Why using Excel is not a good idea for employee scheduling
Excel is a very useful tool but not when it comes to employee scheduling. It is an inefficient and time-consuming tool to use for your employee scheduling.In this article, let us look at why using excel is a not a good idea for employee scheduling.
It can’t handle shift changes
Managers have to manually update the schedule and call to inform employees when there are shift changes to the work schedule. The change of schedule template can take hours to tweak into the format you want and it leaves room for mistakes.
It can’t show employee availability
Spreadsheet is hard to get the complete view of all the work. You have to view the information between tabs. When the formula is wrong, it will affect the other formulas as well.
It can’t handle employee time off
Employee that request for time off can do this via different channels, e.g. send in their request via email or fill in a paper form. You can only check the record manually when you are going to plan work scheduling. What's more, the requests may be missed or lost.
It is not easy to maintain
Create scheduling template may be easy using excel, but when it comes to scheduling for a big organization, it may pose a BIG headache! Imaging the number of rows of information, the amount of “copy and paste" that needs to be done when you have 10,000 employees in the organization.
You can’t share your schedule
Excel confines changes to only one person. When you need to inform your employee about their work schedule change, you have to print and get them to your employee every time changes are made. You can send them an email, but you can’t be sure that your employees have received and seen the schedule. It is an inefficient way to share your schedule.
It doesn’t have a time clock
Excel doesn’t have a built-in time clock. You have to transfer time card records with excel spreadsheet schedules. Comparing time cards to excel spreadsheet is a tedious exercise and the inaccuracies may be costly for your payroll.
It can’t do payroll
You have to manually calculate every single employee’s pay per month on the spreadsheet records. The records required for payroll may be more than the basic hours of employee work schedule. It may also including overtime, time off and other ad-hoc payments. The risk of making mistakes is high and maybe costly to the organisation. Why don’t you switch to the available 247Shift technology that would make the process simpler? With tools that provide you with real-time updates, your employees can easily access the schedule from the cloud storage system from different platforms wherever they go via mobile or tablet. Work schedules need not to be stressful for both, management and staff.
Automate your scheduling system with minimal effort and time required today and reap the rewards of increased productivity!
