.,.Employee Scheduling software is a must in any organization, regardless of whether you have 10 or 10,000 employees, it’s not easy to organize and coordinate everyone’s schedules. The worst-case scenario would be wasting precious time trying to plan each person’s work schedule. That’s why it’s important to implement staff scheduling software that helps with shift planning.
Fortunately, we live in a modern world that allows the use of expert software tools to make your life easier. The following list below will present a range of different software that support employees in shift planning while ensuring an efficient staff scheduling software system for your crew.
AttendanceBot
AttendanceBot is an app that allows HRs to manage shift schedules, track employee time, and manage leave requests. The bot records the attendance of each employee within a dashboard that HRs can access and create attendance reports from.
This is your all-in-one solution to manage your employees and track their work hours without any manual legwork on your part. You can enable AttendanceBot within Slack or Microsoft Teams so that the bot can collect employee responses automatically and without any third-party app.
Google Sheets
Google Sheets is an easy-to-use spreadsheet software with an enhanced tool for shift planning. The rows and columns allow employees options to customize their schedules, dividing them up into days of the week. This not only makes it simpler to understand but is easy to read, even with a heavy worker’s schedule.
Other employee benefits of the online shift planning software include
- Simple Sharing via email
- Cloud Storage, so everything can be backed up
- Autosaving
- It’s Free!
Sling
Sling is a useful shift planning software that keeps you up-to-date on employee news. This stops annoyances like double-booking from occurring, making it easier to keep track of an employee’s work schedule. The difference in Sling is you are able to create your own to-do lists for employees. This is helpful in keeping track of your goals and tasks before deadlines.
There’s also an app version of Sling, increasing its accessibility to check an employee’s work schedule. The app even has its own ‘social space’ or discussion page where you can share news feeds, interact with others or send files and updates. Sling also gives you unlimited use on its free plan but you can always upgrade and purchase the premium plan for additional benefits.
Humanity
Humanity is one of the most popular online staff scheduling software. Starting at $2 per user, the interface is user-friendly and easily understandable with options to edit and check a worker’s schedule on their app. What makes Humanity a great staff scheduling software is its amazing customer support team to help guide you through any problems that may occur, which is rare. You also have the option of upgrading to $3 per user with additional employee benefits.
Other features of Humanity include quick and easy to communicate schedule information, includes payroll, sync employee schedule data, and is the leading employee scheduling app being highly rated by many organizations.
“Humanity represents where shift scheduling is going, in looks, in the analytics-driven features it offers for automating scheduling and creating forecasts, and in how it makes personnel data easier to share with other HR tech and business software platforms” – PC Magazine
Ximble
Ximble provides everything required from staff scheduling software. Easy to use, allows scheduling templates, giving you unlimited access to planning an employee’s work schedule, tracking time off schedules and employees availability, and even provides helpful recommendations of which employees to assign based on historical data.
This quality software will even give you the best workers schedules around your business and comes in 3 different plans including Core plan, an advanced plan, and an enterprise plan. The starting plan starts at only $1 per user per month, so give Ximble a try.
TSheets
TSheets have similar features to the previous staff scheduling software. However its mobile app allows employees to get updates on upcoming shifts and changes to a worker’s schedule. It even gives you a notification when a worker is late or forgets to clock in.
Some of the most special features of TSheets include its ability to attach images to timesheets, giving you an option to show projects without having to write them in lengthy paragraphs. It also has a GPS tracker which allows you to see when and where each employee is located between clocking in and out of the building. This is helpful in keeping track of a worker’s scheduling.
Homebase
Homebase, the free staff scheduling software is mainly known for helping managers forecast labor costs. This allows you to come to any budget figures that are planned, helping to not over exceed this. Moreover, Homebase supports scheduling & time tracking, allowing you to build schedules in minutes and share these instantly with your team. You can use the hiring & onboarding options to post jobs, manage applicants, and communicate with your employees.
We recommend using this for smaller businesses due to its simplicity and easy-to-use software that supports workers’ schedules and shift planning.
actiPLANS
actiPLANS has all the basic principles of great staff scheduling software and more. It incorporates a more streamlined process with its automatic leave request approval, helping with absence management. This not only saves time for managers but also increases employee satisfaction through more control over a worker’s schedule.
There is also a great overview of all available resources, viewing information about current and upcoming leaves and seeing who is in the office with the interactive absence chart. actiPLANS also has an app version where you can notify colleagues running late or leaving early and understand reasons for why an employee may be absent, whether they are in a meeting or feeling ill. actiPLANS’s best feature includes its support of planning time on and off work for the long and short term. This allows you to play around with the shift planning tools.
ZoomShift
ZoomShift is another simple-to-use staff scheduling software with a drag and drop process in shift planning. This makes it faster and simpler in creating and replacing shifts onto a calendar. The whole process takes just a few minutes. Furthermore, the app has the same transition as the web. If you’re in a small team of roughly 10 members, this might be the right software for you. Scheduling hasn’t been easier and ZoomShift is completely free but has options to upgrade to its paid plans with additional features.
Deputy
Deputy, starting at a price of $2 per user each month, is the perfect option for integrating other business systems, including payroll and accounting programs. This multi-platform staff scheduling software helps forecast sales traffic and supports shift planning automatically, preventing your company from having more/fewer employees available.
This may seem like a more complex software compared with the others listed, however, it can be perfect for all business sizes and industries regardless of whether you work in healthcare, manufacturing & logistics, security, retail or call centers, and more. Many workplaces support using Deputy too, including Amazon, Nasa, and Uber in shift planning. The scheduling-only plan starts at $2 per user and has options to upgrade to the premium plan at either $3 or $4 per user, depending on if you pay monthly or in annual increments.
Other features of using Deputy include:
- Staff scheduling software that saves hours
- Simple, perfect rotas
- Real-time attendance
- A connected team via mobile or desktop
- Simplify a workers schedule
- Shift swapping and planning
- Auto scheduling
- Leave/Absence Management
- Assigning tasks to particular groups or employees
- Safe and Secure
WorkSchedule.Net
WorkSchedule.Net starts at $24 per month for 20 employees. It’s easily accessible by all of your employees and has a range of special on-the-go features. It can be accessed on the app and desktop. One of these features includes reading your schedule out loud, which can be useful if you’re driving to work. Shift planning is also easy to do and can be easily shared among your team members. There are 2 different plans, one recommended for smaller businesses at $24 for 20 employees per month. And another one starts at $140 for 100 employees per month.
Snap Schedule
Snap Schedule is described as an ‘Excel-like’ platform but with more power. With similar tools to Excel, it offers features for shift planning giving you options to create and assign shifts to workers’ schedules, planning workloads more easily. You are able to schedule your own breaks too, making a realistic schedule.
The control of labor costs is also important and a constant worry but Snap Schedule helps with reducing unnecessary overtime, calculating overtime, on-call, time off and a worker schedule continuously. You can keep track of your employees easily by using the features of their app. This gives employees the opportunity to request time off, bid on open shifts, trade and pick up shifts, update availability, and more. The best part is it’s completely free. Click here for a tutorial on how to use Snap Schedule today.
Shiftboard
Our last staff scheduling software on this list is Shiftboard and is recommended for medium to large teams, offering complex approaches to shift planning, performance analytics, and attendance tracking. It helps avoid schedule conflicts and unwanted overtime and instead benefits managers from bulti-in reports that help with ahead planning. This can be through recommendations of shift planning.
This staff scheduling software is trusted by a variety of companies including Randstad, Metropolitan police, and 3M. It consists of two different types of plans, one called ‘SchedueFlex’, giving you the Business or Enterprise plan. And ‘SchedulePro’, which give you either the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus option, each being aimed at specific industries. Prices for Shiftboard vary depending on the plan you decide to go for, so it’s best you click here to see which is best for you.
Bottom Line
You have loads of options to choose from, each staff scheduling software unique in its own way. Therefore it may be difficult for you to choose the one for you. Personally, our favorites would be Deputy, WorkSchedule.Net, and Humanity. However, you should not undermine the other great staff scheduling software and even try shift planning on each platform to see which works best for your business.
