7shifts Reviews

Pros

You can work from the website or from the app which is convenient if you're bouncing between locations. On the website, I can preset shift times for faster scheduling. You can set multiple roles which is beneficial for staff that do multiple things. You can assign an hourly to each role as well, so you can see an approximation of your labor for the week.

Cons

Unfortunately, the preset shift times do not translate over to the app so you do have to manually do it which takes a little more time. Although I have my preference set to get push notifications for almost all the app features, they don't always come through.

Alternatives Considered

HotSchedules

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

7shifts was less expensive and much easier to use plus it integrated with our point of sale system.

Pros

What I like most about this software is that it was super easy to use for me and my staff it’s just very easy and it starts off. You can just do the basics and I am as a new business owner. I was just you know priorities come up, so scheduling was just first and foremost, but it has so many features that you can add on them at any time which is great they have help then it’s a wonderful automated system and they’ve just added a ton of new great features. I am excited to use.

Cons

Honestly, I can’t say I didn’t like anything in particular or what I least liked I think with maybe what I least used was something where we would be things that bigger organizations might need to use that or not important or not necessary for my particular business, but there is nothing that was the least liked

Alternatives Considered

Homebase

Reasons for Choosing 7shifts

Didn’t know anything about homebase it was used by the previous person. I try to get in there and start using it switching over and it was just a headache so I just looked for a new system start fresh and this one was just doing easier and glad I did.

Switched From

Homebase

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

So there’s a ton of different products out there seven shifts is a reasonable price and it had the features I needed for my industry so I looked at several products, but I focus on what they what features they had and what my priorities were at the time and it matched

Pros

I liked the messaging platform it had for teams. I enjoyed the ease of seeing team member roles. I liked the ease of seeing the daily line up of teams in different departments. I enjoyed being able to flag attendance within the app and reports generated from that.

Cons

I did not like third party app integrations that users would be automatically opted into. Forecasting was a bit clunky also unfortunately.

Alternatives Considered

HotSchedules

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

We didnt. We went with HotSchedules.

Pros

has been very effective as a team communication solution.
It is amazing for team scheduling and is easy to use.

Cons

No bad experiences with 7shifts. Meets needs.

Pros

A super all-in-one app that does pretty much everything. Scheduling, to time clocking, to event calendar, to messaging, to task assigning. Price is fair and function is easy to use.

Cons

Messaging within the app is slow and unreliable. Amount of notifications received is too much and not easily customizable. Not having the ability to show a staff’s shift from another department that work multiple departments when printing is kind of a bummer (if I am scheduled to work as a manager in admin department, I will not show up in the restaurant department even though I am assigned and appear on schedule).

Alternatives Considered

MakeShift and HotSchedules

Reasons for Choosing 7shifts

I started with Microsoft excel. It’s free, but you get what you paid for. Workarounds after workarounds. Then I tried “when I work”. It’s great, but they charge by the employee, which gets pretty expensive after 50+ people. MakeShift was recommended by our payroll company because our time clock is sync’d with MakeShift so we can effectively use labour forecast vs actual labour. But that’s the only thing good about it. Hate the fact I need to use 3 different apps - 1 for manager, 1 for staff scheduling and 1 for messenging… price is also higher too. 7shifts’s pricing is excellent. Flat fee, unlimited employees was huge. Plus the functions available was almost perfect! It hits every check mark and then some. If our time clock data (ADP) can be uploaded to 7shifts or have an integration between the two, that would be a dream come true!

Switched From

MakeShift, When I Work and Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

Price was the biggest decision maker. Ease of use. And the fact the dev team listen and evolve to make the end user’s experience better is the key reason for the switch. I’ve already seen over 10 major upgrades over the past 2 years. No other products out there can do what 7shifts can!

Pros

We have been using 7Shifts little over 2 years now and it has been a great experience.

User interface is very simple. It an app that apple would have build. Very basic but yet very powerful. If you are getting this app i highly recommend getting all packages. End of the day it saves you money and head ache. Advil pain killer is expensive and good for your body

Cons

I dont have any dislike so far in 2 years

Alternatives Considered

Buddy Punch and ScheduleFlex

Reasons for Choosing 7shifts

Hard to use, bad customer service, behind todays technology

Switched From

HotSchedules

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

Easy of use, lots of capabilities, communication with team members very easily, free text message automatically daily reminders to employees for their upcoming shift

Pros

Responsiveness. Ease of use. Employees not complaining for once!

Cons

With scheduling, we have staff that want to have the same recurring shift week to week. This changes often so having a template for a time period versus just a person is proving difficult. Staff keep saying "but I thought that was my shift every week?" What's happening is, they offered their shift to someone else so when we copy the prior week to a new week, the wrong employee gets assigned the shift. This is getting hard to manage.

Need the ability to print out day schedules the same way weekly ones look. We print our schedules out daily and assign breaks from them plus we leave notes about the day. Currently the only option to print a day view is in list mode and that does not show you visually where holes in scheduling are. We did find a way around it by printing the day view from the manager dashboard but that prints out the website not just the schedule.

We close out pay periods but they are still just sitting there as open, so that's confusing.

I wish we could name our group chats and create multiple versions with the same people. We like having group chats around topics to keep messages separate and easy to reference.

Pros

If I have an issue the customer service is great. They even take my suggestions and have made improvements!

Cons

Sometimes it is slow to load so that is anoying

Pros

Ease of use, customer service, speed, responsiveness, price, does exactly what we were looking for.

Cons

Can't think of a con...just a great program

Alternatives Considered

Deputy, ScheduleFlex, When I Work and HotSchedules

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

It just seemed like the best product for the price...and again the customer service was great too.

Pros

I like the interface and the ease of use.

Cons

Lack of options compared to other softwares, in my opinion.

Pros

It was critical for us to find software that would track each employee's unique schedule availability and limitations, and allow each other to automatically see the shift pool. It has reduced headaches and made team communications about the schedule virtually seamless.

Cons

We are missing the ability to see which manager makes what changes to already published schedules - it would be nice to have a "versions" page to see who made what switches. We would also like a bit more robust availability planning capability. Some of our staff can only work seasonally, others who work every other weekend - it would be nice to be able to set this up.

Alternatives Considered

When I Work and WhenToWork

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

7Shifts offered so many features in the premium level, for about $10 more than what we were paying with our previous software. It also really mattered that 7Shifts doesn't charge per employee. We have room to grow without exponentially increasing related expenses.

Pros

The software has a lot of potentials to be great, the best part of it is the integration with POS so we can have real-time data.

Cons

There are sections like time-sheets that are unnecessarily hard and not user-friendly.

Alternatives Considered

HotSchedules

Reasons for Choosing 7shifts

The software was very user-friendly but the app itself keeps crashing or lagging delaying our process when doing scheduling and payroll.

Switched From

Homebase

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

Did not like the Fourth interface.

Pros

During the time that we have used this software, there have been wonderful developments and rollouts that nicely enhance our operation. Keep up the good work!

Cons

It was very basic to begin with. Coming along nicely and will likely be the best product if they keep it up.

Pros

Setting up availabilities and scheduling is very easy and helpful.

Cons

Sometimes there'll be a notification even though the notification has already been resolved.

Alternatives Considered

Slack

Reasons for Choosing 7shifts

Homebase was not as functional and user-friendly as 7shifts appears to be.

Switched From

Homebase

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

Cheaper, user-friendly and does a lot of the tasks I wanted to be done.

Pros

The best features of this program is all around communication. That includes communication from ownership on down. Everyone always has quick access to the notes and day to day. Management log and scheduling were the biggest attractions for us.

Cons

The biggest con for me so far is the permissions. We can only designate one Administrator and we cannot customize all permissions down quite as much as we need or would like. Sometimes we are stuck with "all or nothing" permissions decisions for some staff members.

Alternatives Considered

HotSchedules

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

The toast integration option, pricing, trial period, and overall product availability that we were looking for.

Pros

I love 7shifts! It's easy to use, easy to schedule, easy for my staff. I can communicate with the whole team at once, can look at the whole month of requests off, the reports are handy for seeing who has had what time off, etc. The team can trade shifts amongst themselves and everybody can get ahold of each other when needed. I also like that I have quick easy access to things like employee start dates, etc without having to go digging through their file!We do not sync this with our POS or payroll, but I do use it to double check when I have a time clock entry that seems off.It's also nice to be able to easily access the schedule from years prior!All around good product at a fair price!

Cons

I wish that some features of this product were not only available with the more expensive plan. Reminders for important staff dates would be helpful, but isn't worth the extra $$. Same with a manager log book, I'd love to use it with our business, but it's not worth the price difference to unlock these two items.I've only ever had a couple of issues I've run into. While support wasn't always able to correct them or address them head on, they've always done what they're able to &/or have put in feature requests, etc.

Alternatives Considered

Sling and Schedulefly

Reasons for Choosing 7shifts

We were a brand new business and had shopped around for scheduling software. I also had previously used several other products, but wasn't necessarily keen on what I'd used before. We opted for a different product, but it didn't have the same usability as 7shifts. Glad we realized this early on! We made the switch and have no intention of changing again!

Pros

I do the scheduling for a staff of 60+ so the ease of copying shifts to another week/day is great

Cons

The integration between this and Toast is great but could still use some work. We primarily use it for the purposes of seeing when staff have clocked in or not and as a manager it would be great to turn this feature on and off for the different departments ( front of house, back of house, bar). It would also be great to turn the feature off for clocking out vs clocking in at the end of the shift vs beginning. As a front of house manager I’m not as concerned with back of house clockins but still get 12 notifications for their staff a day, and I am more concerned about front of house staff clocking in but not as concerned with them clocking out

Pros

It is very user friendly. Schedules are easily created and notifications are sent to employees if any changes are made. This eliminates me having to individually reach out to employees. I also love the announcement board for when I need to inform my crew of changes to the menu or any other operational changes.

Cons

When inputting events into the calendar it would be nice to have more formating options. Ex. Type of event, time frame (if it extends past 12am making it so it doesn't show on the calendar for the next day)

Also when employees try to book time off outside of the allotted time frame it would be nice if the admin still got notified since most employees just text you about it anyways. Perhaps the message could say "your time off request has been submitted but it is outside of the scheduling time frame therefore it cannot be guaranteed" or something like that.

Pros

The longer we use 7shifts the better it gets. I use it for scheduling, employee newsletters, our employees use it to chat back and forth with eachother and the owners, shift swapping, time-clocking (with PUNCH) and payroll. It basically replaces the need for an HR position. Because we've used it now for a few years, I can quickly scroll back to last year and see our sales trends over time to predict sales and predict staffing requirement. Sometime I forget when we changed our hours last year, so I can easily check that through 7shifts. Also I can play around with future schedules to analyze when we need to hire a new employee or if it's worth it to add or delete days from our schedule.

Cons

Nothing I don't like...but here is an idea for a new feature. I wish I could get an immediate alert (to the owner) if the sales go higher or lower than set parameters for a certain time period. This would tell me that something is wrong (like no sales for 2 hours...uh oh...did we close? is something broken?) or the restaurant needs help (like 3 hours worth of sales in 45 minutes...oh no, we're slammed and need extra hands).

Pros

It is easy to use and has made things easier with the Toast integration. We switched from Jolt to 7 shifts and have much more control over metrics and tying everything together with the Toast integration. Task lists are easy to create and use. Event calendar helps us communicate events to staff

Cons

Labor tracking and scheduling hours are confusing and dificult to determine how those numbers are calculted. They dont align with Toast, so we can never figure out how 7 shifts system is coming up with the labor numbers from the schedule. It is difficult when salaried employees are included on the schedule and Toast caluclates differently

Pros

We have used 7shifts since we started our company. We wanted something that could be easy for everyone to use, and we've seen a ton of efficiency improvements over the years! It has been really easy to have different managers run the schedule with ease, and the analytics are helpful for running payroll as well. Would definitely reccomend 7shifts and 7punches as a combination tool.

Cons

No cons to mention! The improvements over the last few years have really made 7shifts and outstanding product.

Alternatives Considered

Square Point of Sale and QuickBooks Enterprise

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

Ease of use and easy to setup.

Pros

No glitches ever (previous app we used glitched and made errors to employees' schedules)
Budgeting tool
Ability to put in events
Color coding departments and jobs
Ability to print PDF schedule
Communication (chat and message options)
Employees can trade shifts
Availability and time off request features are perfect
Multiple locations allows you to use employees at different sites, but you can see in lighter color where they are already scheduled to work
Great value for the price
They keep making it better and will let you know when an update has been made

Cons

There's a minimal international fee charged monthly for 7Shifts. But that's all!

Pros

While 7Shifts was the first and original scheduling app we tested, we did try 2-3 others. But we kept coming back to 7Shifts. At the center of this decision was the ease of use, and nice design that allowed for easier scheduling. A scheduling app has to do that and work for us. Without this ease of use scheduling can be a a tedious task. 7Shifts makes this a breeze.

Cons

I think 7Shifts has a very good core product (scheduling). And I only wish we had more time to test other features. But that is more on us, than the app. The one feature I wish we had back, as an administrator I wish I had the ability to quickly help employees with their password management. Resetting the passwords used to be easy some years back, whereas the admin was able to set-up a password for the end-user. That feature went away some years back.

Pros

I like that I can use it on my phone or computer!

Cons

Sometimes the publishing gets confusing and I can’t find workers when I need them

Alternatives Considered

Toast POS

Reasons for Choosing 7shifts

More user friendly

Switched From

HotSchedules

Reasons for Switching to 7shifts

We got both

Pros

It is easy to understand, set up and the customer service is extraordinary!

Cons

I wish there were more manager capabilities in the mobile app, but the app has improved already since it was first launched, so I imagine it will only get better.