Whether you own a small business in Mansfield or a chain restaurant in London, you can surely benefit from digitising your business. When you digitise your business, you can gain great operational benefits and even increase your revenue. Studies have shown that companies that use online scheduling systems, reported more productivity amongst their staff, and could avoid scheduling conflicts in their entirety. This article delves into all the benefits a business can gain from implementing an online scheduling system. Keep reading to find out how you can benefit from online scheduling as well.

Timesheet Planning: Increase Your Operations

If you still write down your employee’s schedule on a piece of paper, it’s time to make a change. Scheduling on paper takes lots of time, and often comes with a lot of complications. Paper schedules can get lost, or contain errors. It often occurs that employees who have leave that was accepted some time ago, are still scheduled by mistake. This causes a lot of frustration for managers, business owners and employees, as a replacement has to be found for the hours that now appear to be under-staffed.

In addition, employees who have accidentally lost their schedule must contact their employer each time they need to know their working hours. This can be time-consuming for the establishment and can cause frustration as well. Besides, when adaptations need to be made to the schedule, each employee involved must be contacted and made aware of the changes. This can cause great problems with operations.

These mistakes can be easily prevented by making an employee timesheet online. Online timesheets have lots of benefits for both the company and employees. Some of the benefits can be found below.

Time-Saving Opportunities for the HR Department

As a manager or planner, you’ll find that using an online timesheet comes with great benefits. One of the biggest benefits for your HR department is the time they can save by implementing an online schedule. In such a system, employees can enter their availability ahead of time. You may then add all sorts of information, such as skills, clearances, number of required working hours and more.

The system will generate the optimal schedule, based on the information programmed by the company, and you won’t have to go through employee’s files and previous schedules anymore. So instead of having to draw a schedule every week, and having to make adjustments when the schedule contains mistakes, you’ll be done with just a few clicks of a button.

Customisation of the System

One of the benefits of using an online scheduling program is that you can customise it to the needs of your company. This means you can implement shifts, and peak and off-peak hours if needed. The system can generate the optimal schedule with the best people available for the shift. It can also clock in employees automatically, which makes waiting in line for the physical clock-in system needless.

During peak hours, the system will make sure that there is enough staff, while it can optimise the schedule to minimise the staff count during off-peak hours. In this way, overpaying for unnecessary staff hours can be avoided. Furthermore, it helps to keep production flowing and makes sure that your customers get the best experience.

Source: picture from Unsplash.com by Christina @ wocintechchat.com https://unsplash.com/photos/34GZCgaVksk 07-11-2019

Online Approval System

An online scheduling system is for more than just scheduling work time. It can also be used to let employees apply for leave and to approve or deny it. Once leave is approved, the employee will appear as unavailable and will be blocked from being scheduled during the leave period. In this way, scheduling conflicts can be avoided.

This also works for setting preferred working hours for your employees. Some employees might not be available during some hours, because of other obligations, such as studies or dropping off kids. This can all be implemented in the system as well and is another way to avoid scheduling conflicts. It’s also possible for employees to enter their travelling costs, receipts, and other costs.

Improve Productivity

Implementing an online scheduling system is a great way to increase your employees’ productivity as well. Most scheduling systems have a time tracker that immediately tracks all worked hours, which can easily be approved and paid out utilising the system. The time tracker helps employees stay focussed on their work and track the hours that they work as well as their break times.

This system can help employees to dedicate their hours to certain tasks more efficiently. They can also access reports, showing them how much time they’ve spent on certain tasks and reviewing whether they are spending the right amount of time on their clients. Besides, keeping track of the time employees have spent on certain tasks, can help bill the clients more accurately.

Easy Report Generation

Another thing that managers can greatly benefit from is the easy report generation that can be done with an online scheduling system. Whether you need a report of the worked hours for a specific employee or an overview of the total operation hours of the company, you can generate a report with the system. This function can be quite useful for payrolling, and for reviewing the operational excellence of your establishment, as well as for tracking employees’ (sick)  leave and absence. With the report system, it’s also possible to calculate staff cost per job or hours worked per area.

Online Time Scheduling Programme: Benefits for All Organisations

An online scheduling system has many benefits when it comes to operational excellence. With the many functions such a system offers, scheduling becomes much easier than when making a schedule with pen and paper. Employees can easily set their availability, while managers can schedule without error. This avoids conflicts and helps increase operational excellence.

Moreover, using an online scheduling system as a time tracker can help employees track the hours they spend on their customers, improve productivity, and help managers bill clients more accurately. Overall, an online scheduling system comes with lots of benefits that can help all sorts of organisations.