Deputy

What we like most about this software is the ease of clocking in and out and tracking our employees locations.

We like almost everything about Deputy besides how it and ADP integrate. We are still trying to figure out how to connect the two.

I like that my staff could clock in and i would see that they arrived on our clients sites. The booking system for Head office administrator staff also worked very well.

It was abit challenging to navigate. A simpler more efficient way would make a great difference.

I felt it was important that our company, or at least my department, moved into the 21st century. We had highly paid managers AND an admin person wasting an entire day or more doing a roster for 10-person teams each month. I tinkered around with it, putting in preferred shifts for each staffer, which busy days in the week we needed more staff, their off day preferences, the minimum amount of time between shifts, how many days a month some of the contract staff worked, etc, then let Deputy do its AI thing and automatically come up with a proposed roster.

You can run it a few times to come up with different schedules, if the first time doesn't look ideal. Then it can be exported IIRC (or copied and pasted) including to excel (because "that's how we do things here" — people were just more used to viewing their roster on a spreadsheet, sigh).

The best part is, once you set most of the parameters, subsequent rostering is a breeze. Users can log in to put in their own leave dates ahead of time. IIRC they can also request among each other to change shifts.

During the trial, tech support was super responsive and even helped customise the backend of my account to allow a certain permutation we needed.

Overall I really liked Deputy. Very regretfully, it was not adopted by my company. It didn't make it past my supervisor level as he felt that there would be management resistance to paying monthly for this service.

Nothing really. It took time to figure out what parameters had to be input because my test team's roster had 5 different shift types over 7 days a week, and different people had different preferences for their rosters. It wasn't impossible to set Deputy up for this, but it was not straightforward (nothing to do with Deputy).

It also seemed at first like Deputy was more set up for people to go in and grab the shifts they wanted. But I could ignore that and run the scheduler to get rosters done quite quickly after a while.

It could take a bit of time for the automated scheduler to do its thing. But still much faster and fewer errors than human effort.