Generating and scheduling matches

Fixture generation reads data you must have entered first. Check all of this before you press anything:

• Classes exist and have a match length. The match length is the whole slot a match occupies, including the break before the next one — if play is 2 x 15 minutes but matches start every 40 minutes, the length is 40. Classes are set up on the class pages; see Classes and competition format.
• Teams are registered and in the right class. Teams still on the waiting list, or in the wrong class, will be scheduled wrongly. Fix registrations before you schedule, not after.
• Teams are sorted into groups. Only teams that belong to a group can be scheduled.
• You know how many courts you can use and roughly which hall or arena they are in.
• You know the playing dates. Match days can be created from the match list, and Profixio will also create or widen a match day automatically to cover matches that already exist.

When to start. Base data can be entered well in advance: the match length per class, the courts, and which classes may use which courts. Do not start on the match programme itself until the registration deadline has passed and all teams are in. Once the deadline has passed, set the parameters for courts, classes and so on; this is an important job that has to be done correctly if you are to get a good schedule.

One switch controls the web scheduling tools. In tournament settings, Basic settings, the toggle Use simplified scheduling decides whether the web scheduling tools appear at all. With it off, the menu item Forming - Simplified is hidden and the Scheduling and Make matches buttons on the match list do not show. The Calculation planning page stays available either way. Turn the toggle on for any tournament you intend to schedule in the browser.

A planning tip that costs nothing: multiply matches by match length and divide by the number of courts to get the hours you need. Odd group sizes are what wreck compact schedules — with an odd number of teams in a group and an odd number of matches per team, one team always ends up with one match more than the rest, and two teams always end up with a long gap. If you have a waiting list, use it to get even group sizes.

Scheduling rights are tournament-scoped permissions, granted per user on the tournament's roles page.

Two things surprise people regularly:

• There are two match lists, and they look almost identical. Match Schedule → Matches Graphics is the scheduling one and carries the scheduling buttons. Referee → Referee Assignment is the same table and chart in referee mode, with referee tools instead. If the scheduling buttons are missing, check which of the two pages you opened before you suspect a permission problem.
• Match-scheduling rights are separate from tournament-admin rights. A tournament admin can move matches but may still find Create day missing from the match-days window, because that specific action asks for the match-scheduling permission.

The match list is where a schedule is built and repaired. Reach it from the tournament admin menu, Match Schedule → Matches Graphics, at /{tournament}/matches. It has two halves.

The graphical scheduler at the top. Days run horizontally, courts vertically, and every match is a box. You can drag a box to a new time and court, select several boxes and drag them together, and use the buttons above the chart:

• Save, Undo and Discard, which save your moves, step back one move, or drop the moves you have not saved;
• Categories, which marks every match in one class;
• Facilities and Days menus that let you show only some halls or some dates.

Right-clicking a match gives Mark all in the category, Mark all in the group and Unmark all, and when you can edit the schedule also Edit match and Make match break from here, which shifts that match and the group's later matches that day by a number of minutes.

Spotting holes. The graphical view is a very visual way to see the match schedule: an empty stretch on a court's row is a free slot, so gaps in the schedule are easy to see. Combine the Categories menu with the Facilities and Days menus to look at the holes for one class in one hall at a time. Export to Excel and match-card printing are on the table below, under Export and Reports.

The table below. A normal, filterable match list with one row per match: round, date, start, facility, court, match duration, class, home team, group, away team, match name, match number, periods, period length and result. Filters cover date range, class, home team, away team, group, facility, court, whether the match is included in final play, and whether competitors are locked.

Printing reports. Use the filter to narrow the table to the matches you want, or go past the filter and take all matches, then tick Select all. Open Reports and choose among the reports presented; one of the most popular is Kort 4x1, a match card with four cards per page. Each report downloads as a PDF for the selected matches. Matches can also be exported to Excel with the Export button, so you can make your own printout.

Save your work. Moves wait until you press Save, and moves you have not saved are saved for you when you leave the page.

The match list is also where single matches are edited and where referees are appointed. Those are covered on Editing matches and results and Referee setup on the match list.

Only teams that belong to a group can be scheduled.

Where to do it. Tournament admin menu, Match Schedule → Forming - Simplified (the page heading reads Distribution of teams pr day, and the page is also labelled Scheduling - simple), or the Scheduling button on the match list, which opens the same tool in a window. It is a three-tab flow:

1. Date — Create playing dates. Pick a class, then add one entry per group with a name, a date and a start time of 08:00 or later; a group without a date is not listed on the Scheduling tab. The tip in the page suggests naming them after the city, hall or occasion. Add playing date adds one, Save data saves them, and Reset discards unsaved changes.
2. Team distribution — Only teams from selected category is shown. A grid of the teams in the chosen class against groups: tick the box where a team should play. A team can be ticked into one group per day, and Save stores the ticks. The page counts groups, teams and ticked places for you.
3. Scheduling — Enter data in input boxes. The settings table and the generate button, described in the next section.

Moving teams around by hand. In step 2, untick the team in its old group and tick it in the new one, then press Save.

Splitting a group. Split in two on a saved group with a date creates a new group in the same class with the same date and venue settings, named with the next letter (B, C and so on); then tick each team into one of the two groups in step 2.

Adding a team that has not registered. In the Prepare schedule window, the plus icon on the group card, Add a team to a group, asks for a team name and creates a placeholder team in that group. Use it to fill a group to an even size when you know a late entry is coming. The trash icon on a team removes it again — but only for placeholder teams: for a real, registered team the app answers Operation rejected. The team is registered, and you have to deregister the team on the registration side instead.

Renaming groups. The match list has Shortcuts → Edit group name, where you set the display name of each group and the order the groups are listed in.

Deleting a group. The delete action on a group in step 1 removes the group, its match day, its teams and its matches. If the group already has matches you get the warning There are matches set up. Are you sure you want to delete?, and if any of those matches has a result the deletion is refused with Rejected: The matches already have results.

Once the teams are in groups, Profixio can work out who meets whom and lay the matches out on courts.

Open Forming - Simplified and go to the Scheduling tab. Each row is one group, and you fill in:

Num matches (team) and Num series pr team are alternatives — filling in one clears the other.

Then press Prepare schedule on the group's row. Play date and Match start are filled in from the group's date, and Match end time with the earliest time all the matches fit; a note shows how many matches there is room for. Tick the group and press Make matches. Profixio then:

• creates the courts it needs, named Bane 1, Bane 2 and so on, in the chosen arena;
• creates a match day for that date if there is not one already;
• builds the fixtures for each selected group, keeping teams from the same club apart where not everybody meets everybody;
• places the matches on the group's courts between the start and end time, around matches already on those courts, giving teams a rest between matches, avoiding three matches in a row for a team where it can, and balancing home and away;
• numbers the new matches on from the highest match number already used in the tournament;
• saves the matches there is no room for without a time or court, so they wait under Unplaced matches on the match list;
• creates them hidden, so nothing shows publicly until you publish.

The schedule is made in the background while the window shows its progress, and Stop and use best result ends the run early with the best schedule found so far. When it is done, the match list opens at that date and facility.

Do one class or a handful of groups at a time, starting with the ones that play first. It is far easier to adjust a small batch in the graphical scheduler than to untangle a whole tournament.

One group and one day at a time. The web generator places one group's matches on one day, so fitting groups and days together is up to you. That is what you use the graphical scheduler for afterwards — or Scheduler TXO, if the tournament is too big to arrange by hand.

Prepare schedule stays greyed out until every setting in the row has a value. Errors you can hit: Groups are not selected, No venues found, The venues have no free time left that day, Matches not created, Rejected: The matches already have results, and, while another schedule for the tournament is still being made, a message naming who started it and when.

Next to Scheduling on the match list there is a second, older generator called Make matches. It does much the same job with a slightly different form, and it is the one described in the help article about one-day tournaments.

It lists your classes instead of your groups. Opening a class gives you Play date, Match start time, and an Ant puljer field — the number of groups, at most 26. Changing that number re-divides the class's teams evenly into groups named A, B, C and so on, which is the quickest way to split a class you have not organised yet. Under it are the same group cards with drag-and-drop, Add a team to a group and the remove icon. Vacant teams you add here can be deleted again, but a registered team cannot be removed from the schedule: deregister the team before you schedule. The Make matches button then generates and lays out the fixtures.

Two differences matter, and both can bite:

• Matches made here are visible straight away. They are not created hidden the way the Forming - Simplified generator creates them. If your tournament is otherwise published, the half-finished schedule is public the moment you generate it. Check the tournament's match-visibility settings first.
• Regenerating replaces every match in the group. Regenerating a group here deletes its existing matches for that date and group, played ones included, and builds new ones. Check that none of them has a result before you regenerate, or use the Forming - Simplified generator, which stops with Rejected: The matches already have results.

If you have a choice, use Forming - Simplified. Reach for Make matches when you want the Ant puljer shortcut to split a class into groups quickly.

The Calculation menu item is this tool's settings table on its own page. Match Schedule → Calculation lists your classes with Num teams, Num matches pr team, Num series pr team, Num matches, Match length, Num venues, Arena and Timer, and nothing else — no generate button. Use it as a planning calculator: type in a scenario and read off how many matches it produces and how many hours of court time you need. The numbers you enter there are the ones the Make matches window then uses.

The graphical scheduler can only draw matches on days and courts that exist, so these three lists decide what your schedule can look like. All of them live under Shortcuts on the match list.

Edit dates — the playing days. Each day has a start and an end time; the scheduler draws exactly that window, and the start and end can be edited straight in the table. Use Create day to add one (date, start time, end time — the start must be before the end). You do not need to be precise: set the window a little wider than reality. The delete action is greyed out for any day that still has visible matches on it, so clear the day before you remove it. Adding, editing and deleting days all need the match-scheduling permission.

Profixio also keeps the days honest by itself. When someone with write access opens the match list, any day that has matches outside its window is widened to cover them, and a missing day is created.

Compress dates does the opposite, in one click: every match day is pulled in to about an hour before its first match and an hour after its last. Run it at the end, when the schedule is settled, so the public schedule does not show hours of empty hall.

Edit venue name — the halls and the courts, on two tabs. Facility lists your facilities with name and map location. Track lists the courts inside them, with a name and a description. Each tab has a button to add a new one: New facility and New venue. A court can only be deleted while no match is on it. Adding, editing and deleting here needs the match-scheduling permission.

Where a facility comes from and how travel, accommodation and maps around it are managed is covered on Facilities, accommodation and logistics.

Generating fixtures gives every match a slot, but rarely the right one. Fixing that is the real work, and the graphical scheduler on the match list is built for it.

Moving one match. Click the box and drag it to the day, time and court you want.

Moving several. Select several boxes and drag any one of them; they move together and keep their spacing.

Seeing what you are doing. Click a match to highlight both its teams so you can see where else they play. Use Mark all in the group or Mark all in the category to work on a whole group at a time, and the Facilities and Days menus to hide everything you are not working on. The two extra overlays, Show collisions and Show moved matches, only appear on the referee-assignment version of this page, not on the scheduling one.

Saving and undoing. Moves stay pending until you press save. Undo steps back one move and Discard throws away everything since the last save. Once you have saved, use the bulk Undo bulk change described in the next section instead — or move the matches back by hand.

Save early and often, especially before a big rearrangement. Leaving the page saves your moves, but a lost connection loses unsaved moves.

Changing a single match's date, time, court, teams or length can also be done from the match row itself, without the scheduler — see Editing matches and results.

When a hall falls through or a day has to shift, you do not have to move matches one at a time. Tick the matches in the match list — filter first, then select — and use the bulk actions:

• Change date — give every selected match the same new date.
• Change time — give them all the same start time, or shift them by a number of minutes with Move matches, or tick Do not use match date and time to strip the date and time off entirely and park the matches until you reschedule them.
• Change track — move them all to another court.
• Delete matches — permanent, and the confirmation says so: Do you want to delete the selected N matches? This cannot be undone.

Each of the three schedule actions asks you to confirm first, with the count spelled out: This will update all N selected matches. Check your selection before you confirm. Read the number. A forgotten filter is how a whole tournament gets moved to one Saturday.

Undo. The success message after a bulk change carries an Undo button. If you have clicked past it, go to Settings → Undo bulk change, pick the operation from Bulk schedule changes from the last 7 days, and confirm. There is also a checkbox Publish referee assignments — leave it off unless you want the restored referee appointments pushed out to the referees again.

Three things to know about undo:

• Only untouched matches come back. The note in the dialog says it plainly: Only matches that have not been changed since the bulk change are restored. If somebody has since moved one of the matches, that one is skipped and reported, and the rest are restored.
• It expires after seven days. Older operations are deleted automatically by a nightly clean-up, and each operation can only be restored once.
• It covers date, time and court — the three bulk schedule actions. Deleting matches is not undoable, and neither is deleting a group.

These bulk actions need referee-admin rights. Bulk delete is also hidden for series run from the federation system, where matches are owned elsewhere.

Teams withdraw, classes get merged, and sooner or later you have to build a group's fixtures again. You do not need to delete the old matches first — generating a group replaces the matches for that date and group.

Matches with results are protected. If any match in the group has been played, the Forming - Simplified generator stops with Rejected: The matches already have results and changes nothing. Deleting a whole group is blocked the same way.

The older Make matches window deletes and rebuilds the group whether or not its matches have results, so use it only for groups that have not started playing.

Things to check after regenerating:

• Match numbers. New matches always get numbers above the highest one already used, so numbers stay unique — but they will not be consecutive, and a schedule you have already printed or sent to a printer will no longer match. If people are working from a printout, tell them the numbers moved.
• Referee appointments. Referees are attached to matches; matches that are deleted take their appointments with them.
• The new matches are hidden. Generated fixtures start hidden and have to be published before anyone sees them.
• The published schedule. If the tournament is already public, publish again so the change reaches the website and the app, and consider notifying the affected teams. The match list has Make tournament note for a short message shown at the top of the public schedule page — the classic use is matches on court 3 have been moved to court 8.

If only one or two teams changed, swapping teams is usually less disruptive than regenerating; see the next section.

When a team withdraws and another takes its place, or two teams ended up in each other's group, you do not have to rebuild anything. On the match list, use Shortcuts → Switch two teams.

Pick a class, then one team in each of the two lists, and confirm with Switch selected two teams. The two teams exchange every fixture they have: wherever the first team was the home or away side, the second team takes its place, and the other way round.

What to expect:

• Only matches from today onwards are changed. Matches already played keep the teams that played them, which is what you want — but it also means a swap made mid-tournament leaves the two teams with each other's history.
• The fixtures stay where they are. Times, courts and match numbers do not move; only who plays does.
• Group membership is not updated. The swap rewrites the fixtures, not the group lists. If the two teams were in the same group that makes no difference, but if they were in different groups each team now plays the other's fixtures while still being listed in its old group. Correct the group lists by hand in Forming - Simplified afterwards.

If you need to move a single team to a different group instead of trading two, untick it in its old group and tick it in the new one in step 2 of Forming - Simplified — but do that before the fixtures are generated, because moving a team between groups does not rewrite matches that already exist.

A tournament with a thousand matches over ten days is unreadable if you draw all of it at once. Narrow the view before you start working.

In the graphical scheduler: the Days and Facilities menus each let you show one day or one hall and hide the rest — clicking a label picks only that one. Show All brings everything back.

Long tournaments open partly collapsed on purpose. If a tournament has more than 15 playing days, the scheduler shows only the next 15 upcoming days when you open it, and the Show All shortcut for days is not offered. Older days are still there; tick them in the Days menu. This is why a schedule can look as if half the days are missing on a long winter series.

In the table: filter by date range, class, group, facility, court or team, and work through one slice at a time. Filters also decide what a bulk action applies to, so filtering first is both faster and safer.

A practical order of work: finish one class or one day, save, then move on. Selecting a few hundred boxes and dragging them across a ten-day chart is slow and easy to get wrong.

A playoff is a bracket: quarter-finals feeding semi-finals feeding a final, with the teams filled in from the group tables as results arrive.

The bracket itself is built in Scheduler TXO, not in the browser. There is no page in the web app that creates a playoff bracket — choosing the number of teams, whether there is a bronze final, and whether it is an A, B or C playoff all happen in the desktop tool, which writes the bracket to the same database.

What the web does with playoffs:

• Shows the bracket. The graphical playoff tree is displayed on the class's match page, and on the public pages and in the app, with teams filling in as results come in.
• Lets you rename and publish trees. On the match list, Shortcuts → Change playoff lists the playoff trees with a number, a name and a published toggle. The name is what the public sees. Editing needs the match-scheduling permission.
• Treats playoff matches like any other match. They appear in the match list and in the graphical scheduler, they can be moved, bulk-changed and given referees, and once the tournament has playoff matches the match list gains a Select play type filter with All, Group play and Playoff.

One consequence worth knowing: a playoff fixture whose teams come from a group table shows Not decided instead of team names until the table is settled — and it will keep saying that if the class has its table hidden, because naming the teams would give the standings away. See Hiding matches, schedules and results from the public.

Scheduler TXO is a Windows program, separate from the website, that works on the same tournament data. Larger cups are still built in it because it holds the parts of scheduling the browser tools do not have.

Getting in. Tournament admin menu, Match Schedule → Scheduler TXO. Access needs the match-scheduling permission in a tournament that has been approved and has communication enabled. Administrators registered at a federation, a district or a club, and the organiser's registered contact person, also get in. Everyone who can see the Match Schedule menu sees the link, so it is normal to click it and be sent back to the roles page with an error — that means the permission is missing, not that the link is at fault. The first time in a session you will also be asked to confirm a code sent to your email before you are handed over.

What TXO can do that the web cannot:

• A scheduling engine that solves a whole tournament at once, weighting how compact the schedule should be, how evenly a team's matches should spread over the days, and whether play should run round by round.
• Time restrictions — a team, a club, a class or a hall can be limited to certain intervals on certain days.
• Anti-teams — two teams that share players and must not play at the same time, with a minimum number of matches between them.
• Vacant teams — a placeholder that behaves like a real team in the schedule and can later be swapped for a late entry.
• Seeding and play keys — controlling who meets whom in which round.
• Playoff brackets.
• Chronological match numbering, schedule statistics, and printing.

Working in both places. Changes you make on the web are visible to TXO and the other way round, but they are not merged for you — if you rearrange a schedule in the browser while somebody else is working on it in TXO, one of you will be overwriting the other. Agree who owns the schedule before you start.

Where the help for TXO is. Most of the older Profixio help articles about Kampoppsett, the visualiser, restrictions, anti-teams, vacant teams, play keys and playoff trees describe TXO, not the website. If an article tells you to right-click a match or use a menu you cannot find in your browser, you are reading TXO documentation.

You can have the schedule built for you, by Profixio support or by another person who does this work. Contact support to agree a price and a deadline; the published rate has been per hundred matches, with extra for complicated criteria or for big changes after the schedule is finished.

To get a usable schedule, send a brief that answers all of these:

1. Playing dates, with the earliest start and latest finish each day, and any hall that cannot be used on a given day. Fri 22.01 17:00-21:30, Sat 23.01 09:00-21:00. BigHall cannot be used on Friday.
2. Every class with its match length, including the break to the next match. B10 18/20 minutes, so matches start every 20 minutes.
3. Every class with the number of matches per team in group play. G14 four matches each. G16 all against all. B16 three matches each.
4. Time limits per class, if a class may only play at certain times. B10 only Friday 18:00 to 21:00.
5. Playoff, for the classes that have one: how many teams, and whether there is a bronze final. B16 eight teams including bronze final. B18 twelve teams, no bronze final.
6. Which courts each class may use. G18 courts 1-4. G20 courts 1-6. Court 6 cannot be used on Friday.
7. Anything else — clubs that cannot play at certain times, teams that must not meet, or a wish for a very compact schedule so teams spend as little time as possible at the venue.

Two warnings from experience:

• Team wishes are read from the team leader's note on the registration, not from messages. If a club emails or messages a restriction, it will not reach whoever builds the schedule unless it is written into the registration note.
• The registration data is the organiser's responsibility. Classes must be right, teams must be in the correct class, and teams that are not coming must be deregistered before the schedule is built. Every registration mistake found afterwards means rebuilding.

Work down this list before assuming something is at fault.

"There are no matches on the public page." The most likely cause is that they were never published. Fixtures generated from Forming - Simplified are created hidden. The whole match programme can also be hidden with a tournament-level switch, and a class can be locked. See Hiding matches, schedules and results from the public.

"The scheduling buttons are gone." Either Use simplified scheduling is off in Basic settings, or you opened Referee Assignment instead of Matches Graphics — they are the same table in two modes — or you lack match-edit rights in this tournament.

"Prepare schedule is greyed out / says No venues found." Num venues is empty for that group, or one of the other settings in the row has not been filled in. Every settings field in the row must have a value before the generate button will work.

"It says the matches already have results." A match in the group has been played. Nothing was changed. Either edit those matches individually, or delete the played matches deliberately first, knowing you lose the results.

"I cannot delete this team from the group." Operation rejected. The team is registered means the team came from a real registration. Deregister it on the registration side; the remove icon only removes placeholder teams you added by hand.

"Half the days are missing from the scheduler." A tournament with more than 15 playing days opens showing only the next 15. Tick the missing days in the Days menu.

"My changes disappeared." Moves in the graphical scheduler are pending until you save them. Leaving the page saves them, but losing your connection loses them.

"The schedule is right in the desktop tool but wrong on the web" — or the other way round. The two are not synchronised for you. Publish from the tool you consider the master, and agree who is editing before two people work at once.

"There is no league table." Standings are calculated from results, not from fixtures. A class with no results yet has no table, and a class can also have its table hidden on purpose. See League standings and tables.

Most of scheduling works the same everywhere. These are the exceptions.

Ice hockey and bandy: ice preparation planning. For tournaments in these two sports the match list has an extra action, IsPrep, which plans ice-preparation slots for a day, arena and rink, and can send the plan by email or download it as a PDF. It does not exist for other sports.

Date-based group play. The Forming - Simplified flow, where a group is tied to a specific date and teams are ticked into the dates they attend, was built for age-specific ice hockey series where teams meet for a gathering rather than a fixed round robin. It works for any sport, and it is the only place where a group carries its own date.

Series run from the federation system. In a series administered from the federation side, the matches belong to the series, not to the tournament. Bulk delete of matches is hidden there, and time and venue are normally set by the clubs within a deadline rather than by an organiser laying out a chart. See League scheduling and time setting.

Golf. A golf tournament site is made just like any other sport tournament, and often it has just one class: Mix. Every player must belong to a club, and the clubs should be in a defined list so that all teams choose an existing club. Teams register the ordinary way and are most often positioned in groups by the tournament owner. Each home team plays on its own venue and each team plays one match a day, so make the schedule with one round each day and then move the matches to the correct venue.

Everything else is the organiser's choice. How many matches a class plays, whether a group of three plays a double round, how much rest a team gets between matches and whether seeding is used at all are set by whoever builds the schedule. If your federation has rules about these things, apply them when you build the schedule.