Good software for scheduling employee shifts in a restaurant.
July 21, 2006 10:23 AM   Subscribe

I'm looking for good software to schedule employee shifts in a restaurant.

I run a small restaurant (around 15 employees) and am looking for a good software solution for scheduling shifts. At the moment we run around 10 shifts per day, split between 15 employees. Some are students, others work full time. There is also a possibility of opening another restaurant, which would increase the number of shifts to around 20 per day and the number of employees to around 30.

Today we use Easy Schedule Maker, but that solution isn't good enough since it basically requires our staff manager to fill in all the shifts by herself. What I'm looking for is a software solution, which would make this automatic. In an ideal world it would do the following

- Web based
- Staff could input when they can and can't work - preferably online - or this could be input by our staff manager.
- The shifts would be filled automatically by the program based on how much each employee likes to work each month, and when those employees can work. Those employees who like to work more get more shifts.
- The schedule would be published online.
- The staff could swap shifts without the staff manager having to change the schedule. In a dream world this would be done via some sort of web form.
- We could somehow mark which employees can't work certain shifts. So, for example that younger staff can't work late shifts etc.

Is there any solution out there that resembles what I'm looking for? Googling around I found this solution, which seems to have a lot of what I'm looking for (except that it seems to need a Windows server) - but it looks a bit complicated.

Does anyone have any experience with using scheduling programs you would recommend?
posted by einarorn to Computers & Internet (8 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
i don't want to derail, but a friend of mine (who works in the industry) and i have talked about writing such an application. we've had several arguments about whether it would be more successful with an ad-supported model or a subscription one (before building it, even! web 3.0, baby!). Would you be willing to pay a small subscription rate for such an application? Say, $15-30 a month? Or, as my friend argues, is there zero budget for this sort of thing in the restaurant industry?
posted by fishfucker at 10:39 AM on July 21, 2006


Response by poster: If the software did what I want it to do, then I absolutely would be willing to pay either a fee in the beginning or a subscription fee.

If we had the right program and it would be easy to use it would save us an incredible amount of time and frustration (or that's what I hope at least :-)
posted by einarorn at 10:46 AM on July 21, 2006


One of those things that wouldn't take terribly long to write, & may be better to write exactly to specification than try to adapt to another system. Shameless plug: email in profile.

Especially marking which employees can't do different shifts is a strange feature. Adding it would be trivial, if the software was yours, but could be very complex if not.
posted by devilsbrigade at 10:58 AM on July 21, 2006


Response by poster: Especially marking which employees can't do different shifts is a strange feature

That doesn't sound like a strange feature. The strange part might be that I used age as an example. As another example, some employees cannot work in the kitchen or at the register so I would want the software to take note of that.

If I don't find what I'm looking for I'll send you an email.
posted by einarorn at 11:06 AM on July 21, 2006


fishf: you might want to consider writing that as a module for (say it with me, now) WebGUI, rather than a standalone system; it will take a certain amount of intake, as with all frameworks, but I suspect it would be worth it... and it might make the module easier to sell, if you wanted to sell it instead of renting it, since all that other functionality would come along for essentially free.

WG is GPLd; I'm not sure precisely how the two would interact...
posted by baylink at 11:18 AM on July 21, 2006


Wellll, there's a couple of freebies listed on freshmeat: phpSched and Employee Scheduler. Hopefully one will work for you!
posted by shepd at 11:49 AM on July 21, 2006


Response by poster: Thanks, shepd, but those freebies seem to be a lot like Easy Schedule Maker, which I'm using now. phpSched is still in beta (and the last version seems to have been out in 2000). I'm going to check out Employee Scheduler a bit better, although I don't think it does what I'm looking for.

Just to clarify, I'm definetely willing to pay for a good solution. It doesn't have to be free.
posted by einarorn at 12:46 PM on July 21, 2006


We've used WhenToWork.com for several years and it seems to fit the bill for what you need.
posted by disaster77 at 12:49 PM on July 21, 2006


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