Employee Scheduling Software Review

Whether you're a small business owner or a mid-level corporate manager, you know that interacting with your employees and customers is the best possible use of your time. Nevertheless, a manager's job also involves busy work such as designating shifts, handling budgets and controlling the flow of supplies and resources. Employee scheduling software can get you away from the paperwork and back to business.

Switching to employee scheduling software is the modern-day equivalent of moving from typewriters and carbon paper to Xerox machines. You still have to input data such as employee names, contact information and wages, but with this software, you only have to do it once. Then, you can create regular schedules or templates and assign shifts all at once. Depending on how complicated your personnel needs are, you can copy the schedule week after week. From there, making changes to accommodate sick leave and time off is simple. Check out our articles on employee scheduling software to learn more.

Employee scheduling software can save you time and keep you from doing hours of busy work. It can also improve your business by making your employees happy. In many cases, this software lets your employees ask for time off electronically, ask for preferred schedules and trade shifts. Furthermore, you can keep your employees informed by posting their schedules online, printing them out or sending the information via text message or email. The best scheduler applications we found are WorkSchedule.Net, Time Forge Scheduling and ShiftPlanning.

Employee Scheduling Software: What to Look For

The best scheduler software saves you time, keeps your employees happy and makes shift information readily available. To save you time, employee scheduling software needs to simplify entering employee information and shift requirements. It also needs to simplify the process of giving each employee sufficient hours, scheduling each one to work only when she is available and ensuring that each shift has employees with the proper qualifications.

Good employee scheduling software can make your job as a manager easier in other ways as well. First, if your employees know when they are expected to work far ahead of time, you can reduce tardiness and absenteeism. It can also save you from "When do I work?" phone calls. The best employee scheduling applications can also interface with payroll software and time-clock software and can give you reports such as how many hours each employee is scheduled to work and what your labor costs will be for each shift. You want an application that is easy to use but full of advanced features to meet the specific needs of your unique business. Below are the criteria we used to evaluate employee scheduling software.

Feature Set
Employee scheduling software should provide you with advanced tools that make scheduling easy. Look for applications and web services that let you print schedules, export data and post shift information online. The key to streamlining your scheduling processes is making those schedules accessible to your employees.

Another important feature to look for is a schedule set-up wizard. The best among these help you identify positions one step at a time. After this, you are guided through a process that automatically assigns employees to shifts. We also checked for specific options such as scheduling for multiple locations and data backup and restoration capabilities.

Scheduling Capabilities
If you're paying for advanced scheduling software, you need it to do more than act as a basic spreadsheet. Scheduling applications should be a storehouse of information that can be used in a variety of ways. We checked for options that let you define employee positions, skill levels and required hours. We also looked for features that let you assign departments, let employees sign up for open shifts, let you assign on-call status and alert you of scheduling conflicts.

Reporting
The most important part of scheduling software is, of course, helping you assign shifts that meet your needs and your employee's needs. But a great benefit to this software is its ability to combine data into easy-to-understand reports. We looked for software applications and web services that show you total employee hours in a single click. We also checked for daily, weekly and monthly viewing options. The most advanced applications show time-off summaries and total shift costs as well.

Ease of Use
This software is all about increasing efficiency. Therefore, employee scheduling software should be easy to download and intuitive to use. We looked for software applications that are accessible to seasoned tech users and novices alike.

Help & Support
Even with the most intuitive employee scheduling software, having access to technical support is a must. Some of the applications we tested come with lifetime support, whereas others offer no support at all. We checked for help resources through avenues such telephone, email, online FAQs and user forums.

Employee scheduling software will save you time so you can get back to doing what makes your business great, whether that's mixing up a perfect cappuccino, beautifying residential landscapes or cleaning teeth and preventing cavities. We looked at many products and found the best applications and fully hosted web services available.

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