BrightHR vs. Planday

I feel Bright HR is well suited to most small/medium sized businesses where they have a 'straight' forward resource set up. For larger businesses or for complex businesses similar to ourselves, where we operate 24 hours per day, rotational shift patterns, ambulatory staff, locums etc...we have to 'fudge' the way we use the information sometimes to make it work for us.

Incentivized

Planday is a wonderful first step in organizing team management, such as mass communication, scheduling, time off requests, and centralized timesheets. I used it for my retail business and found it to be extremely helpful in communication with my team and keeping track of everyone scheduling needs in one place. As we grew, I noticed a need to assign tasks, which would be very helpful for larger companies or businesses with daily tasks that need to assigned to specific team members, departments, or shifts

Incentivized

• BLIP is working very well. Staff find it easy to use and the geo-fencing that can be set up is very useful.
• Reporting, in particular reporting of Absence. We run this monthly and the information we can download is flexible and useful.
• Sick analysis - helps in controlling absence.
• Holiday planning and authorization is very helpful and details including date booked helps manage requests.

Incentivized

• Provides an overview of staffing levels for each team, and the department as a whole.
• The UI makes it very easy to get a snapshot view of the staffing levels for set time period.
• Managing absences and arranging for shift swaps are also efficiently handled using Planday.

Incentivized

• Notifications for requests should be optional based on individual employees. For example an admin won’t necessarily want every staff members leave requests by email and push notification. The settings only currently allow for notifications for everyone or no one. Being assigned as a manager may not allow data viewing required of wider staff.
• Toil should automatically be accrued into a balance if the employees clocked in time amounts to more than the target hours. It shouldn’t have to be calculated and requested.
• When reviewing hours worked for the week, the history calculation should take into account approved leave and sickness etc. I have a staff members target of 37 hours, but if their hours show 29 hours worked then I have to work out why they worked less. It should account for this if the absence is approved.

• Holiday functionality - currently under review, new system launching early 2017 which will improve accuracy, calculate balances and deliver a more user friendly experience
• Payroll reporting - data is not all relevant, could be more flexible
• Schedule - could be more flexible to show employees consistently working across the group on one schedule

It's not entirely my decision - we are members of a 'community' of veterinary practices who have signed up to the contract with pensinusla and have bright hr as part of that contract however, I am usually involved in the tender process as I am one of the biggest users of both bright hr and the services from peninsula

Incentivized

It is quite good. Has alot of useful features such as the inbuilt learning / trainings. I really like the clock in function where admin can update or edit staff clock in times. I love the easily accessable annual leave section where we can easily see wat annual leave a staff has. However what would be useful is for 0 hour staff due to them not automatically having 17/28 days annual leave, if it can calculate itbased on hours they work

Incentivized

The team are proactive, having an advocacy team is just amazing and a great way to really understand their product roadmap and have input into useful features or feedback

Incentivized

it was fairly easy to do but timely as i had to enter everything from scratch - i didn't at the time realise how important it was to set up the variable or fixed working pattern correctly given future changes as this is very tricky once it has been set up and i wished i had been aware that sometimes you can't make future changes without deleting the whole profile and starting again

Incentivized

I chose BrightHR as it offered a one-stop platform for HR management for which we have dedicated UK and ROI HR specialists who not only give HR advice but also write policies and handbooks, etc. They are a one-stop-shop, which was very important as when I signed the contract I did not have an HR person in my team and they were essentially my back office. Also, by signing up, I got access to Bright Safe too; which is great as again it's a one-stop-shop for Health and Safety in the workplace. So I can roll out toolbox talks, training, and accident management.

Incentivized

Ultimately Planday is the perfect tool for simple straightforward team time management, communication and scheduling. I would like to see a task management feature added to Planday and perhaps some integration for employee rewards. Planday is leaps and bounds above Quickbooks Time, and TimeClock Plus but falls behind Deputy only slightly by having less features available. Overall I would recommend Planday to any small business owner with a team of 5-20

Incentivized

• Able to reduce one member of staff in personnel from 5 days to 3 days.
• Able to reduce time spent by payroll on holiday records significantly and improve accuracy significantly.
• Able to improve control of sick absence and improve record keeping.
• BLIP meant we did not need to buy expensive attendance software.
• Looking at possible use of payroll and other aspects of Bright HR not used at present.

Incentivized

• So much easier to manage than an Excel spreadsheet!
• The relatively low cost is completely outweighed by the time saved using Planday

Incentivized