This article covers Football tournaments. Other Sports tournaments work exactly the same way. Padel is different and has its own articles.
The Format tab is where a tournament stops being a name and a date and becomes a schedule. Saving here creates the groups and generates every fixture, so do it once your teams are in.
Before you start
Add your teams first, on the Participants tab. You can save a format without them, but the numbers you enter here have to match the number of teams you end up with.
Choose a template
Open the tournament, then Format. A football tournament offers three templates. Padel has its own set, with its own questions about players, courts and scoring.
Group phase only - round-robin. Everyone plays inside their group and the table decides it.
Knockout phase only - straight elimination from the first match.
Group & knockout phase - groups first, then the top teams go into a bracket.
Select one. The questions underneath change to match.
Group phase only
Enter How many groups do you want to create?
Enter How many teams are there in each group?
Choose Encounters - how many times each team plays the others in its group. The list stays empty until the two fields above it are filled in.
Fill in the League schedule block. It decides when the fixtures are played: the scheduling mode, how many pitches you have, how many weeks the league runs, how many matches a week, the daily start time, and which days you play on.
Tick at least one day under Preferred match day(s). They all start unticked. With no day ticked there is nowhere to put a fixture, so every fixture is generated without a date. See "How the fixture list is generated for a football tournament".
Group phase only has no overflow question. The League schedule block is what handles the calendar here. The other two templates do have one - see below.
The other two templates
Knockout phase only asks how many teams go into the bracket. You choose from 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64.
Group & knockout phase asks both sets: the group questions, then how many teams come out of the groups and into the bracket.
Both of them also ask Automatically schedule overflow matches on the next day. Yes pushes matches that will not fit onto the next day. No keeps them on the tournament date with no start time. Neither template has a League schedule block.
What you will see
Select Save. Scoryboard creates the phase, splits your teams into groups, and generates the fixtures.
The format now appears under the tournament's name everywhere it is listed.
If it does not work
"8 teams cannot be split into 3 equal groups." The number of teams has to divide by the number of groups. Scoryboard lists the group counts that would work - pick one of those.
"With 2 groups and 8 teams, each group must have 4 teams." Teams per group is not a free choice. It is the number of teams divided by the number of groups.
Encounters will not open. Fill in the number of groups and the teams per group first. Until both are set there is nothing for it to offer.
There is no overflow question. You are on Group phase only, which does not have one. It has the League schedule block instead.
Your fixtures have no dates. No day is ticked under Preferred match day(s). Tick at least one and save again.
"Schedule capacity exceeded." Your league has fewer slots than fixtures. Scoryboard counts the weeks, the days you ticked and the pitches, tells you how many fit, and offers to add the extra weeks. Choose Yes, create extra weeks, or go back and give it more days or more pitches.
Out of range. You can have 1 to 64 groups, 2 to 64 teams in each, and 1 to 128 matches per team.