There are three easy steps to the setup process: first, define your shifts, second, enter shift explanations and notes, and third, enter employee information. Once you’ve entered this information into your schedule maker, you’re all ready to go.

The first step in implementing a schedule maker is to define your shifts. Since many organizations have unique shifts, it’s important to find schedule software that will allow you to define your own shifts. Shifts are used to tell an employee when to start and end working. When you define a shift, you can enter the start and end time of the shift, as well as specific information, such as a description and abbreviation for the shift. An example of the description would be that it’s a day shift and the abbreviation could simply be the letter “D.” You can also indicate break lengths for the shift, so that unpaid break time is subtracted from the total length of the shift. A quick key could be assigned to make it faster to assign shifts when you are making schedules. For example, you could use the letter “D” on your keyboard to assign the day shift. A different color can also be set for each shift to make reading schedules easier. If you have a color printer, you could print color-coded schedules for your employees.

The second step to setting up new schedule maker software is to define explanations. Explanations are used to add even more detail to a shift. The shift description says when they will be working, such as day shift or night shift. An explanation description can be used to indicate location (ex. 3^rd floor or cardiac unite), assignment (ex. training or charge nurse), or job (ex. customer service). You can also use explanations to describe time-off (ex. sick time, vacation, or holiday).

The third step of the schedule maker setup process is to enter employee information. When you enter employee information, you can type in general contact information, such as name, phone number, email address, and the number of desired hours they wish to work each week. You can also define positions and special skills, as well as enter miscellaneous comments about the employee.

Making schedules with software is very easy and will save you a lot of time, so don’t let the implementation scare you away. First, you need to set up your shifts. Second, set up shift explanations. Third, enter in your employees. The initial set-up of schedule maker software is as easy as one, two, three.

It’s helpful to have reminders for when you need to email or distribute employee schedules, prepare management reports, and schedule time-off requests. In an employee scheduling program, you can type in a name and description of a reminder that should display each time you open the program. You can also set the date and frequency to indicate when a reminder should appear.

Even though the reminders automatically appear when you open an employee scheduling program, you can also view the reminders at any time. Each reminder in the list will display an icon that indicates whether the reminder is past due and has not been viewed, past due and has been viewed, an upcoming reminder, or an upcoming recurrent reminder.

If you need to remind employees about an upcoming event, instructions, or other special information or announcement, you could use a cover page for the employee schedules. Add a Microsoft Word document as the cover page to your employee schedules, so they can be printed, posted, or emailed together.

Legends can also be printed on employee schedules to help them remember the details about each shift. In schedule views that display many days, you’ll likely rely on abbreviations to make everything fit on one page. The legend will list the shifts and explanations. You can choose to print the abbreviation, description, start and end time, break length, total length of a shift (minus the length of the break), and quick key associated with the shift. It’s helpful to print a legend on any schedule that uses abbreviations, so you can be sure all employees will understand the schedule.

If you have additional miscellaneous notes, in addition to the announcements on the cover page and the schedule legend, you can add notes to a text box in a cell.

As you can tell, if you need a little extra help remembering all the little schedule details, an employee scheduling program has the tools you need. You could set and view reminders of upcoming tasks that need to be completed, add a cover page to schedules, print a legend on schedules, and add miscellaneous notes to a schedule.

You can run a customer list report to see your customers’ contact information and frequency of their visits. If you would like to contact customers who haven’t schedule an appointment for a while, you could run a report that lists customers who have not had an appointment in a particular date range. This can help you book more business.

You can also run a report that lists appointments by customer. This list can be used to see when a customer has been in last or to remember what type of services the customer has had in the past.

If you’re running a marketing or sales campaign to attract new customers, view a new customer chart in your appointment scheduling software. It can show you the number of new customers each of your employees, or your entire staff, have added during a specific time period. It’s a great way to find out how well your new campaign is working.

If you’re looking for promotion ideas for a new marketing campaign, look at a services summary. This report will show you how many appointments were scheduled for each service your staff provides and the percentage of each service, so you can easily see which of your services are the most popular.

Prepare for performance reviews by looking at employee productivity reports. It lists the number of hours an employee is available and the number of hours an employee is actually scheduled to come up with a productivity score. You’ll be able to see which employees are the busiest and which employees need to schedule appointments more often.

You could also view a services summary chart to monitor your employees’ use of time. This chart displays the number of hours your employees have scheduled for each service.

Appointment scheduling software can help you schedule appointments faster and easier than using a paper appointment book. Having appointment and customer details at your fingertips is handy. And, having a waiting list is helpful for keeping your appointment book full and providing good customer service. Don’t take for granted the reports and charts that are available to you, too. Customer lists can help book another appointment with previous customers. The services summary and new customer chart can help you plan and track new customer marketing campaigns. Employee productivity and services summary chart can help you prepare for your employees’ performance reviews. The information inside your appointment schedule can help you.

Instead of wasting time flipping through a paper appointment book, you could quickly see your employees’ calendars on screen. When a customer wants to schedule an appointment, the first thing you do is find an open time on the calendar. Using business scheduling software, you can find an open time by simply clicking a button. You’ll be able to search for a specific duration of appointment, a specific time of day, a particular employee, and a specific day of the week.

If a customer needs to schedule more than one appointment, such as a recurring appointment, an appointment scheduler can do so fast and all at one time. While the appointment scheduling window is still open, you can simply click on the repeat appointment button to set a repeating pattern, such as daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. You could also select the dates separately for each of the recurring appointments.

Sometimes a customer wants to schedule an appointment sooner rather than later, but you can’t accommodate them because your schedule is already full for the next couple of weeks. If you’re using business scheduling software instead of a paper appointment book, it’s easy to add them to a waiting list. That way if an appointment is canceled in the meantime, you could call customers on the waiting list to help get them in early.

A new feature in business scheduling software is the ability for your customers to request appointments online. This can give them an opportunity to contact your business about an appointment after hours by filling out an online appointment form on your website. When your appointment scheduler sees the list of appointment requests, they can quickly find and open time and schedule the appointment as they normally would do and then confirm the appointment with the customer via phone and/or email. This appointment scheduling feature is a professional way of providing an alternative communication method for your customers while still being able to schedule appointments fast.

Being able to schedule appointments fast is key to good customer service. Business scheduling software will allow you to find open times and schedule appointments quickly in person or by phone. You’ll be able to schedule repeat appointments all at one time. You could help customers get an appointment sooner than their regular scheduled appointment by using a waiting list. And, by allowing online appointment requests, customers can schedule appointments without even having to call or stop in. 

A couple of ways to increase job satisfaction with employee scheduling software is to create flexible schedules that consider time-off requests as well as the desired number of hours employees wish to work. Employee schedule software is great for making “employee friendly” shift schedules, but also for achieving business goals.

How does employee schedule software handle time-off? You can assign time-off the same way you would assign any other shift. The time-off option can be used for vacations, sick time, leaves of absence, holiday hours, jury duty, or any other time off an employee may need. If you copy shift patterns into the future, you’ll inevitably end up with employees who are pre-scheduled for days they wish to take off. You can easily remove them from that shift first before assigning time-off. Managers can run a time-off report to view the days an employee has planned time-off and the days they are not listed to work.

How does employee schedule software help employees get the number of hours they need? You can enter the number of hours they wish to work in this software. Some employees may only want to work a few hours each week, while other employees will want to work 40 hours a week. A scheduling assistant in the employee schedule program can be used to show you how many hours each employee wants to work, how many hours they are scheduled to work, and the percent complete, i.e. the actual hours scheduled compared to the number of hours the employee wants to work. You can sort the scheduling assistant by each of these columns, which makes it easier to pick an employee who needs more hours and helps prevent an employee from being given overtime unnecessarily.

It’s easy to give employees the schedules they want using employee scheduling software. Employees will like it when they are not scheduled when they’ve requested time-off. They also like being scheduled for the amount of hours they want to work.  Help increase job satisfaction by using employee schedule software.

In the Products section of the business plan, you’ll want to write about the products and services you want to provide now, as well as in the foreseeable future. You’ll want to list the product features or characteristics, especially any that make the product unique compared to your competitors’ products. You’ll also want to list the benefits of the product or service. It’s important to know how the product will help customers since you can use that list of benefits to convince prospects to buy your product.

The Pricing section of the business plan should describe your pricing philosophy and the actual prices you are planning to charge your customers. The pricing philosophy refers to how you want to be perceived in the marketplace. You could choose to offer the products at prices lower than most of your competitors. Or, you could choose to charge more. If you charge more, you should offer more features in your product or a service as part of the sale of the product because if your product is more expensive than most of your competitors, there must be a perceived higher value that will help your customers justify spending more.

You should also explain how you determined the prices. If you have many competitors, you’ll need to consider what they are charging and find a way to fit within that marketplace. If you do not have many or any competitors, you’ll need to take the actual cost of your product and add your desired profit to come up with the price you want to charge customers.

For the Place section of the marketing plan, explain where your customer will learn about and buy your products. Will the customer buy directly from you in a brick and mortar building or on an ecommerce website or both? Will you have sales reps on staff or will you pay an outside reseller to sell your product? You’ll need to describe the distribution channel you think will work best for your new business.

The fourth part of a marketing plan is all about Promotion. The promotional plan explains how you will get the word out about your product in order to draw in customers and convince them to buy your product. Advertising, public relations, sales promotions via direct mail or email are common ways of promoting products. Be sure to keep a close eye on the promotions budget because promotional activities tend to come with significant costs.

Keep in mind the “Four P’s” of a marketing plan when you’re writing a business plan. Thorough descriptions of your products, prices, places, and promotions will help guide you as you search for new customers. Business planning software includes examples, instructions, and how-to advice to help you write your business marketing plan.

An old-fashioned way of tracking upcoming expiration dates for certifications and licenses is to take a big, paper desk calendar (or two) and handwrite the employee name and the name of the certification or license that will expire. A tickler file and Post-it notes are some other rudimentary ways of remembering expiration dates. Most recently, managers have been adding tasks to the Microsoft Outlook or other email management tools or online calendars. There are two main problems with these methods of tracking training, certifications, and license renewal dates. First, they don’t allow you to run reports listing upcoming expiration dates or employees who have not yet renewed a certification or license. These reports are helpful if you are trying to plan ahead before a vacation or during a leave of absence, or if you prefer to plan training for more than one employee at a time. The second problem is that you still need to document information about the certification or license in the employees’ human resource files. Instead of using two separate systems, you could save time consolidating these tasks. The fastest and easiest way to add training, certification, and license information to human resources documentation and a reminder alert system is to use human resources software.

In human resources software you’ll add both the start date/effective date and the end date/expiration date for every training, certification, and license record. For the training records, you’ll receive a reminder prior to the start date. For certification and license records, you’ll receive a reminder prior to the expiration date. When you enter the record, you’ll also add information about the hours, cost, agency, location, and notes, if applicable, all at the same time.

Human resources software will allow you to make one entry for multiple employees. If a group of employees all attended the same training, you could enter one training record for the entire group. Each individual employee training record would have the same dates, as well as information about hours, cost, agency, location, and notes, but you would only have to enter the training record once. It makes human resource documentation even faster.

Human resources software also has reports available that can show you reminders for upcoming expiration dates, employees who still need to renew a certification or license or hasn’t taken a required training class yet, and a list of training each employee has completed.

Human resources software will help you track training, certifications and licenses. Reminders for upcoming expiration dates will help ensure certifications and licenses stay up-to-date. You’ll save time with human resource documentation by adding the information into one system instead of having one method for reminders and another method for human resource files. The reports are an easy way to know exactly which employees have had and which ones need a specific training, certification, and license renewed. 

Human resource software includes a security system that lets you set a username and password for each user to protect confidential employee information. Or, you could set it to windows authentication which means users must use the same username and password to log into the human resources software as they do to log into the computer itself.

You can manage security settings for each user to limit their view to specific types of information, specific departments, and/or for read-only access.  It’s helpful to set up department managers as users, so they can view and keep the staff records up-to-date for the employees in their department. For example, if the department managers have access to the software for the employees they manage, then they can add vacation or sick days when an employee takes time off or they can type performance reviews directly into the software.

Backing up the human resource database is easy to do. You can use the backup function directly in the software. There’s even a reminder that pops up to help you remember to back up your data. Or, if you have the human resource database file on your server or network, and you regularly back up your server, then the back-up would already be handled automatically. It’s important to back up all your crucial business information, including your human resources data, so you can access the information even after a tragedy, such as a computer malfunction, office fire, or natural disaster.

Often small businesses start out with some paper files stuck in a file cabinet and/or a couple of spreadsheets to keep their staff records. Over the years, those few paper files can turn into a mountain of messy paper work and the couple of spreadsheets turn into a maze of tedious bookkeeping and possibly even double entry. Human resources software keeps the paperwork to a minimum because you can keep all the employee information in one place electronically.

In addition to being an easier, faster, and better way to manage employee information, human resource software will also allow you to keep confidential information secure, back-up staff records for disaster planning purposes, and avoid running out of physical storage space for paper personnel files.

Job descriptions and performance reviews go hand-in-hand. The best way to evaluate employees is by going through the work responsibilities outlined in their job description which lays out expectations for employees and can keep them focused throughout the year.

Preparing performance reviews can be stressful because it can be easy to cross over the line by either glossing over it so quickly and vaguely that it doesn’t provide useful feedback an employee can use to improve, or by being so overly critical of an employee’s performance that it can be completely demoralizing to the point where they feel hopeless and don’t even want to try to do a better job. Having consistent forms and processes that are used throughout the company can help to regulate reviews and make them more useful.

Human resources information systems can help you prepare both job descriptions and performance reviews. It is easier to have one software system that can do both and store employees’ personnel records all in one place. Human resource information systems are a great place to create and store all your human resources documentation, including company policies, employee handbooks, HR forms, guidelines, and checklists. Even though job descriptions are unique to each position or employee, it’s good to have a consistent template to use for each company wide. For example, each could include a section for their title, department, basic scope of responsibilities, principal responsibilities, education and training requirements, decision making and financial authority, supervisory responsibilities, organizational structure (who the employee reports to), working conditions, which include physical work environment and effort, as well as travel expectations.

The same principal is true for performance evaluations. Even though each individual employee will be reviewed by the performance of their specific work responsibilities, the performance review form that is used for all employees should have a similar set of performance categories and the same scoring system.

It is easy to type a performance assessment right into a human resources information system. You can type the date into the date field. There will be a description for each performance evaluation, so you can differentiate between a 90-day probation performance review of a new employees and a regular annual assessment of an employee who has been with the company for years. Each category will have a place to type in comments and a score. At the end of the review will be a place to add overall evaluation comments, which are a great place to write about goals and plans for the future. The category scores feed into calculations for the total score and average score of the entire performance review.
Preparing job descriptions and performance reviews can be a dreadful task, but it is helpful to have a human resource information system to keep these items consistent across the company and organized together in one place

The problem is that most business owners or managers are still using out-of-date spreadsheets or scheduling templates. This is the old way and could be costly. Spreadsheets make it difficult to change schedules on the fly, disseminate this information to employees, and valuable time is lost.

Scheduling software changes everything from managing staff, work schedules, custom reports, employee vacation, time off, breaks, overtime hours, and gives you a back up plan when you need it most. Quick report printing makes it simple and easy for managers to maintain a high level of organizational skills so they can focus on more important tasks.

It’s time to get your schedules done faster, better, and easier! If you are a business manager, department manager, or a supervisor and have problems with scheduling, staff availability, shift conflicts, or want to create schedules in minutes then you should use scheduling software.

Scheduling software capabilities that will save you time, and eliminate confusion.

Schedule Planning

1. Schedule by shift
2. Schedule by hour
3. Schedule by position
4. Schedule by location
5. Change or modify employee schedules easier.
6. Create Custom Reports – Daily schedules, rosters, time off, vacation, labor cost, and easily print them on demand.

Scheduling software can eliminate shift rotation issues, over scheduling, or under scheduling. Here are four things you should look for in a scheduling software solution.

1. User friendly – The scheduling software is easy for everyone to use, manage, modify, and schedules are available for employees at any time.

2. Cost Savings – The scheduling for management saves time performing shift scheduling, planning, and shift reports. The schedule reports should be custom and easy to maintain.

3. Saleable – The scheduling software includes technical support, maintenance, and can expand as you grow your business.

4. Credibility – When selecting any schedule software for your business or organization you will want to research and read actual user testimonials, software demos, technical specifications, and computer requirements.

Keep in mind following a 1/3 planning and 2/3 execution rule for all aspects of planning improves your ability to schedule and manage people.

You might also be interested in other software for managers or businesses owners. Management software is available for business management, business owners, and if an entrepreneurial venture is calling your name you can see if your business model will be profitable.

Business software can assist with scheduling, management, business plans, marketing plan software, financial projection, balance sheet, cash flow, income statement, and financial forecasting. This will save you valuable time, and money. You can also find many business plan templates, business plan samples, scheduling templates or just software to manage staff files, staff records, or sensitive employee information.