data from your previous system, or

👉🏻Manually add current and future leave already approved or booked.

Make sure your annual leave period is correct — the default is April to March, but this can be customised organisation-wide or per individual.

You can also store appraisals and supporting documentation within the HR area.

Once these are in place, your HR foundation is complete — ready for managing leave, sickness, bank holidays, and other HR processes in one place.

You have two options for how to manage staff interaction at this stage:

👉🏻 Option 1 – Management-led:
Continue managing leave requests manually while your team adds them into Tempo on behalf of staff. This allows you to test the system before inviting users.

👉🏻 Option 2 – Staff onboarding:
Invite all staff to log in to their own accounts. They’ll be able to:

👍🏻View their entitlements and pay rates

👍🏻Request leave

👍🏻Record sickness and overtime

👍🏻View approvals from their line manager

We’ve created 🎥Videos🎥 you can share with your staff showing how to navigate Tempo, request leave, and manage absences.

Begin by creating all of your rooms across every site. Each room should include its capabilities — for example:

👉🏻Consultation room

👉🏻Treatment room (for dressings, minor surgery, or coils)

👉🏻Hot desk

👉🏻Counselling room

👉🏻Phlebotomy room

Adding these capabilities helps Tempo identify which rooms can host which types of sessions. This means that when you later allocate clinics or staff sessions, you’ll be able to see instantly which spaces are suitable.

Next, check each person’s individual workforce settings. For each team member, record:

👉🏻Their preferred module (usually aligned with their main site or team)

👉🏻Their preferred location

👉🏻Their preferred room

This ensures Tempo automatically assigns people to the right places when building templates and rotas. You can manage this under Manage Workforce Settings.

🎥Video🎥

Session types define what kind of work people do in their sessions. Examples include:

👉🏻GP: Standard session, Duty session, Triage, Minor Ops, Coil Clinic, Nursing Home visit

👉🏻Nurse: Chronic disease management, Baby immunisations, Dressings

👉🏻HCA: Phlebotomy, ECG, Blood pressure clinics

Repeat this setup for each workforce group you plan to rota. These session types form the foundation for later rota design and reporting.

Specialisms capture particular skills or qualifications that certain staff have — for instance, GPs who perform minor ops or joint injections.

Adding these under Staff Specialisms means Tempo can automatically suggest the right people for specific clinics, ensuring that only those with the correct skills are assigned.

This step is optional, but it’s particularly useful if your service includes specialist clinics or advanced practice roles.

🎥Video🎥

In the Workforce Management screen in user’s profile you can identify who can supervise other staff members and who needs supervision. For example:

👉🏻 GP trainers supervising registrars
👉🏻 Senior clinicians supervising paramedics, ANPs, or pharmacists

You can also set each person’s usual supervisor and the default amount of supervision time they require. This ensures Tempo fully understands your supervision model and can build it into rota design accurately.

🎥Creating and Managing User Templates🎥

🎥Checking for Incomplete User Templates🎥

Once the foundation is in place, build User Templates. These describe what each person usually does across the week — effectively their default rota.

For each team member, record what they typically do in each morning and afternoon. For example:

👉🏻Monday AM: Standard GP session

👉🏻Monday PM: Duty session

👉🏻Wednesday PM: Admin or management time

You can also create different week types (e.g. Week A / Week B) to reflect alternating schedules.

Once all user templates for a team (such as all GPs) are built, Tempo brings them together to form what many practices would recognise as their master rota spreadsheet. You can view this combined picture in the Annual Planner, which shows who is usually working, when, and in what capacity.

Tips:
💡When you’re first getting started, it’s best to include all sessions that a person would usually do, even if someone else occasionally covers them. For example, if a GP is normally responsible for a duty or triage session on a given day, include that in their template. This keeps the rota accurate by default and gives a clearer picture of your baseline service model.

💡 When you create your user templates, you have two options for how closely they align with each person’s work plan hours. If you prefer to keep things simple at the start, it is absolutely fine for the template session lengths to reflect the rota pattern rather than the full contracted hours. If the clinical time in the rota is shorter than the work plan hours, this will create some overtime or undertime, but you can switch on the setting to ignore rota-based overtime across the whole hub while you get up and running. As you progress with Tempo, aligning your user templates with the work plan session lengths becomes increasingly valuable. It gives you much clearer, automated overtime calculations and makes it easy to see whether each person’s rota matches their contracted hours — particularly important for roles such as GPs working to the British Medical Association contract or other defined session lengths. Alignment is optional early on, but it unlocks greater accuracy and insight as your use of Tempo matures.

🎥Video🎥

Once your templates are ready, you can start Session-based Rota Management.

We recommend beginning with session-based rotaing. This means defining who is doing which session each morning and afternoon — for example, standard GP sessions, duty, triage, minor ops, or clinic work.

Session-based rotaing is a powerful first step because it allows you to:

👉🏻 Clearly see which sessions are being delivered, and how many of each type
👉🏻 Understand how many hours and sessions each person is working across the week
👉🏻 Build in supervision requirements, ensuring trainees and supervised roles are safely supported
👉🏻 Check that your service design is being achieved — e.g. duty and triage cover every day
👉🏻 Gain organisation-wide visibility of staffing and capacity before adding appointment-level detail

Once staff have received their logins, session-based rotaing also unlocks several benefits for your users:

👉🏻 Each person can clearly see which session they are doing on any given day,
👉🏻 They can see whether they are supervising someone,
👉🏻 They can view their start and finish times for each session, and
👉🏻 You can advertise open shifts across your workforce, allowing staff to assign themselves into available sessions when appropriate.

Starting here gives your team confidence using Tempo’s rota tools, while providing meaningful oversight of capacity and service delivery. You can then build on this foundation by adding appointment-level detail when you’re ready.

🎥Rota Management Concepts with User and Organisational Templates🎥

🎥Organisational Template Based Rotas🎥

An optional next step in your rota setup is to start working with Organisational Templates. These sit above individual user templates and allow you to design the service you want to provide, rather than the rota of each individual person. If you choose to explore them at this stage, they open up a powerful set of planning tools for setting minimum service levels, shaping leave rules, and understanding whether your workforce can deliver the service model you intend.

They work in a similar way to user templates, but instead of saying who is working, they describe what sessions need to exist to deliver your service safely and effectively. For example:

👉🏻Duty GP AM and PM at each site

👉🏻Triage AM and PM

👉🏻A minimum number of standard GP sessions

👉🏻Nursing or HCA clinics

👉🏻Enhanced access or home visiting provision

Once designed, an Organisational Template becomes a very powerful tool because it can be used in multiple ways:

👍🏻Minimum Service Levels
You can define the minimum number and type of sessions required each day. Tempo can then use this to set template-based leave rules, ensuring enough staff remain in to maintain your core service.

👍🏻Capacity Planning
Organisational Templates feed directly into capacity planning, allowing you to test whether your workforce can deliver the service design you want — or whether additional roles or redesigns are needed.

👍🏻Service Planning and Redesign
You can build different service models (e.g. winter pressure model, enhanced access model, or a lighter summer model) and compare them.

👍🏻Check Coverage in the Annual Planner
In the Annual Planner, you can compare your actual staffed rota — taking into account leave, sickness and vacancies — against the Organisational Template. This lets you instantly see whether you have enough people to cover your minimum service on any given day.

👍🏻Optional Use in Rota Creation
You can choose whether or not to build your live rotas directly from Organisational Templates. Some organisations use them purely for service standards and planning, while others use them as the starting point for rota creation.

💪🏻Organisational Templates💪🏻are one of the most powerful features in Tempo. They give you a clear, structured way to define the service you want to deliver and make sure your staffing model supports it — both now and in the future.

If you want Tempo to reflect meetings that affect availability — such as clinical meetings, tutorials, or practice-wide meetings — you can record these so that they appear in your rota and prevent double-booking.

For meetings that happen every week or every other week, it’s best to build them directly into users’ User Templates. To do this:

👉🏻Create a session type for the meeting (e.g. GP Clinical Meeting, MDT, Tutorial).

👉🏻Add this session into the User Template of everyone who attends, just as you would add a standard GP or nurse session.

👉🏻If the meeting only fills part of the morning or afternoon, follow it with a shortened session (e.g. a shortened Standard GP Session) so that the remainder of the time is captured correctly.

👉🏻If the meeting occurs every other week, use the Alt-Week functionality within the User Template to reflect that alternating pattern.

For meetings that occur monthly or less regularly than every two weeks, it’s more appropriate to use the Meetings functionality. This allows you to add one-off or infrequent meetings without changing someone’s core template.

Using the right method helps keep your rota accurate, prevents scheduling conflicts, and ensures each person’s availability reflects the reality of your organisation’s working patterns.

Once you’ve built your Organisational Templates — the service designs that define the minimum sessions you want to provide each day — you can start using them to guide how leave is managed. This moves your organisation away from the older, simplified approach of team-based leave rules (e.g. “you can have two GPs off at once”) and towards a model that protects your minimum level of service.

Instead of asking “how many people can we allow off?”, you begin asking:
“How many people do we need in to deliver our organisational template?”

For example, your template might specify that each day must include:

👉🏻A Duty GP (AM and PM)

👉🏻A Triage GP (AM and PM)

👉🏻A minimum number of Standard GP sessions

👉🏻Nursing and HCA cover

By switching on Organisational Template–based leave rules, Tempo uses this minimum service model as the basis for deciding whether further leave can be approved. Leave is only permitted if the core service design remains intact.

This provides a far more resilient and realistic way of managing leave across your organisation.

Line managers can then use the Annual Planner to support day-to-day decisions. In the Planner, they can view:

👉🏻The Organisational Template for each day

👉🏻The staff actually available, taking account of leave, sickness, vacancies and supervision requirements

👉🏻The dials showing whether the minimum service level is covered or at risk

Managers can use these visual indicators to decide whether approving a leave request would compromise the service.
This makes leave decisions clearer, fairer and directly linked to the service you need to deliver.

Organisational Template–based leave rules therefore shift your organisation from headcount-driven leave management to true service-driven leave management, ensuring that your minimum level of care is always protected.

Once you have session-level data in place, the Appointment and Spending Report gives you a powerful way to analyse your service delivery over longer time periods. It allows you to see:

👉🏻 The number and types of sessions delivered
👉🏻 The service mix across weeks, months, quarters or the full year
👉🏻 How many hours of specific services have been provided — particularly useful for understanding activity in areas such as home visiting, duty, triage, or co-op work over the course of the year

This provides real visibility into how your workforce effort translates into actual service provision.

When you’ve added salary and pay details into staff records, the same report enables detailed cost analysis, helping you understand:

👉🏻 The cost of delivering different services
👉🏻 How this compares with your target activity levels
👉🏻 Whether you are within budget over a given period

The report becomes even more powerful once you move to appointment-level rotaing. At that point, you can track:

👉🏻 The number of appointments delivered within each session type
👉🏻 Capacity at the level of individual appointment volumes
👉🏻 Service-level performance against planned capacity or targets

You can then compare all of this with demand data from your clinical system or from our Tempo Data Dashboard, giving you end-to-end insight from workforce planning to real demand and delivery.

The Appointment and Spending Report is therefore a key tool for operational leads, clinical directors and managers to understand productivity, efficiency, and service sustainability across time.

Once your rota system is running smoothly, you can begin Capacity Planning.

Use Tempo to model different service designs and test scenarios:

👉🏻What happens if we add a registrar or lose a GP?

👉🏻Should we replace a GP with an ANP?

👉🏻How would costs change if we adjust the number of triage sessions?

You can build, compare, and cost these scenarios directly in Tempo to guide future workforce planning.

🎥Video🎥

Appointment or Slot Types are the individual appointment types within your clinical system — covering both patient-facing appointments and non-clinical elements such as admin time, breaks, paperwork and other blocks of work.

When you first get started, we can import these directly from your clinical system.

After the import, your first task is to review them:

👉🏻 Check that the default appointment lengths have come through correctly
👉🏻 Review the National Slot Type Mapping
👉🏻 Adjust colours if you want them to match your clinical system (optional, but helps with clarity)

Once your slot types are correct, you have a solid foundation for building your session templates.

From here, you can also add any additional appointment types that you need.

🎥Video🎥

Session Templates define the core structure of a session, including:

👉🏻 The number and order of appointments
👉🏻 How many of each slot type
👉🏻 Where breaks, admin or paperwork time sit
👉🏻 Where catch-ups or home-visit blocks fall

This is different from Session Types:
👉🏻Session Types describe what the session is (e.g. Standard GP, Duty, Triage).
👉🏻Session Templates describe how the session is structured (the appointment pattern inside it).

In this phase of onboarding, the aim is to build the core templates that reflect how you currently work.

Recreating Your Current Rota Patterns

To begin appointment-based rotaing, we recommend starting by replicating the appointment designs you already use across your organisation.

Using the Slot Types you’ve reviewed/imported, you can build simple Session Templates that reflect:

👉🏻 The typical order of appointments in a morning or afternoon
👉🏻 Breaks or catch-ups
👉🏻 Admin or paperwork time
👉🏻 Home-visit blocks
👉🏻 End-of-session wrap-up time

This gives you:

👉🏻 A familiar, accurate baseline
👉🏻 A clear representation of how your service currently operates
👉🏻 A straightforward starting point that staff immediately recognise

These basic templates form the foundation for all later appointment-based rotaing and reporting.

Advanced Option – Day Session Templates (When You’re Ready)

When you are ready to standardise and automate more of your session design, you can upgrade to Day Session Templates.

A Day Session Template is a full-day appointment design that Tempo automatically adjusts depending on:

👉🏻 The start time of the session
👉🏻 The end time of the session
👉🏻 The session length

Instead of creating multiple templates for different timings, you create one default design, and Tempo automatically:

👉🏻 Stretches or compresses the appointment pattern
👉🏻 Places breaks and admin at appropriate points
👉🏻 Maintains overall structure and flow

This becomes extremely useful when you want:

👉🏻 More consistency across your clinicians
👉🏻 Fewer templates to maintain
👉🏻 Automated rota generation
👉🏻 A design that adapts automatically to different scenarios

You don’t need Day Session Templates at the start — they become powerful once your organisation is ready for more standardisation or automation.

Once your core Session Templates are in place, you can enhance them with additional logic.

This logic allows your templates to adapt automatically to real-world scenarios such as supervision, meetings, and (coming soon) short periods of leave or target requirements.

Tempo’s logic tools make your session designs more flexible, more accurate, and easier to maintain over time.

Supervision Logic

Supervision logic allows Session Templates to automatically adjust when a clinician is supervising another member of staff.

Tempo can:

👉🏻 Remove the appropriate number of appointments based on the level of supervision required
👉🏻 Reduce capacity safely so the session accurately reflects protected supervision time

At present, supervision logic removes appointments only (it does not yet replace them with admin or tutorial time).

Meeting Logic

If meetings occur within a session — for example MDTs, clinical huddles, tutorials or teaching sessions — meeting logic allows the template to adjust automatically.

Tempo can:

👉🏻 Knock out the correct amount of time for the meeting
👉🏻 Automatically adjust the remaining appointment pattern
👉🏻 Prevent individuals being double-booked during required meeting time

This keeps your rota accurate and reflects real availability during the session.

Short Leave / In-Session Absence (Coming Soon)

A new feature coming soon will allow Session Templates to automatically adjust when someone has a short period of leave during a session — for example:

👉🏻 A one-hour hospital appointment
👉🏻 Protected time required mid-session
👉🏻 An unavoidable short absence that does not justify removing the whole session

The template will automatically remove the correct time from the session and reshape the appointment pattern accordingly.

Target-Based Adjustments (Coming Soon)

Another upcoming feature will allow Session Templates to vary automatically based on specific service targets, such as:

👉🏻 % book-on-the-day appointments
👉🏻 % book-in-advance appointments
👉🏻 Appointment mix targets for particular services
👉🏻 Service-level requirements linked to access or organisational goals

This will allow practices to build dynamic session designs that respond intelligently to real performance targets.

Why This Matters

Adding logic to your Session Templates means:

👉🏻 Fewer templates to maintain
👉🏻 Less manual editing
👉🏻 Safer and more accurate representation of supervision
👉🏻 Correct handling of meeting time
👉🏻 A pathway to even more automation once future features go live
👉🏻 Better insight and reporting in the Appointment & Spending Report

Logic transforms Session Templates from static appointment patterns into intelligent, adaptable session designs that respond to real-life needs.

🎥Video🎥

As your organisation develops its appointment designs, you’ll naturally want to refine certain templates or create variations for specific clinicians or services. Tempo gives you two clear ways to do this: creating a new version or creating a new template. Each has a different purpose, and using them correctly keeps your rota clean, consistent and easy to maintain.

Updating an Existing Template – Use New Version

If you want to improve or update an existing Session Template while keeping the same overall design, use the New Version feature.

👉🏻 This creates a new version of the template
👉🏻 All places where the template is used (User Templates, Organisational Templates and rotas) are automatically updated
👉🏻 You avoid duplication and keep designs consistent across your organisation

This is the best option when you are refining a template rather than fundamentally changing it.

Examples:

👉🏻 Updating the catch-up timing
👉🏻 Adjusting the number of appointments
👉🏻 Tweaking break placement
👉🏻 Making minor improvements after user feedback

Creating a Different Template – Use Duplicate or Create New

If you need a session design that is fundamentally different, you should create a new template.

You can do this by:

👉🏻 Duplicating an existing template (useful if the new design is similar)
👉🏻 Creating a new template from scratch (useful for completely different work patterns)

This is the right approach when the appointment pattern itself is different — for example:

👉🏻 A GP who works with a different appointment rhythm
👉🏻 A reduced-capacity clinic
👉🏻 A home-visiting session
👉🏻 A specialist clinic with a unique structure
👉🏻 A nurse or paramedic session that follows a different pattern

Why Proper Versioning Matters

Good version control ensures:

👉🏻 Easier to apply to all places that session template is already used
👉🏻 Fewer errors in rotaing
👉🏻 Easier maintenance over time
👉🏻 A clear understanding of which templates are current
👉🏻 Accurate reporting in the Appointment & Spending Report

Using New Version for refinements and New Template/Duplicate for genuinely different designs gives you a clean and predictable template library.

🎥Video🎥

Once your Session Templates are built, the next step is to apply them so they automatically flow into your rota. Tempo allows you to attach appointment designs at two levels:

👉🏻 User Templates – the default working pattern for each individual
👉🏻 Organisational Templates – the service-level design for your organisation

Applying Session Templates at these levels ensures your appointment patterns appear automatically when rotaing, without needing to rebuild them each time.

Applying Session Templates to User Templates

User Templates define what each person usually does on each day of the week.
By attaching Session Templates here, you ensure that:

👉🏻 The correct appointment structure pulls through automatically when rotaing
Each person’s default rota includes the right number and mix of appointments
👉🏻 Supervision logic and meeting logic (if used) apply correctly
👉🏻 Appointment-level detail stays consistent and accurate across your team

This is the most common way to use Session Templates day-to-day, and it ensures rotas reflect the individual clinician’s typical working pattern.

Applying Session Templates to Organisational Templates

Organisational Templates describe the service design you want to provide — not the rota of each individual.
By attaching Session Templates to your Organisational Templates, you add:

👉🏻 Appointment-level detail to your minimum service model
👉🏻 Clear expectations of appointment capacity
👉🏻 More accurate leave-rule design (when using organisational-template-based leave rules)
👉🏻 Stronger insights for service planning and capacity modelling

This allows you to:

👉🏻 Compare your planned service to actual capacity in the Annual Planner
👉🏻 Understand how appointment capacity varies when staff are on leave, sick or supervising
👉🏻 Build much more accurate appointment-level projections for the Appointment & Spending Report

Applying Session Templates to Organisational Templates is optional at first, but becomes extremely powerful as you design and standardise your services.

Once your Session Templates are attached to User Templates and/or Organisational Templates, they will automatically populate your rota with the correct appointment design. This is where your setup moves from planning to real operational use.

Tempo is designed to balance automation with flexibility, so you always have a reliable default while still being able to adjust sessions day-by-day when needed.

What Happens Automatically

When you rota someone into a session that has a Session Template applied, Tempo will automatically:

👉🏻 Populate the appointment pattern for that session
👉🏻 Apply supervision logic (if relevant)
👉🏻 Apply meeting logic (if relevant)
👉🏻 Adjust the pattern based on the session length or start/end times (especially when using Day Session Templates)

This means your rota always starts from an accurate, consistent baseline without any manual building.

Making On-the-Day Adjustments

Even with automation, real life often requires adjustments. Tempo allows you to make local, on-the-day changes without altering the underlying template.

You can adjust:

👉🏻 The number of appointments
👉🏻 The order of appointments
👉🏻 Appointment lengths
👉🏻 Placement of catch-ups, breaks, or admin
👉🏻 Individual slots within a single session

These changes affect only the specific session you are editing, not the underlying template.

This keeps rotas grounded in reality while preserving the integrity of your designed system.

🎥Video🎥

Tempo can export your full rota directly into SystmOne so that the appointment books in S1 match the rota you have built in Tempo.

What the Export Sends

👉🏻 The appointment pattern for each session
👉🏻 Appointment lengths and timings
👉🏻 The number and order of appointments
👉🏻 Session start and end times
👉🏻 Any supervision or meeting adjustments already applied

Important Pre-Checks Before Exporting

Before exporting, make sure: The two-letter appointment code matches exactly between Tempo and SystmOne:

👉🏻If Slot Types were imported from S1, these will already match

👉🏻If you create any new Slot Types in Tempo, you must also create them in S1 before exporting

If the codes don't match, SystmOne will not accept those appointment types.

Once you start rotaing with appointment-level detail, the Appointment & Spending Report becomes a much more powerful tool. It gives you insight into the actual delivery of services over time and helps you understand both activity and cost.

What You Can Analyse

With appointment-level data, you can track:

👉🏻 The exact number of appointments delivered
👉🏻 Book-on-the-day vs book-in-advance activity
👉🏻 The number and mix of appointments within each session type
👉🏻 Service-level activity across weeks, months or the full year
👉🏻 Appointment delivery compared to your planned Session Templates or Organisational Templates

This gives you a clear view of what your workforce is delivering across any time period.

Cost and Workforce Analysis

If you have added salary and pay data to your users, the report can also show:

👉🏻 Cost per appointment
👉🏻 Cost of delivering specific session types or service lines
👉🏻 Total workforce cost across selected time periods
👉🏻 Comparison to budgets or planned activity

This helps you understand the financial side of service delivery, not just the activity.

Comparing Capacity and Demand

You can compare Tempo’s appointment-level activity data with demand data from:

👉🏻 Your clinical system
👉🏻 The Tempo Data Dashboard

This allows you to see:

👉🏻 Whether your capacity meets demand
👉🏻 Where gaps occur
👉🏻 Which services are delivering above or below expected levels

Why This Matters

The Appointment & Spending Report connects:

👉🏻 Planned capacity
👉🏻 Delivered appointments
👉🏻 Workforce effort
👉🏻 Costs
👉🏻 Patient demand

This is a complete view of how your appointment book is performing and is essential for service planning, PCN discussions, and operational decision-making.