6 Reasons why staff rostering software is better than Excel

Many businesses still rely on Excel for staff rostering. While Excel is a useful tool for organizing, analyzing, and storing data, it lacks essential features that make staff rostering software far more efficient. In this article, we highlight 6 advantages of using a staff rota app or dedicated staff rostering software.

Modern staff rostering software is designed to be accessible across multiple devices, including computers, tablets, and smartphones. This ensures that the staff rota is always available, no matter where your team members are. As a manager, you can easily oversee and adjust the schedule on the go. Additionally, employees can report their working hours directly from their mobile devices. By submitting time records immediately after a shift, you reduce the risk of forgetting crucial details, making your staff rota app even more efficient and reliable.

03 Get organized

To efficiently assign shifts, it's advantageous to categorize employees based on specific criteria such as location, education, past experience, skills, and personality traits. For instance, at Bemannica, a growing staffing company in Sweden, employees are organized based on their location and skill set. This approach enables Bemannica to promptly compile a list of suitable candidates whenever a new order is received, ensuring timely communication with clients. While Bemannica utilizes Timezynk for this purpose, manual methods remain effective. It's crucial to proactively create lists encompassing relevant combinations of criteria pertinent to your business, ensuring smooth and effective operations.

Communicate clearly & frequently

We've all experienced the frustration of meticulously planning, only to face miscommunication issues when the agreed-upon time arrives. To ensure clarity within your team, establish consistent communication practices, such as holding meetings to outline scheduling procedures and providing written guidelines. Once implemented, adhere to these routines rigorously, holding both yourself and your employees accountable. Over time, these practices will become second nature, ensuring smooth operations and timely access to necessary information for payroll and invoicing. Streamline your processes further by utilizing standardized reporting formats and designated submission deadlines. By fostering a culture of clear communication and accountability, you'll minimize scheduling mishaps and ensure your team operates efficiently.

Facilitate administration around salary and invoice management

The most important thing to facilitate the handling of the documents for your salary and invoice systems is to have well-developed routines. You can use paper templates, Excel templates or a scheduling system like Timezynk. The important thing is that you have a fixed format for the time reporting and fixed days when the reports must be submitted. Then it will be easy to see who needs an extra reminder. The time report should contain the employee's name, possibly which client the employee worked for (if you invoice your time), start and end times for the work shifts, absences and OB and overtime. The employee accounts and totals, so you only need to certify the time sheet when it comes in.

Make sure to bring in the time reports every week. This makes it easier for the employees to report when they have the work passes fresh in their memory. It also means that you can be at most a week late with documentation and invoicing. Once you have received all the documents, you summarize the information and register it in your salary and invoice system. With Timezynk, the documents are transferred automatically.

Collect everything in one place

Scheduling affects and spans large parts of your business. It controls how your staff work, is affected by your order entry, is the basis for salary and possibly also invoicing. It is an important tool in budget work and for planning personnel needs, organization and skills development. To make it quick and easy for you to take advantage of this, our tip is to collect everything in one place. Whether you have it in a central scheduling system, a folder on your computer, or maybe a shelf of binders and a whiteboard you need to be able to quickly find the right information depending on the task you have to perform. Organize the scheduling according to the different parts you are working on. For example, put the needs schedule next to the wishes schedule and the order intake so that you have all the background material collected when you have to add next month's staff schedule. Collect timesheets together with the staff schedule so you can compare and see any discrepancies. Have your skill-based staff lists together so that in the event of illness or other schedule changes, you can quickly find the right replacement. Have ready-made templates available for the weekly schedule, wish schedule and change SMS so that it is easy and smooth for you to keep your communication routines.