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HotSchedules has become a reliable solution for businesses in various industries, including restaurants, amusement parks, resorts, and …
Overview
What is HotSchedules?
HotSchedules is a cloud-based scheduling, labor and communication management software solution serving the restaurant and hospitality industry.According to the vendor, key benefits include:Build & Communicate SchedulesThe scheduling and labor management software reduces the time it takes managers to create and…
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What is HotSchedules?
HotSchedules is a cloud-based scheduling, labor and communication management software solution serving the restaurant and hospitality industry. According to the vendor, key benefits include: Build & Communicate Schedules The scheduling and labor management…
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7shifts is a restaurant workforce and scheduling management application, which also features collaboration features, from the Canadian company of the same name.
What is Lightspeed Restaurant?
The Lightspeed Restaurant POS, from Lightspeed in Montreal, is a restaurant POS and management system designed to enable users to sync the user's menu with major food delivery apps, manage all orders and and reach new customers.
Product Demos
HotSchedules Demo: The Employee Experience
YouTube
HotSchedules Demo: Creating a New Schedule
YouTube
Demo of Red Book Keep
YouTube
HotSchedules Demo: Navigating the Schedule
YouTube
HotSchedules Demo: Employee Shift Release & Pick-Up
YouTube
HotSchedules Demo: Submitting Time-Off Requests
YouTube
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is HotSchedules?
HotSchedules is a cloud-based scheduling, labor and communication management software solution serving the restaurant and hospitality industry.
According to the vendor, key benefits include:
Build & Communicate Schedules
The scheduling and labor management software reduces the time it takes managers to create and communicate schedules. All scheduling and employee information is stored in one central location, so managers have access to time-off requests, availability, skill level, and certification compliance.
Work Schedule AppThe HotSchedules mobile app lets employees check their schedule, request time off, swap shifts, manage availability, and send messages. All shift requests require a manager's approval.
Forecasting and ReportingWhen integrated with the POS, the tool pulls time and attendance, sales and guest data into the system. The forecasting engine shows past sales trends, which makes it possible to build schedules with the right amount of labor. There are also over 40 reports.
Multi-Unit Store ViewThe Above Store Console provides reporting and visibility across stores, anywhere and at any time. It can be configured by region, state, country.
Bilingual App & SupportThe mobile app is available in English & Spanish. Employees can call into the AVS or Customer Support Center to get their schedule in English or Spanish - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
HotSchedules Features
- Supported: Online Scheduler
- Supported: Time-Off and Availbility
- Supported: Work Schedule Mobile App
- Supported: Scheduling Templates
- Supported: Employee/Staff Communication
- Supported: Sales and Labor
- Supported: Forecasting Engine
- Supported: Reporting
- Supported: Point-of-Sale Integration
- Supported: Centralized Communication
- Supported: SMS Messaging
HotSchedules Screenshots
HotSchedules Video
HotSchedules Competitors
- When I Work
- ScheduleFly
- Crunchtime
HotSchedules Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Mobile Web |
| Supported Languages | English, Spanish |
HotSchedules Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
When I Work and ScheduleFly are common alternatives for HotSchedules.
Reviewers rate Usability and Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of HotSchedules are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
HotSchedules has become a reliable solution for businesses in various industries, including restaurants, amusement parks, resorts, and retail establishments. Users have reported significant time savings and improved efficiency in scheduling processes. For example, a restaurant manager praises HotSchedules for reducing their scheduling time from over 3 hours to just 30 minutes per week. This software enables employees to cover their own shifts with approval, allowing for better shift management and flexibility. It facilitates communication among team members, ensuring constant checking and trading of shifts in an amusement park setting. Multiple departments at a resort rely on the platform to handle last-minute schedule changes, call-offs, and requests for added shifts.
HotSchedules assists food and beverage departments by providing easy access to availability, time off requests, and labor forecasting. This improves communication between staff and management. The software's user-friendly interface allows for generating and posting weekly schedules effortlessly. It also serves as a means of communication with staff members across multiple locations within a restaurant group.
Moreover, HotSchedules Train formerly Schoox is utilized for employee orientation and training purposes. The software not only helps with controlling labor costs but also offers features like sales forecasting and labor cost analysis. Across organizations, HotSchedules proves valuable by assisting in proper staffing needs and managing labor expenses effectively. In retail settings, the product streamlines employee scheduling while enabling them to view their schedules easily and make shift swaps when necessary.
In conclusion, HotSchedules is highly regarded for its ability to save time, improve communication, increase flexibility in scheduling processes, and provide various features that benefit different departments within organizations. Its broad range of applications makes it suitable for businesses of all sizes across multiple industries.
Users highly recommend signing up for HotSchedules and getting familiar with the application. They also suggest using the convenient mobile app and setting up email notifications for easy access to schedules and efficient shift swapping. Additionally, users highly recommend HotSchedules as a reliable solution for scheduling needs in various work environments. Overall, they find HotSchedules to be a valuable tool for controlling expenses, allocating labor, improving communication, and making positive changes within the service industry.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(26-50 of 167)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 24, 2018
The hot schedules review
We use the suite across all locations company wide. We use it to schedule the hourly employees at the restaurants.
- It works great as an internal environment that the employees can use to trade shifts
- It’s easy for the managers to make shifts and move people around buy moving blocks around by hour
- You can copy schedules from previous weeks as a template
- It’s very expensive for what it’s worth
- Better integration into the POS
- More integration between all of your own products that you offer.
January 23, 2018
Time saving tool for everyone!
We are using hotschedules throughout all the branches of Island Pacific Supermarket. This is what we use to generate employee scheduling and time cards, manage labor cost versus labor budget, monitor employee working hours, manage overtime cost, manage employee time off requests, and is mainly used for employee time punches.
- Easy and convenient to use.
- Very detailed and organized.
- A lot of times that the app/website is experiencing technical issues.
January 22, 2018
HotSchedules - Mobile Clock-In
It is being used by our home office employees that are mobile and in the field for the WebClock. They aren't able to clock in at any restaurant of ours so we needed a mobile app that could track hours and compile data for us.
- Very user-friendly
- Customer service is very nice, patient, and willing to help right away
- Hotschedules is a very slick looking site/application
- I don't like that even as the admin in the above store console that I don't have access to turn on/off all features. Even for users below me. I need to contact customer service and they have to do it which just creates a lag.
- I don't know the features that are available sometimes because they aren't activated right away for some reason, and to my point above, I have to reach out to someone else to see what they are/activate them.
- The automated reporting isn't very robust, I really need to be able to have an automated report that can give me individual employees' hours for a week not just by job code.
January 22, 2018
Hot Schedules
Hot schedules is used company wide within our organizations. It is used to create a one-stop shop for all team members needing to check their schedules, trade shifts, request days off, change availability, etc. It has an additional function allowing team members to clock in but we do not currently use this function.
- Easy to read schedule any time you need it
- Can change availability for schedule writer whenever I want
- Ability to swap shifts or pick up days with other team members
- We do not use the clock in function
- Sends a lot of notifications
- No way to limit how much team members can swap around
January 22, 2018
HotSchedules in a hot minute
We use it for hourly and management employee scheduling. We also use it for a lot of our intercompany communications - especially broad announcements that we need to get out to many people very quickly. HotSchedules is also great for keeping track of employee certifications. HotSchedules allows us to maintain a healthy sense of accountability, since all communications are easily referred to.
- Group communication
- Certification tracking
- Employee accountability
- Schedule layouts can be difficult to read
- Slow response when editing schedule blocks
- Messaging center could be more elegantly designed and user-friendly
It is used as a schedule platform to monitor labor budget and for scheduling as well.
- Flexibility 9 can be tailored fit to your company needs.
- Ease of use
- Availability ( mobile access / remote access )
- For now concerns are addressed directly by the HotSchedules team.
January 15, 2018
Hot Schedules was probably GREAT......10 years ago
We are using it to schedule employees for a coffee shop and to time punch.
- The app works well for employees
- It is easy to copy and use schedules
- Hot Schedules is too complicated for a 1-3 shop environment
- It defaults to not having an ending time on a shift....who does that??
- It is not easy enough to delete some of the layers---i.e. we have a manager who is scheduled on the floor and we want others to be able to see her hours and when she is working, so we can't use multiple schedules or else the supervisors would not be able to see her
- In my "day" job, we operate over 50 franchise restaurants and I always wanted to use Hot Schedules which is why I tried it for this consulting gig I have.....unfortunately, it seems they have not stayed up with the technology currently being offered in this category
January 12, 2018
HotSchedules Review
[It's] Used by all scheduling departments in the restaurant. [It's] Used for timekeeping, scheduling, time off requests, staff communication, labor budgeting.
- Schedule changes--live time schedule updates.
- Management log--accessed easily by app when away from restaurant.
- Time off management--easy to block dates, approve or deny requests.
- Always improving. New updates seem to be done well and improve the software.
January 12, 2018
So Hot Review
I have four businesses with one building, all restaurant and Bar related. I use HotSchedules for all employee scheduling as well as the web clock. I refer back to several of their reports that are easily accessible.
- Time off approvals- Keeps a list of who has requested and been approved for time. Makes it easy to not schedule someone accidentally.
- Schedule templates- allows me to have the schedule done with inminutes.
- Employee time management- allows you to see if someone is predicted to hit overtime. Keeps our payroll down.
- If I am looking at the Staff area, for example, and I go into a particular employee, then want to return to the list - I would like it to not automatically start again at the top of the list but where I left off.
- Loading time could be faster
- If I wanted to add a extra shift prior to applying my template it will not allow me to use the template.
January 12, 2018
Good System, some Advancement Needed
We currently use HotSchedules for all scheduling and training needs at 8 locations across the country. The system is also used as a timekeeping function within 1 of those venues. We recently went live with the Schoox program through the system this year. The system currently addresses the scheduling needs and has provided an online training option for our remote locations.
- Easy end user interface, our employees can very quickly access their schedules and hours through the mobile platform.
- Easy to read schedules, there is no trouble identifying when someone is scheduled to be at work.
- Management of timekeeping records is clean when the system is used directly for clock in/out.
- Not user friendly with POS systems, we recently experienced a major issue with our payroll run because the system was not able to identifying two separate rates of pay in the middle of a pay period.
- Schedule rotation functionality does not always work consistently. It would be great if inconsistencies in the schedule were identified by the system, at present we have to identify issues manually.
- Reporting options will only allow us to look back and pull reports for 30 day increments. This is not helpful when we are responding to legal suits which require all payroll/schedule data for an employees tenure with the company.
January 12, 2018
HotSchedules is the new Hotness in Labor Management
We use HotSchedules for shift scheduling and timecards, initially for our tasting room but now for the whole business. We had previously used paper timecards, so this is a big step forward for the company. We have a mix of salaried and hourly employees, and to my knowledge all hourly employees track their time through HotSchedules.
- Ability for field employees to clock in and out on their phones
- Easy management of staff and timecards by managers
- Easily altered options for various levels of staff
- Robust reporting options
- Reliance on internet connections can sometimes be an issue with HotSchedules, given our rural location, this is an issue with all SAAS suites however.
- We have only one account for our many departments, which means we occasionally run into issues using some features, as each department operates differently but our options in HotSchedules must be the same.
- A minor pet peeve, but I would love it if, when I was altering employee's punch in/out times, that the date/time would not reset until I hit the "submit" button. Sometimes a man just wants to make changes in his own order.
- Support for a card-based timecard solution.
- Ability to host a local instance on our own servers
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
HotSchedules is used in all departments of the FOH and BOH. It helps us forecast our labor budgets and gives us actual vs. scheduled to see if we are scheduling accurately and if all staff members are clocking in and out as scheduled. The corporate office does not have much use for HotSchedules and is utilized mostly by the operations team in the restaurants.
- Communicates well when writing a schedule if there is overtime, overlapping shifts, or against availability to prevent poorly written schedules.
- Notifies when there are shift changes, time off requests, or availability approvals needed.
- Very easy to build schedules and is user-friendly.
- Being able to override "time off approvals" after they've been approved. sometimes a staff member will make an exception and work a half a shift or change their mind and they have to go back and remove their request before a manager is able to schedule.
- Fewer website crashes.
- Requires the page to load completely before navigating to where you need to go.
December 20, 2017
Hot Schedules...Worth It
We currently utilize HotSchedules for all of our scheduling needs at a location level. This allows the management team and the associates to interact with the schedule outside of the location. As an administrator I am able to see requests off and schedule updates without needing to be at the location.
- The app is very user friendly.
- Once you create your schedule templates, scheduling becomes increasingly easier.
- The chat feature is very valuable.
- We have 30+ locations. We sometimes “borrow” associates from location to location to cover shifts. As of now the borrowed associates do not always show up on the schedule. This has caused associates to miss shifts.
- We do not utilize it yet, but not being able to clock in unless you are on the schedule seems like an issue waiting to happen.
December 20, 2017
Hotschedules is great!
We use it for our employees work schedule and any messages that need to be sent out. Our employees are also able to track their hours worked and we are able to use check lists to keep up with weekly/daily duties. This allows us to be accountable within management and for our staff to be accountable. We have been much more organized since using hotschedules.
- Hotschedules is very easy to navigate making it usable by everyone!
- Hotschedules makes staying organized easy!
- We can reach every single employee at any given moment with important information through hotschedules!
- We just had an update to our time clock and we don’t like it. It takes longer for our management and team to clock in and out and has added steps that could be more simplified, though we do like seeing hours worked so far.
December 18, 2017
Hot or Not
Used to clock in, & post schedules. It is used by our entire company (5 restaurants). It addresses topics of making schedules easily accessible to employees and for punching in and out.
- Mostly reliable, sometimes the server stops responding when trying to access the site but not very often
- Decent interface for both managers and employees
- App is a great feature
- Time clock lags
- Spanish speaking employees struggle with the new time clock since the prompts are solely in English.
- Scheduler is difficult to use. Can only see 1-2 lines of employees while inserting house shifts. Can only see 1-2 lines of house shifts and it’s difficult to scroll through while scheduling
- Employee availability is no longer easy to use since the update. The drag and drop availability toggle when adding new availability has caused several issues. Employees shouldn’t be able to submit their own availabilities—it makes it a management nightmare when a ridiculous availability comes through for approval and you deny it the employee doesn’t understand there are minimum availability requirements for our company. I don’t like this feature what so ever. Availabilities should ONLY be adjusted by managers. Another issue is that employees make themselves available for 2 hour increments, our company doesn’t have shifts that are as short as 2 hours so this complicates their availability when I’m viewing it on the scheuduler. Worst feature you have added
December 15, 2017
Scheduling Made Simple
We use it for the weekly schedule, sales forecasting, budgeting, as well as lower our labor costs across the board. Helps us lower OT and lower payroll mistakes. We run the report at end of the week and use it for payroll.
- Schedule writing
- Forecasting
- Reports
- Updates
- Schedule writing made a little easier
- Coaching when there are updates
- Report finding they should have a search bar
December 15, 2017
Thank You Hot Schedules!
Across the whole organization. It has made scheduling and checking hours much easier.
- It is super easy to copy schedules and paste them into future weeks if the schedule stays the same.
- The new clock in update has made it possible for employees to check their own hours.
- The support that is provided has proven to be helpful, especially when we first implemented HotSchedules.
- Their clock in update was much needed, especially now that employees can check their own hours.
- It needs to be made possible to check hours and make corrections real time and not the next day.
- There have been issues with the clocking in and out function, particularly when coming back from breaks.
December 14, 2017
This app is Hot!
The app is used company wide across 30 locations and our corporate team. Each location has between 10 and 25 employees. It's great to conveniently see your own schedule and roster. We've had issues sharing employees with other locations. I believe the problem has since been fixed.
- Easy to use.
- Your schedule is laid out plain to see what day you work.
- You can check your roster to see what other employees you will work with.
- You can navigate backwards to an extent to review who has worked previous shifts.
- You can send messages through the app in case you don't have a coworker's number.
- Sharing employees.
- Making a schedule on the phone / tablet.
December 14, 2017
HotSchedules
For clocking in and scheduling. Used by all locations and all employees. Addresses overtime well.
- Scheduling, allows a manager to see when they forget to schedule a specific shift that is needed for a day.
- Punctuality, it easily allows companies to watch when employees are on break, punch in and leaving.
- Allows me to see who else is working each day, on the mobile app.
- Scheduling, it is incredibly hard to add a different shift or change the time of a specific shift if we wanted.
- A late employee cannot clock in without supervisor assistance, in our size company that is not necessary.
December 14, 2017
HotSchedules - The disaster
We use it across our entire organization for user management and time tracking; or we would if the time tracking feature worked. We are using it to make our schedules but still have to use our old time tracking system due to errors from hotschedules.
- They have 24 hour support which is nice, but the reps are not trained on all the "new" features.
- Their upper-management is not afraid to get involved and help resolve issues, which we have taken advantage of multiple times.
- The user interface is clean and fairly easy to use.
- The inability to share employees from site to site is really disappointing.
- Their support reps are not aware or trained on the "new" features that are developed for customers.
- Their database engineers seem reluctant to provide assistance correcting issues their product caused.
December 13, 2017
Hot, Hot, HotSchedules!
HotSchedules is used across our entire company to make scheduling at each individual location more personalized. It helps keep the location up to date with the most recent schedule changes and since we are in an industry working with primarily first time job holders and high school students, it helps bridge the gap of having to contact each employee whenever a schedule change occurs or if they need to swap shifts or take an unexpected day off. I think some of the best features are how interactive both the application for mobile devices and the browser version are and that they update in real time as soon as a change is made with a push notification to everyone assigned at my location.
- The template system for shifts that occur every day at our location and that I can drag and drop them to ensure that I am meeting our company’s staffing guidelines are a huge plus for me.
- The ability for employees to handle shift change on their own with my approval so I am kept in the loop but not having to constantly log on every time an associate calls me with an unexpected need to change their schedule is a nice feature.
- The mobile application is ten times greater than the previous program we were using to generate a schedule. It is very interactive and allows me to do almost everything from the convenience of my smartphone or tablet.
- My biggest complaints are just bug fixes that were supposed to be pros of the product. Right now there is a bug that has gone on since we rolled out the product at our company that does not allow us to share employees between locations for employees needing to cover a shift or transfer to another location for an extended period of time.
- I would really like to see them add the actual schedule creation into the mobile application or at least be able to create the schedule on a mobile browser to eliminate the need to use my home computer. If I could generate a schedule from my phone or tablet, I would be able to make any necessary changes on the fly and it would not necessarily interrupt my time off or when I am not at the location.
December 12, 2017
A Company that Values its Clients!
It's used for all of our locations for time and attendance and also scheduling purposes. One of our locations uses the logbook feature which is great. We use this to pull hours, pull labor statistics, track clock in and outs, and also scheduled vs. hour employees.
- They take feedback seriously and make changes
- The reporting is nice to use
- The webclock improvements are continuous
- Being able to report on breaks
- Being able to separate out holiday time
- City specific pay rules to be used
December 12, 2017
HotSchedules making it easy!
Hotschedules was initially more widely used by the company to manage scheduling and hourly employees. I kept track of my staff and their hours and set and managed scheduled time. We used the clock in feature, which I liked because we could sign on remotely to clock in. Now we have to clock in at a store location, no more remote access to the clock in feature. I am now a salaried employee and do not clock-in any longer. I found the program easy to navigate and enjoyed using it.
- Ease of setting a schedule.
- If the schedule is repeated week after week, it is easy to copy it with out rewriting the whole thing.
- Fast, easy reference to who is clocked in. Easy to check my weekly hours for my team and keep it under control.
- Messaging feature was very handy.
- Ability to delete old employees and reuse the assigned sign in number at the end of a fiscal year.
- Really had few complaints.
July 18, 2017
HotSchedules: A Hot Way To Schedule!
We use HotSchedules for scheduling, messaging and as a time clock across several departments including food and beverage (front of house and back), the golf shop, and our golf course maintenance department. This addresses several business problems for us including managing requests, offering an online messaging portal and keeping an on eye on our labor.
- It is a great scheduling platform. As its main focus, it is easy to use for management and our staff.
- It makes managing requests for our staff very easy and efficient. For managers, it is simple to manage these requests.
- Its reporting features are great. It's always nice to be able to quickly pull a report outlining just the information you are looking for.
- The Time Clock feature could definitely use some help. We have to manually review each person's hours to make sure they didn't miss a punch. If we don't do this, it will manually clock them out at 4 am, in effect paying them for a very long day that they didn't work.
- You should be able to copy and paste shifts when scheduling non-house shifts. Let's say I am scheduling for a special event and I need 10 servers in at 5 pm to serve, I have to manually enter all of those instead of being able to just schedule one and copy and paste it to everyone else.
- When messaging, you should be able to respond to messages directly from your email like you can on Shift Note.
June 20, 2017
HotSchedules for Restaurants
Hotschedules is used by each individual restaurant across the organization. It allows managers to schedule effectively and communicate, manage and control scheduling functions at their fingertips. There is more accountability in an industry where staff members have a lot of scheduling flexibility needs.
- Scheduling automatically generates a dollar cost so you can see what expense you are projecting instantaneously.
- Managing schedule requests, shift changes and swaps from your phone gives great flexibility.
- Managers can communicate important messages with staff and know that they have seen the messages.
- The visual platform could be potentially be improved for new beginners by mimicking Excel spreadsheets since most come from that type of system.
- The platform should be more functional to switch user views - rows vs. column data should be able to be swapped if needed. Shift types should be able to be customized- lunch/day vs. dinner/night. For example, you should be able to group employees however you need and keep their day part shifts (lunch, swing, dinner, etc...) together when grouping employees.