Top-9 Employee Scheduling Softwarefor Efficient Workforce Management

For both shift work and regular office hours, scheduling, leave management and attendance tracking are important tasks. Some still prefer using tools like Excel, Word or just paper and pen, some have employees scheduling software modules integrated in their HR and payroll systems. However, there are better ways to keep track of each employee’s attendance and absences. Here’s our selection of scheduling tools for different areas of application.

1. actiPLANS

actiPLANS is a leave management application that helps plan team’s leaves for future dates, calculate leave balances, and keep detailed record of the team’s leaves history. It is designed to streamline the entire absence management process in the company: requesting a leave, getting it approved, and calculating the remaining balance. The tool has advanced reporting functionality and allows to run reports on leave times and balances, past leaves, and balance histories of the employees.

For those who often work away from the desk, actiPLANS has a native mobile app. It shows who is absent today and on any of the future days and allows to inform colleagues when you’re running late or leaving early.

2. Hot Schedules

Hot Schedules is an online scheduler for teams that work on a shift basis. By automating the scheduling process, it saves managers’ and regular employees’ time. Clients report that with Hot schedules, it is not only faster to create, communicate, and manage work schedules, but also easier to save on labor costs and forecast future capabilities. What’s more, the tool helps control labor costs and budgets.

3. Humanity

One of the most popular solutions, Humanity offers scheduling, time clock and staff management features. It helps organize shifts and communicate schedule information to the employees quickly and easily, and also includes payroll and HR features. Humanity has mobile apps for viewing and managing team’s schedules from anywhere.

4. Snap Schedule

“Excel-like with more power”, as the authors call it. In fact, the interfaces of this tool are similar to the Excel’s, but it offers special features for schedule planning and publishing. Create and assign shifts, plan workloads, and control overtime. Snap Schedule also allows to schedule breaks and define tasks to be performed during each shift. The app helps build up a mindful shift management process, reduce labor costs, prevent unexpected overtime, and easily collect payroll data.

5. Sling

Sling combines schedule planning and absence management features, so it helps manage shift work and avoid conflicts with the team’s absence schedule. The tool allows you to copy shifts and schedules between days and weeks and create recurring shifts to eliminate repeated entries. A mobile app is provided so that you can stay on top of things and communicate with your colleagues from anywhere. What’s more, the app has a “social space” feature that allows to share updates and files, set up newsfeeds and interact with coworkers.

6. Calamari

Calamari contains two modules: leave management and clock-in and –out. Its leave management module offers an automated time-off processing from request to approval, and leave balance calculations. In it, you can create various leave types, see requests history, and attach related documents to your requests.

As for the clock-in and –out module, it helps track team members’ tardiness and attendance. Calamari supports several clock-in methods: iBeacons, native mobile app, QR codes, etc. The tool notifies managers about tardiness and unexpected absences.

7. Ximble Schedule Maker

Ximble offers a schedule planner that helps create shifts for teams of any size. In this app you can create schedules for teams, manage absence requests, control labor costs, communicate with colleagues, and more. The tool allows to manage schedules for teams located in different offices: it supports multiple calendars for different locations and protects from double-booking of work time by a person who works at two locations.

Ximble Schedule Maker helps managers understand their employees’ availability for future workloads and sort them by job roles, if team’s capacity for specific work type needs to be checked.

8. Shiftboard

Shiftboard is a scheduling tool for medium and large teams. It offers a complex approach to scheduling, attendance tracking, and performance & capacity analytics. Its scheduling features allow a simple setup process, avoiding schedule conflicts and unwanted overtime, and automating schedule creation. Managers can benefit from built-in reports and analytics that help in planning work ahead.

The tool includes a startup procedure for new employees that simplifies the onboarding process and ensures that all employees have taken necessary startup and training steps. For hiring managers, it also streamlines candidate data collection and organizes the entire hiring process.

9. Homebase

According to the developers of this app, a thoughtful scheduling procedure can save up to five working hours each week. This is what the app offers: scheduling, shift management, and labor cost control. Managers can create schedules and communicate them to the employees both from the desktop account and the mobile app easily and quickly. By automating work time calculation, Homebase also helps managers forecast labor costs and compare them to the planned budget figures.

As the developer emphasizes, using spreadsheets for leave management costs more than you expect. Up to 14000 minutes a year are spent on requesting leaves and getting them approved in a team of 200 employees, and this is the amount of time that can be used more efficiently with a special leave management tool.