My Shift Planner has my shifts on the wrong day

What the start date does

When you pick a pattern, the app asks for a start date, and their own setup guidance is blunt about why: This is important as it tells the app which day to start adding your pattern to the calendar. It should be the date of the first shift of your cycle — not today, not the first of the month, and not the day you happened to set the app up.

Get that one field wrong and every shift after it is out by the same amount, which is why the calendar looks plausible and is useless.

The fix

1. Open the pattern setup from the calendar icon.
2. Set the start date to the first working day of a cycle you can verify — a day you know you worked, ideally one at the start of a block.
3. Check a month you already know: a holiday you worked, or a weekend you had off.

If it is out by a week rather than a day

That is usually the pattern length rather than the start date — a cycle picked from the library that has the right blocks but the wrong number of weeks in it. Their library patterns can be edited after they are chosen, so the number of on days and off days can be corrected without starting again.

Why this keeps happening

Because a general shift calendar cannot check your answer. It has no idea what your department works, so a start date a day out is just a start date.

BlueShifts draws the rotation the same way, and for a growing list of departments the published cycle is on the agency's own page, in the employer's own words, so there is something to check yourself against.

From My Shift Planner's own pattern setup guidance and pattern library, read 6 September 2026.