Have You Outgrown Your Excel Employee Schedule Template?

September 24, 2019

Let’s face it, your scheduling process is taking more time, with more employees to manage, more rules to follow, as well as more stress and headaches from other associated tasks like compiling payroll and attempting to stay within your OT budget.

It’s likely you’ve been using Excel as your employee schedule templates up to this point. While Excel is known for being one of the first to do some pretty great things, such as improving department efficiency, and eliminating the common practice of putting all of our data down on paper, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the right choice to handle the countless intricacies of schedule management.

Here are some valid reasons to toss those excel work schedule templates in the recycle bin:

Excel Doesn’t Work Well for Employees

Employees don’t care for Excel because it’s not accessible. Accessibility is all about being mobile. Employees need to know when they’re scheduled to work, and there’s no better way than giving them access to their schedule anytime, anywhere.

Excel Can’t Send Out Reminders

The majority of employees would likely appreciate having a reminder sent to their phone notifying them of an upcoming shift. This is especially helpful if your schedule changes frequently due to employees swapping shifts, or picking up open shifts at times they normally don’t work. Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t offer the ability to send out reminders.

Excel is Too Limiting

For employees who want to swap a shift, cancel a shift, or schedule a shift, these changes to the schedule in Excel will require reprinting the schedule for everyone. The inability for a scheduling system to provide real-time schedule changes and employee updates is not ideal for the employee nor the department.

Excel Doesn’t Communicate

When employees need to communicate or discuss a schedule change, they can’t do it via Excel. This can lead to confusing notes, texts, emails, and social media messages that can get lost or worse yet, never received.

Excel is Holding You Back

Excel is slow, outdated, and simply doesn’t have the capabilities to keep up with today’s busy and complex scheduling needs. Imagine having a scheduling software that everyone has access to at any time; one that can be updated in real time, and has messaging capabilities to organize your scheduling task. Sound too good to be true? Not so fast.

Where to go After Excel?

You know you’re in need of a much better way, but aren’t exactly sure which direction to turn. That’s where employee scheduling software has you covered.

Employee scheduling software offers:

Reporting and Shift Optimization

With employee scheduling software, you can view the hours worked by employees, see who still needs more hours this pay period, and optimize your schedule accordingly.

Communication and Messaging

Need a better messaging system? Are you still using separate apps? Or perhaps you don’t have an established messaging system yet, or an effective way to communicate between staff.

With employee scheduling software, you can get all of your messages organized in one place, complete with time stamps, eliminating common communication problems such as when a staff member says they didn’t get a message regarding a shift change.

Shift Swapping and Schedule Changes

With employee scheduling software, employees can swap shifts, drop shifts, and pick up shifts with minimal oversight. This relieves a lot of burden and stress from the scheduler, who in the past had to be the go-between in orchestrating shift swaps and last-minute schedule changes.

Still confused over what to do when your current staffing schedule templates are out of date? The answer is simple. Ditch the excel templates and start using employee scheduling software from Schedule360 today. We know scheduling, and we know what you need to organize your scheduling task for good. Contact us today to schedule a customized demo to see how Schedule360 can change the way you manage your workforce.