SchedulingDirect – An Employee Scheduling Solution

Jane can’t work on Tuesdays, Bill is on vacation this Wednesday, and Anne is only available on the weekends. Scheduling employee shifts is a thankless job that most managers spend too many hours dealing with each week. SchedulingDirect is a web-based solution that automates the process, ensuring that scheduling conflicts and cost control are always taken into consideration when putting together employee shifts.

Create upcoming work schedules from scratch within SchedulingDirect, or use previous shift schedules as a template for the upcoming weeks. Once your whole team is on board with using SchedulingDirect, you can enable employee self-scheduling and allow employees to make their own vacation requests through the cloud-based system. These requests will show up in your dashboard, and you’ll be able to approve requests at your own leisure. If an employee’s schedule changes at the last minute due to illness or another unforeseen conflict, SchedulingDirect will make the necessary adjustments and notify all impacted parties automatically through multiple channels.

To make its platform even more useful for businesses with shift employees, SchedulingDirect has created attendance and payroll modules that enable managers to track employee absences and punctuality. Data from SchedulingDirect’s time sheets can be exported to a payroll service provider, which offers even more flexibility and usefulness for businesses.

Practical Uses:

• Make sure your employees aren’t working more than 40 hours a week
• Approve or deny vacation requests whenever you have time
• Receive alerts when a staffer has forgotten to clock in or out
• Approve time sheets before they’re sent to your payroll provider

Insider Tips:

• Opt to get emails when employees submit new requests within SchedulingDirect
• Set up a dedicated terminal to encourage employees to clock-in when they arrive at work
• Copy shifts from a previous week to expedite the scheduling process
• Review how many hours each employee is scheduled to work in a given week

What we liked:

• Employees are automatically notified when schedules have changed
• Managers can receive instant alerts when an employee fails to clock in
• Employee requests show up in a manager’s dashboard
• SchedulingDirect makes it easy to export attendance records

What we didn’t like:

• SchedulingDirect doesn’t currently offer payroll integration

Alternatives:

• Deputy – http://www.deputy.com
• ShiftPlanning – http://www.shiftplanning.com
• When I Work – http://wheniwork.com

Company Info:

• Launched: May 2014
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Montreal, Canada
• Founded by: Sebastian Dragnea, Charles-Edouard Desmarais, and Brian Luong
• Web site: https://www.schedulingdirect.com

Costs:

• Free trial