Free employee scheduling software reviews

Every respectable employee scheduler has time clocking features, and Shiftboard is no different. Like most providers on our list, Shiftboard allows employees to clock in via the app. You can set up time-frames for shift clock-ins as well as allow only assigned shifts to clock in, which helps you avoid any overtime and labor compliance issues. The free work schedule app is free on all pricing plans. Managers can receive alerts for no-shows and review the clock-in history for individual employees.

Additionally, you can easily onboard employee data from Excel into Shiftboard without the need to punch in everything manually. There are three Shiftboard pricing plans to choose from: Basic, Professional, and Enterprise. While there are no free plans available, Shiftboard is one of the cheapest options on the market.

However, the number of teams you can create is limited to a maximum of It grants you access to useful features like customer employee profiles, an unlimited number of teams, third-party integrations, employee shift trading, and a rating system for workers.

Shiftboard offers multi-channel customer support via phone, email, and live chat. OpenSimSim is the perfect solution for business owners who coordinate large teams in multiple locations. This free scheduling software runs laps around the competition since it lets you arrange shifts for an unlimited number of employees in as many locations as you wish.

OpenSimSim boasts free iOS and Android apps that both managers and employees use to get valuable info on the go. You can communicate with your entire team or individual employees from the OpenSimSim app, which lets you share photos and files. Unfortunately, the time-tracking feature is a paid upgrade.

When making a schedule for your workforce with this free employee scheduling program, you can choose between daily and weekly views. While Homebase allows you to plan one month in advance and When I Work requires you to upgrade to a paid plan to do that, OpenSimSim allows you to make unlimited schedules for an unlimited number of employees in an unlimited number of locations.

Once you create free employee schedules with OpenSimSim, you can save and reuse them in the future. This feature is a great time-saver, especially if you manage a large staff or a group of volunteers in a number of different locations. Restaurateurs and other hospitality managers really like the fact that this schedule generator lets you plan shifts according to departments.

You can select generic options, like the kitchen, bar, and floor, or you can create departments that are unique to your business. More than just a shift scheduling free app, OpenSimSim can be used to plan labor costs, too. This is yet another feature that saves time for managers and increases the overall productivity of your business. When your team expands from five people to 15, scheduling becomes really complicated, really quickly. You can add notes for your employees when creating a timetable.

Eliminate confusion by sharing the address they are working from, explaining where VIP guests would like to sit in your restaurant, or anything else you need to communicate. Shift acknowledgment is another great time-saving feature. OpenSimSim even sends shift reminders to employees to cover all bases. Finding workers to cover extra shifts is also made easy by this free staff scheduling software.

The once-stressful process of calling employees and checking their availability is now done through the app. Set the hours and the position that needs filing and send it to all qualified employees, or just a select few. Interested employees apply through the app and managers confirm those hours. Such high scores land have it in contention for the best schedule app in terms of user reviews. Managers use it to share important notifications with their staff, like the new menu in a restaurant or a new clothing item in a store.

Photos, hyperlinks, and documents are all supported, so you can communicate with workers as you would in any other messaging app. The only difference is that this is a dedicated channel for work-related topics. Employees love the app because they can see their schedules and those of their colleagues. If managers permit it, employees can request shift swaps. Managers then approve or deny the request with a simple click on the scheduling app and the schedule gets updated automatically.

Another reason both employees and managers love this free scheduling app is the option to request time off and set the hours when they are unavailable. OpenSimSim schedule planning software takes care of the complicated task of managing your workforce, but it remains simple to use.

Once you enter your name, email address, and business name, your account is created. This free employee scheduling software opens a chat window with video instructions to help you navigate the system. If you are left with any questions, you can start chatting with an OpenSimSim customer support agent right then and there.

They are backed with screenshots to provide complete clarity. Customer support is available around the clock and easily accessible. Both free and Premium plan customers are eligible for the same level of customer service. However, features like time clock, timesheets, reporting, and advanced scheduling are limited to Premium users. Findmyshift provides a free shift scheduler for teams of up to five people. This feature-rich freeware lets you create shifts, track the time employees spend at work, and communicate more efficiently.

The learning curve is minimal since the program boasts a sleek interface. Findmyshift has good news for larger teams, too. Making an employee schedule with this free software is very much like creating one in Excel. The program recognizes all time formats, so you can make shifts that last from 9 a.

While the free plan lets you plan a week ahead, the Business and Volunteer plans have no such limitations. The same restrictions are applied to how long the previous schedules are stored.

On the other hand, paid plans save all your timetables. Sharing the latest timetable with your co-workers is as simple as pushing a button. All team members will get notified of their schedule via email, push notifications, and text. Another feature that facilitates easy communication and smooth running of your business is shift swapping.

And while some competitors like Sling, for example, charge extra for it, Findmyshift offers it for free. Employees can use this free work scheduling app to request time off and managers can approve or deny those requests on the go. Ensuring discretion in the decision-making process, managers can keep time-off requests visible only to them.

After all, having two employees request the same days off and awarding them to only one could cause tensions and affect morale. If you want to prevent solidarity clock-ins and -outs, you can even instruct the software to take photos of employees at the beginning and end of each shift.

Employees can use a pin or a password to clock-in. Managers can turn on automatic clock-outs. And if you need to know the exact whereabouts of your team when they begin a shift, you can rely on GPS data from their phones.

The information collected by time clocks is stored in timesheets. Those can be revised and used for payroll purposes, ensuring you pay your workers fairly for all the hours they work. Creating a shift schedule with this free software is as easy as can be. The demo schedule is populated with enough information to give you insight into all the features offered by this amazing product.

You can also import employee data from an Excel sheet or a payroll system. Play around with the system first. This intuitive application will make for a smooth transition from Excel sheets. If you get stuck creating a free employee work schedule, you have a myriad of resources at your disposal.

Skim through the knowledge base articles or video guides to find an answer. You can also watch a training video or sign up for an upcoming live webinar. In case you prefer personalized care, you can chat with a customer support agent during work hours. Rounding up the support offer, Findmyshift also offers help via email. Outdoing the competition once more, Findmyshift lets you suggest new integrations and access its API if you upgrade to a paid plan. And the answer is YES! Yes, there is.

There are actually a number of rosterapps, and many of them enable you to create free employee work schedules. The answer to this question varies according to your business needs. Do you operate from a single location or various? How many employees do you have? Would you like to track employee attendance with the same tool, or do you already have a system for that?

It will speed up your planning time with its hourly planner templates, which you can copy from week to week. All these features are available free of charge, as long as you work from a centralized location. On the other hand, if you have a few restaurants spread out across town or you coordinate a team of wedding photographers working from a different venue every week, then OpenSimSim or Sling might be the best free employee scheduling app for you. Neither of these put limitations regarding the number of employees and locations.

However, both charge for the time clock feature. Read More About Float App. By Kickserv. This Employee Sc Read More About Kickserv. Acuity Scheduling. By Acuity Scheduling. Read More About Acuity Scheduling. By Out Crowd. This Workfo Read More About Findmyshift. By Data Management. This Empl Read More About Timeclock Plus. By Resource Guru. This Emplo Read More About Resource Guru. By Pingboard. This Employee Read More About Pingboard.

Communication is possible without sharing personal information or phone numbers. Automatic Scheduling: It allows shift managers to automatically schedule their staff while taking team availability data into account. Its plans do not restrict the number of employees for whom the schedules can be created.

Mobile Application: Homebase provides a mobile app to simplify scheduling for both iPhone and Android users on-the-go. Sales Forecasts: It provides sales forecasts for businesses and helps set achievable labor targets while preparing workforce schedules.

Deployment: Platform:. It manages full shifts, trade shifts, time offs, team tasks and staff availability. Security and Scalability: When I Work addresses any security concerns of the businesses by offering them an around-the-clock security audit mechanism that is available days a year.

It comes with an architecture that can be scaled up as per the growing needs of an organization. Shift Swapping and Dropping: It offers employee shift trading with other staff members and also enables them to drop shifts in case of an emergency. Applicant Tracking System: It lets the users track every job application and collaborates with the hiring team for the interview process. It also adds the new recruits to the company schedule. Resource sharing is supported cross-origin and it allows secure interaction with its API and web application from the client-side.

Labor Saving Calculator: It comes with a labor-saving calculator that can be used to calculate return on investment and offers insightful inputs to manage labor cost, time spent and much more. Labor Compliance: It comes with proactive tools to maintain labor compliance. Users can enforce custom and mandatory breaks and can receive overtime alerts of the staff. The tools help organizations remain compliant to the labor laws of the state and follow scheduling that is secure across different countries.

Manager Log Book: It comes with a manager logbook to jot down shift details, daily notes and any follow-up tasks. The default logbook categories it offers track shift activities, and categories can also be customized to track activity metrics. Employee Engagement: Its aggregate statistics track team engagements like late arrivals, sick leaves, no shows or dropped shifts. It can help track each location to let the shift managers identify the most engaged employees and where additional training may be required for increased productivity.

Pay rates can be customized for extra hours and public holidays. Integrations: It allows integration with existing payroll and POS tools used by the businesses. Sales Tips: It provides useful sales insights once the employees complete their shifts to gauge their productivity. Sling Sling is a cloud-based workforce scheduling and communication application that organizes all aspects of work on a single platform. It measures labor costs and considers budget information while preparing staff schedules.

It sends alerts when businesses save money on labor costs. Keep reading to find more. Excel is a more common replacement for pen and paper. Excel allows you to easily resize rows, columns, and even individual cells. Excel was designed as a database and accounting tool.

It is in these tasks that it excels no pun intended. It can also reach a large number of people quickly.

Dropbox is another option that can facilitate your schedule distribution. With Dropbox, you first create your schedule then upload it to Dropbox, where you can specify who is allowed to access the file. Dropbox can then be instructed to send notifications to all parties involved via email, text, and various other means to let your employees know that a new schedule has been posted.

Is there a way to combine the creation process and the distribution process into something a bit more streamlined? Read on to find out. Google Docs takes the creation of your employee schedule and puts it firmly in the cloud.

You create your document online. And you can specify who has access to the document. With Google Docs, the distribution has been streamlined considerably, but the creation still leaves a lot to be desired. Like Word, Google Docs was meant for text-based projects like letters and reports. As such, its most powerful features are focused along those lines and not toward making the scheduling process easier for you.

You can also add color-coded blocks to delineate employees and include tasks and responsibilities in a more logical and visually appealing way. Google Sheets, like Docs, can be distributed quickly and easily by sharing the document with specific users. Those users can then access the document whenever and wherever they choose.

The ease of distribution is certainly a plus and the fact that Sheets is much easier to manipulate for scheduling purposes than Docs makes it a better choice amongst free scheduling tools.

But is there yet a better option? Calendar software like Microsoft Outlook can be an excellent replacement for pen and paper, word processors, spreadsheets, and their cloud-based counterparts. And chances are you have a free scaled-down version of Microsoft Outlook on your computer already. So what makes Microsoft Outlook a viable though not ideal choice for free employee scheduling software? Microsoft Outlook 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 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.