Designed to be a calendar, you can view the program in a day, four-day, week, month, year, or schedule format. You can easily input events and reminders into a calendar and add notifications so that your employees never miss a work shift.
In addition, you can create employee shift calendars for each employee and share it with them. That way, they can view the shared work schedule calendar on their personal calendar and integrate it into their daily lives. Rather than forcing them onto a new platform, you can reach them on a platform they might already be using for personal events and reminders.
Homebase is a top app because of its large variety of features. Not only does it have stellar scheduling, timesheets, efficient time clocks, and easy messaging, but it also has a special recruiting software that helps you post to online job boards. Homebase can sync data from several payroll and POS companies, so you can effortlessly make the transition to Homebase from other platforms. This feature-rich, thorough app does offers a free Basic plan for unlimited employees.
However, it also has other plans that offer more features for monthly or annual costs. Sling is a great scheduling app that keeps you up-to-date on employee news.
That means, you can avoid double-booking or last-minute scrambling by having updated employee availability and time-off requests on-hand. The program will send you a notification if you've accidentally over-booked a shift or overlapped shifts.
Not only can you schedule shifts, but you can assign tasks through Sling Tasks. You can create to-do lists for employees and follow their progress to ensure that they're on schedule to complete tasks before deadlines. You can also message employees individually or in groups, right on the app.
While Sling does have an unlimited, free plan, you can also purchase a premium or enterprise plan for additional costs. When I Work is an efficient tool that can save an average of eight hours per week that were originally spent on tracking employee schedules and attendance.
By being able to send employees instant updates, you can also reduce the number of missed shifts. The program is mobile-friendly, easy-to-use, and flexible, perfect to fit the busy lives of your employees and yourself.
When I Work's simple interface, featuring tons of shortcuts, gives employees the power to handle their own scheduling. When I Work is free to use for up to 75 users, but you can create a custom plan if your company has more than 75 employees. In addition, there are paid plans with more features: the Scheduling Basic plan and the Scheduling Pro plan. ZoomShift makes it a lot easier for your employees to access their shifts in real-time. This makes it much simpler and faster to find shift replacements and ensure shifts are always covered.
You can drag and drop shifts onto the calendar within minutes and share that schedule with your employees via email notifications. The app is very functional on mobile, creating a seamless transition from web to mobile. ZoomShift has a powerful free plan, perfect for small teams getting started with a scheduling software. Next, read this post about how to improve if you're a bad boss. Originally published Nov 12, AM, updated December 14 Logo - Full Color. Contact Sales. Overview of all products.
Marketing Hub Marketing automation software. Service Hub Customer service software. CMS Hub Content management system software. Operations Hub Operations software. For one thing, spreadsheet software is still plagued by the distribution problems that both pen and paper and word processors struggle with. Should you print and post, hand out, or email everyone a copy? And once changes are needed which they inevitably will be , which copy is the most recent?
It can be hard for employees to keep track. That introduces a confusion factor that can make the process all the more difficult. As with the word processors, using a spreadsheet app like Google Sheets online i.
That said, many other problems still remain. The tools and the solutions they offer are geared toward those activities, not toward scheduling. Calendar software, like Microsoft Outlook, can be an excellent replacement for pen and paper, word processors, spreadsheets, and their cloud-based counterparts.
Calendar software is much more amenable to scheduling because it was created with that in mind. Times, days, weeks, months, and even years are already present and can be manipulated with ease. In addition, creating shifts, which on most calendars would be like tasks or appointments, is as easy as clicking a time slot and labeling it accordingly. Calendar software like Microsoft Outlook was made for the use of a single individual. Because of that, it can be a bit difficult when you have to schedule more employees than you can count on one hand.
Remember, it was intended for one person who could only be in one place at a time. Calendar software also faces the same distribution challenges that make native word processors and spreadsheet programs obsolete. Online calendar software, like Google Calendar, builds on the relative ease of offline calendar software as a schedule maker. These programs then take schedule creation to the next level by giving your schedule the power of cloud-based distribution. You can then give permission to read or edit the document accordingly.
Employees can view that schedule anytime, anywhere. This makes collecting and making changes simpler because employees can leave notes in the document informing you of conflicts. You will, of course, have to go back in and make the necessary changes, but you might also consider giving trusted employees permission to edit the schedule.
That way, they can move their shifts to avoid conflicts and take some of the burden off your shoulders. As great as these tools may sound, they were still not designed with multiple employees, overlapping shifts, and business scheduling in mind. Shifty is a simple app for small businesses and individuals that lets you schedule multiple employees amongst multiple shifts.
With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, you can quickly and easily manage just one person or all your staff. You can even assign duties and tasks so your employees know what needs to be done during slow times. This app is much more conducive to scheduling multiple shifts and multiple employees when compared to word processor and spreadsheet apps.
It does, however, suffer from the same distribution problems as the previous two apps. Schedules are distributed via email. Plus, you have to verify that everyone understands when changes are made because slightly different copies of the same schedule will exist. As helpful as Shifty is, its functionality is basic at best.
Setmore is an automated online appointment app that allows you to reach customers and book appointments in a simple, easy-to-manage calendar view that saves you time and helps your business grow.
It only takes a few seconds to book an appointment on your Setmore calendar. Need to reschedule? Simply drag and drop the appointment into a new timeslot. Setmore automatically sends out a reschedule notice to the customer and the staff member.
But, as you can see from the image above, Setmore is designed specifically for a single user to schedule their appointments. You can make this app work for a team of three or more by scheduling several employees in one box. But if the schedule changes for some reason — illness, shift switch, or the like — you would have to change everything and start fresh.
With Appointy, you can convert website visitors into customers. The Appointy website widget seamlessly integrates with your existing website so you can do it all yourself. Appointy provides a unique sub-domain you can use to create your own booking page.
Appointy even creates a tab on your Facebook page that allows customers to schedule their next appointment on their own. Appointy also gives you complete control over your schedule. You can:. Times, days, weeks, months, and even years are already present and can be manipulated with ease. In addition, creating shifts, which on most calendars would be tasks or appointments, is as easy as clicking a time slot and labeling it accordingly.
For one thing, Microsoft Outlook was made for the use of a single individual. Because of that, it can be a bit difficult when you have to schedule more employees than you can count on one hand. Remember, it was intended for one person who could only be in one place at a time. Microsoft Outlook also faces the same distribution challenges that make native word processors and spreadsheet programs like Word and Excel obsolete e. Google Calendar combines the ease of online creation and distribution with the power of a calendar specifically designed for scheduling.
Though Google Calendar was originally designed to be a personal calendar, with some work it can be altered to schedule multiple employees. From either the day view or the week view, you can click on a time to add an event. You can also color code the event for easier viewing, attach email addresses to the event for simplified communication, and set up automated notifications to keep your employees informed.
Though Google Calendar may look like the answer to your scheduling prayers, it can be a bit tedious if you have more than 4 or 5 employees. In addition, it can be difficult to decipher if you have overlapping shifts and other complicated scheduling.
Only one tool was. One of the biggest challenges you face as a manager is distributing the schedule to all your team members. You have to consider questions like:. The unique thing about group chat apps is that they allow you to exchange messages texts with one or all of your employees without paying SMS fees.
Keep in mind that group chat apps do require a smartphone or mobile device with cell service. You can store the finished file on Dropbox and then send the link to your team members using a group chat app.
If you choose to use pen and paper, you can take a picture of the finished schedule and send it to everyone using the group chat app. Distributing the schedule like this is a quick and easy way to reach all of your team members at the same time. Employing three different tools e. The benefits of using a combination of free tools are instant communication and simplicity for your employees. The drawback is that all of your employees have to use the tools you use. Requiring that your employees download two or three separate programs to access their schedule is a bit much.
And for some programs like Excel , the learning curve can be quite steep. Second, those programs take up valuable space on their devices. It would be better if you could just text a link and be done. You send your employees a link to a cloud-based document, and they can access it anywhere, anytime.
No need to download multiple complicated, memory-heavy apps to their device. No learning curve that could make accessing and reading the schedule difficult. Just easy schedule access at the click of a button or tap of the screen. Another viable free scheduling software option is Google Drive. With Google Drive, you can create shared folders and give specific individuals access to those folders.
You can create one folder where everyone can view the schedule. You can create another folder just for servers. You can create another just for kitchen staff, one for bartenders, one for hosts and hostesses, and one for managers. All you need to set up permission to access these folders is an email address. Then your employees can view the information via a web browser on any smartphone, tablet, or computer.
As familiar and widespread as Google Drive is at the moment, it only addresses the distribution issue within your scheduling process. It does nothing to alleviate the pain of actually creating the schedule. Trello is another free tool that you can use to make organizing your team easier.
Trello is a web-based list-making application that lets you and your employees work collaboratively to get more done. Like Google Drive, you can create Trello boards for different positions within your business and give each member permission to access that board. And, no matter where you are, Trello stays in sync across all your devices so you can collaborate with your team anywhere, anytime.
Within the Trello cards themselves, you can add members, assign labels, make checklists, set up due dates, start a discussion, and much more. Trello, though, is more of a task or to-do list than a full-service employee scheduling tool. Yes, you can attach documents, spreadsheets, and files to the Trello cards, but this is more of a distribution channel than an app that can actually streamline and simplify the scheduling process.
Built for small businesses with a limited number of employees, it has since expanded to serve larger businesses such as charities, hospitals, and museums as well as the food and beverage departments in hotels and restaurants. ABC Roster aims to be efficient and user-friendly while providing you, the manager, with a convenient and intuitive way of creating schedules quickly. The main features of ABC Roster revolve around an easy-to-use interface that allows you to manage all aspects of scheduling — including employee availability, days off, leave, events, bookings, and more — from one screen.
ABC Roster is a free employee scheduling software tool that is simple and focused solely on scheduling your team. Those benefits, though, are also part of what makes the app limited in its scope and usefulness for most businesses.
ABC Roster does nothing but schedule employees.
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