Company Blog - ShiftPlanning.com

4 months ago Allena Rouse 1 Comments

ShiftPlanning Has a New Requests Tab + Schedule Employees in Month View

ShiftPlanning has gotten even easier to navigate! Requests for a shift trades, vacation time, and open shifts along with shift approvals can now be found in the dedicated 'Requests' tab.

These items previously lived within the schedule tab in the action menu, which was hard for some users to find. On the overview section of the 'Requests' tab, employees will easily have access to "request time off".

On the 'requests' tab, there will also be visible a notification bubble to alert managers of the number of issues that need to be resolved.

The employee scheduling application has gotten more flexible as well! The ability to draft schedules in monthly view is now available. Similar to the daily and weekly views, shifts are created by clicking within a date field and entering shift time information.

As always, please feel free to let us know of any questions, comments, or concerns. For more information, reference the guides below:

Happy Scheduling!

5 months ago Allena Rouse 2 Comments

Join ShiftPlanning's New Referral Program

*UPDATE

All accounts should now have access via the dashboard. Please let us know if you need assistance getting started.

The new referral program is designed for users who are advocates of ShiftPlanning system to receive monetary commissions for recommending the software. Users will receive a generous 20% commission for the lifetime of referred accounts. Signing up for the referral program is simple and can be done directly from the 'dashboard' tab of the software.

Interested parties can sign up for the referral program by visiting the "Do you enjoy using ShiftPlanning?" area on the right column of the dashboard.
After signing the reseller agreement, users will be taken to the referral portal. users can access the referral section at any time in the left navigation of the 'dashboard' tab.
At the top of the referral section, users will see a summary of referral action. This summary will list the number of referrals who have signed up for a trials and indicate if that trial has converted. This area will also be where users can keep track of their referral revenue.
Spreading the news about ShiftPlanning is easy. In the "Get the Word Out!" section of the portal, it's easy for users to send messages via facebook, twitter, email and more! With less than five minutes of work, users could be generating cash.
Users can also choose from a library of web banners, text links, and email templates to help market and refer the product to their contacts.

We're excited to be able to reward our users for their contributions and look forward to hearing any feedback or suggestions about the ShiftPlanning Affiliate Program.

Happy Scheduling (and Sharing)!

5 months ago Allena Rouse 0 Comments

Meet ShiftPlanning's Board of Directors

Meet the dynamic group of professionals that make up our Board of Directors. Our board members have a plentitude of experience and wisdom to share with ShiftPlanning to make our employee scheduling application even stronger and more effective. The ShiftPlanning team is most excited about how our leadership and their knowledge will positively affect our users and their experience with the software. If you haven't already, feel free to check out coverage of the announcement in Techcrunch.

Find out more about our directors below:

REAS KONDRASCHOW - CHAIRMAN
http://www.3rhospitality.com
Reas is the founding partner of 3R Hospitality and a partner in Aedificium Capital. He has a wealth of international development expertise having worked in senior positions on global brands including Holiday Inn Worldwide, Burger King Corporation, Marriott International and Wyndham Hotel and Resorts.
CHRISTOPH JANZ - DIRECTOR
http://www.pointninecap.com
Christoph is a co-founder of Pageflakes and has more than ten years of experience in designing software applications and Internet services for consumers. Back in 1997, Christoph co-founded German Internet startup DealPilot.com, one of the first comparison shopping services which got funded by Bertelsmann and has later been acquired by Shopping.com. Before and after that he was involved in various software projects and Internet startups.
HUGO BONJEAN - DIRECTOR
http://www.hugobonjean.com
A critical thinker with an MBA and a bestselling Author on the topic of sustainability and social justice with over 15 years executive experience with global Fortune 500 companies where he was a leading negotiator and mediator in international business initiatives. Hugo has extensive experience in business development, strategy and market positioning around the world.
RADEK BURKAT - DIRECTOR
http://www.pinkbike.com
Founder and CEO of Pinkbike.com. Pinkbike is the largest single sport online community in the world with over 1 million users every month.

5 months ago Ryan Fyfe 0 Comments

Improved Notifications when Publishing your employee schedules

One of ShiftPlanning's biggest advantages over offline employee scheduling software is ShiftPlanning's ability to keep everyone in the loop when schedules are published & re-published (as well as to send out automatic reminders 60mins & 24hrs prior to work times).

Our notifications go out via e-mail and sms and abide by notification settings both setup by the business as well as by the individual employee.

We've just released 2 features which will help to streamline your communication as well as make it much easier to keep staff in the loop during your employee scheduling process.

Branded Notifications

Starting this morning we now include your business logo on all notifications that go out vs. the previous ShiftPlanning logo. This will help improve communication to your staff, and help them to immediately recognize why they're receiving these notifications. If you haven't uploaded a corporate logo you can easily add one from ‘Admin' -> ‘Business Details'.

Available Shifts Included in Published Schedules

Up until now notifications only went out to staff that were actually scheduled, and there was no convenient way for ‘publishing' open shifts. Alongside scheduled shifts we now also take a look at which shifts in the timeline have open slots and send out a convenient reminder to your staff (that are available to work at those times) to let them know their are shifts that they can request to pick-up.

Open shifts have been an incredibly popular component of our employee scheduling software, and we are excited for the improved communication that this added functionality will provide.

Here is a preview of both of these new features in action:

(The ShiftPlanning Rocket Logo is our custom account logo)

5 months ago Ryan Fyfe 0 Comments

Filtering your employee schedules by Employee, Position and shift type.

ShiftPlanning provides a fast and intuitive interface to schedule staff, and with today's release of ‘scheduler filtering‘ things just got a whole lot easier! Schedule filters are an easy way to quickly zone in on specific shifts within the timeline.

You've always been able to filter quickly be location/position through the schedule change menu, but you can now apply a different set of rules on-top of this.

Here is a look at what this new filter option looks like, and below we've outlined the different individual options as well as how you can best take advantage of them.

Filter by Employee

The most useful filter is the ability to narrow down on individual employees or employee. This will allow you to quickly navigate through the scheduler only viewing their staff specific data.

Filter by Secondary Location

You can now filter by secondary locations allowing you to quickly visualize/group shifts that are assigned to that location. With our broad platform we have clients in all different types of industries and it's exciting to see how this filter is being applied across different industries. Here are a few examples that we've seen from our clients.

Food & Beverage / Catering
Secondary locations are being used to assign locations, or ‘jobs' to shift times. With the new location filter you can now quickly group these shifts together.
Job Sites / Projects
Another unique use we've seen for our secondary locations is assigning them as job sites & projects to then assign different staff against them. For example a client ‘install', or ‘construction project' might require a group of different staff positions to get the job done. With this filter you can now group these shifts together to more easily view/manage these projects/jobs.
Assets
This is one of my favorite use cases, as it truly illustrates the flexibility of our platform. Using secondary locations to assign an ‘asset' to a shift. For example our clients in industries like limousine / delivery / etc, are using the secondary location to assign ‘vehicles' to shift times. With the new filters they can now quickly filter in this case based on ‘vehicle', knowing how many hours that vehicle has been scheduled, etc.

Filter by Shift Type
ShiftPlanning now provides the ability to quickly filter shifts on the scheduler based on the following criteria:

Open Shifts - Shifts that contain open slots
Empty Shifts - Shifts that have no staff assigned.
Incomplete Shifts - Shifts that have either no staff assigned or still have extra slots open.

Filter by Search Term

The Shift Notes & Title field are also a flexible option in our application that allow clients to communicate different details alongside shift times. You can now add a filter to the schedule based on a search term across these two properties. This will help you quickly zone in on shifts of a certain series, or that match different different search terms.

Visibility

Whenever a filter is on, we're essentially ‘hiding' shifts from display. We felt that it was important to communicate this visibility to you when you're within the scheduler. This is increasingly important once filters are turned on, and you are navigating through the scheduler. We'll let you know how many shifts are being filtered out from the display, with the option to click on the new ‘status bar', to open up the filter options, to turn them off for example.

In the effort to improve visibility even when filters aren't turn on, we now display a similar status message when you're in the ‘employee' mode. The employee mode shows shifts that are already assigned to a staff member(s), which means that any ‘un-assigned' shifts will be hidden from view. We now will show you how many shifts that we couldn't display in this mode. Clicking on this message will bring you to the ‘position' view where you can quickly see these empty positions.

Known Limitations & What's coming

We're aware of two limitations that are currently being worked on by our development team:

Copy Schedule - Doesn't adhere to this second filter level, and currently works like before on the location/position filter.
Print schedule - Doesn't adhere to this new filter level and will operate the same as before.

We're working to resolve these two limitations as well as rolling out a more robust print experience over-all to include new views, and better consistency between the print views and the actual schedule views themselves.

We hope you enjoy these updates! As always, please feel free to let us know of any questions, comments, or concerns. For more information about setting up a ShiftPlanning account, reference the guides below:

Happy Scheduling!

5 months ago Ryan Fyfe 0 Comments

Improved Reports & Options for our online time clock software

This morning we released a number of highly requested updates to two components of our application. These updates, although small in appearance, are big on impact and provide some of the long-awaited missing elements to make our online time clock software a truly capable alternative to other time clock software & terminals. Available this morning:

Automatically Round clock times

From listening to our clients we found that a key way to improve both clock behavior as well attendance is to 'force' employee clock-time behavior by restricting their ability to 'ride the clock'. The two new settings are applied within the time clock software at the time of clock in/out. If these settings are enabled we will communicate to staff at clock time what their 'actual' clock-time will show-up on their time-sheet based on current time and rounding rule.

For example if you have staff that frequently come late, or leave early you can now adjust the round times to deflect this:

The effect that this will have on your staff clock behavior is significant as they will now be 'penalized' for showing up late, or leaving early, as well as gain no benefit from trying to 'ride' the clock to jump them up over the next time increment.

For example if an employee is meant to start at 9am, and you have this set to 15mins. Unless they show up BEFORE 9am, their clock-time will automatically be rounded up to 9:15, so they've essentially lost a quarter of an hour from their pay, as well as their 'late' presence is clearly noted in your Time Sheet attendance reports.

We've tried to make this communication as clear as possible within our time clock software, so when staff clock in/out we provide full visibility of what is going on. For example:

Break Deductions from Timesheets

A long awaited, and highly requested of our online time clock software was the ability to apply 'break rules' to employee time sheets. A number of our clients were using 'clumsy' work-a-rounds for this. For example having employees clock in/out before/after lunch, or manually adjusting time-sheets to deduct the break times.

Break-Rules can now be applied to time-sheets at the time of reporting saving all of these headaches. For now this is available in the 'time sheet summary' report, and is an option that can be set at the top-right. Here is an example of what this looks like:

Setting: (top-right)

Before/After:

Updates to Reports:

A small update has been made to the entire reports module which will greatly improve performance and workflow when switching between reports. All timeline/options will now be 'held' when switching between different reports. This makes reporting significantly faster when switching between report types with different options/staff selected.

Employee’s ID On Profile:

Rolled out this morning is a baked in 'employee id' field on all ShiftPlanning user profiles. This field will be used for improved integration with payroll & other 3rd party applications, and is already available through our API.

To all users that were previously using a custom-field for this we recommend migrating the id's into our 'native' employee id field, as this is the field that will be included across all future reports/exports.

Happy Scheduling!

5 months ago Allena Rouse 0 Comments

Watch A Video Overview Of ShiftPlanning's Online Scheduling Software

In this video, Shiftplanning's helpful employee scheduling features are explained along details about navigation and where to find the tools that you need to build a complete employee schedule. We'll be continuing to release useful tutorial videos alongside the materials already found at shiftplanning.com/support. If there is a specific feature that you'd like to see covered, please leave a comment below!

For more information about setting up a ShiftPlanning account, reference the guides below:

Happy Scheduling!

5 months ago Allena Rouse 0 Comments

Shiftplanning's 'Schedule Wizard' Updated with Auto-Fill Feature

The 'schedule wizard' has received incredible feedback from our users and is helping them save copious amounts of time in shift assignment. However, the ability to fill open shifts was amongst the most requested upgrades to the wizard. ShiftPlanning’s new ‘Auto-filled Shift’ feature will streamline the process to auto fill open/empty shifts based on the employee’s availability. Users only have to select a timeline/shift (available for a particular shift, daily, weekly, and monthly timelines) and run the 'Schedule Wizard.' This feature works quite nicely with the previous announcement of templates.

Step 1: In the schedule tab, go to the date range and the view that you'd like to fill with employees.

Step 2: Access the gear-shaped action icon, and click on 'schedule wizard'.

Step 3: The wizard will automatically detect the empty/open unfilled shifts. Click on the option ‘Fill these shifts’, if you want to fill the empty slots/shifts.

Step 4: You have the option either to fill both the open and empty shifts or to uncheck the open slots option to only fill the empty shifts.

For empty shifts you can specify the number of employees required.

Step 5: Wizard will show unavoidable conflicts. Take care of any specified conflicts

The shifts are now automagically filled!

You also have the ability to auto fill a specific shift. Click on the option ‘Auto-fill shift’ at the right bottom corner of the shift management screen.

Select the number of employees you want to fill the shift with.

As always, please feel free to let us know of any questions, comments, or concerns. We have a dedicated forum for feedback about the the autoscheduler and other features of our latest release.

Happy Scheduling!

6 months ago Allena Rouse 0 Comments

Upload 'Templates' To ShiftPlanning's Work Schedule System

When most managers trial our system, their time is generally being consumed manually creating schedules via spreadsheets. It's for that reason that we allow for an easy import for .csv or .xls into our system.

The importer can be found by accessing the gear-shaped action icon on the scheduler under the schedule tab. Previously, the importer accepted only two common schedule formats both of which required staff assignments.

But now, we've made available a new upload format that lacks the staff requirement and can be used to upload shifts as templates that can be staffed later or used for open shifts.

Are there any other formats that you'd like to see our importer accept? If so, leave a comment below. For more information about setting up a ShiftPlanning account, reference the guides below:

Happy Scheduling!

6 months ago Allena Rouse 0 Comments

Update on Upcoming/Past Work Schedule Shifts

Shiftplanning's staff profiles now contain upcoming/past work schedule shifts similar to those found on the dashboard.

This is accessible by employees viewing their own profile with managers having access to all profiles. This feature gives managers the ability to view an individual employee's recent and upcoming schedule for the next ten shifts in the future or ten in the past.

Along with shift times, employees and managers can also use the "details" button to change availability or request shift trades for the particular shift time.