7shifts is a restaurant workforce and scheduling management application, which also features collaboration features, from the Canadian company of the same name.
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Podio
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Podio is a cloud-based platform for organizing team communication, business processes, and reporting in project management workspaces; also it may be used as a light CRM platform. It enables workflow automation and integrations. It includes a free version and paid packages with additional features.
7Shifts is ideal for a broad number of restaurant clients, whether it is a single unit, independent location or multi-unit, multi-jurisdiction group like ours. Pricing is very reasonable, and as mentioned earlier, a lightweight and intuitive platform makes it easy to implement and maintain, and scalable for growth
[Citrix Podios's] customer support is very quick and they provide you an option to convert your project into small tasks so that you can better assist your team and extract maximum work out of them hence I will totally recommend its usage. I could not think that keeping track of tasks could be this much easier and smart. It is a fully customizable tool that manages my tasks efficiently and deal with them effectively.
Very easy for people without coding or technical skills to set up and maintain information in "Apps".
Platform is very easy to learn and adopt--it's intuitive.
Project management potential is awesome--instead of having to fit your projects into a structure that is industry specific, you can build an app that tracks what you want, in the order you want it.
Has a "relationship" field that allows you to relate an individual item or record to a record in another app. It effectively gives some of the functionality of a relational database.
Very useful for information sharing when staff members are in different regions or places.
When creating schedules I wish there was a way to remember the last schedule you were on instead of ordering them in alphabetical order.
When working on a schedule, again when you revisit it, it alphabetizes the employees instead of keeping them in the order you add them. This is pertinent for our business because we're reservation-based and work off of a rotating schedule where the lowest ones are called off if there are not enough reservations.
A customizable profile status – would love to work with Podio in silent mode (logged in while working, but "not available" for requests when in heavy work mode)
Podio customer service is great. The cloud and mobile service is fast (almost instant, continuous syncing). With a solid user base, and backed by Citrix, this is a serious business solution. They're also constantly working on improving and making it more powerful. I anticipate it only getting better
I would say everyone at our store really appreciates the fact that we have 7shifts. We would be lost with out it. It would be hard to find anyone that does not support the software.
Podio support was always responsive and very quick to provide answers and assistance during the history of using this product, their support team has always been top notch. There have been several cases where calling podio support a feature was not available and they provided either workaround solutions or added the features straight into their roadmap.
For me, 7Shifts has the same amount of functionality, but for a much better price. The app functionality of 7shifts was easier to navigate and allowed me to do more than HotSchedules. I've recommended it to several other local businesses who have implemented it as well and had great luck.
Compared to Salesforce: Podio is not as robust as a tool for CRM tracking. It also doesn't have the in-email capabilities that SF offers. Compared to Basecamp: Podio is somewhat similar to Basecamp but doesn't offer the same functionality with checking items off and archiving projects. Compared to Zoho Projects: Podio is vastly superior to Zoho Project's lack of flexibility (requiring a development team to build) and accessibility by all members (Zoho Projects requires a very limited number of "owners" of projects which makes it difficult if multiple owners need to assign one or more people to a project).
Positive: Less call outs/ and missed communication due to internal conversations that were never communicated. For example, employees tell manager A they are not coming but Manager A does not tell manage B and C.
Positive: Manager log book has helped multiple departments stay in touch and on the pulse of the floor operation. Departments like HR, events, reservations, AP/ AR, etc. are not empowered to be more proactive
Labor and sales are tracked and can be forecasted which has helps us schedule SMARTER
Podio is great for task assignment and tracking. The ability to enter and assign tasks from mobile and track their completion saves me several phone calls a day.
Podio outdoes email as my go to place to search for information. The ability to forward emails into the system, organize by projects and contacts, and search it all saves considerable time and confusion.
Podio has considerable potential to reduce overall admin time spent organizing information (filing, tracking, etc) The ability to keep a single record of a given piece of information without being tied to email vs file structure works very well.
