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HotSchedules

HotSchedules

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

HotSchedules has become a reliable solution for businesses in various industries, including restaurants, amusement parks, resorts, and …
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HotSchedules

9 out of 10
January 27, 2020
Incentivized
HotSchedules is used across both our stores for scheduling and employee management. Employees are able to update when they want to work …
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HotSchedules review

7 out of 10
February 02, 2018
Incentivized
HotSchedules has given our company a chance to manage labor across the organization and the capability to compare labor strategies with …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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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…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is 7shifts?

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.

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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
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Product Details

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 App

The 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 Reporting

When 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 View

The Above Store Console provides reporting and visibility across stores, anywhere and at any time. It can be configured by region, state, country.

Bilingual App & Support

The 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

Screenshot of Time-Off, Availability, Employee Hours, Sales Volume are all available in the scheduler.Screenshot of Employees are able to swap and pick-up shifts from the HotSchedules Mobile App. All shift changes or requests require a manager's approval.Screenshot of Managers and employees can communicate with each other from the mobile and web apps - from anywhere and at anytime.Screenshot of Employees can submit a time-off, request - paid, or unpaid - and can request to work or request off right from the mobile app.Screenshot of Managers can view sales and labor data from their phone.

HotSchedules Video

HotSchedules Competitors

HotSchedules Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Mobile Web
Supported LanguagesEnglish, Spanish

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(232)

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!

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

(151-167 of 167)
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Brent Watkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Keep everyone in the management team involved in the daily labor spend.
  • Connect all users in one system of communication.
  • Assist in the planning and creating of staffing pairs and scheduling based on volume.
  • Helps with accountability and tracking of written employee counseling events.
  • There are some confusing aspects of the POS/HotSchedules integration that could be improved.
  • The double verification aspect needed for on-boarding can be a deterrent for some employee users.
  • The reporting tab is great but takes some time to pull the individual reports. Response time could be improved.
Daniella Paez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Ease in creating a schedule, being able to copy a schedule and modify
  • Ability to see labor hours broken by down by day
  • Ability to use forecast
  • Notifications once a schedule is posted or changes are made
  • Ease of creating a team member and amount of information that can be captured
  • Webinars
  • Would like help in using forecasting tool
  • Need to learn more about labor analysis
  • Would like to utilize the reporting feature more
February 13, 2017

Love the labor saving

Maggie Stith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Digital logbook - allows for all management to be aware of the happening of each shift, and can be used in court if needed.
  • Scheduling templates - they make it easy to create and use different templates depending on the season and forecasted sales.
  • Integration with REVEL.
  • Account managing - ever since we lost Nathan Dale as our account manager, I have no idea who is responsible for answering my questions, and have to contact the regular customer care every time I have a question.
February 13, 2017

Efficient

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • They have a mobile app for most functions on the go
  • Easy to use
  • Great communication tool to send messages to staff
  • It would be great if I could make changes to the schedule with the mobile app.
  • Sometimes [there are] glitches when changing through days on the roster screen in the app.
  • Loads slow sometimes.
Masaru Torito | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It allows everyone to see their schedule on their phones as soon as it's posted.
  • I can easily review staffing for all positions at both stores easily from my phone.
  • Servers can easily communicate with each other about getting shifts swapped.
  • The app, it would be great if it was free. Our staff often live paycheck to paycheck and getting them all to use the app is a challenge.
  • Issues with the server going down. The system needs to be more stable.
  • Better screen optimization on a computer. It's hard to make the schedule unless you are working on a desktop with any screen smaller than 20 inches.
February 10, 2017

Hotschedules Review

Alison Domino | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Ability to see scheduled hours by team member as well as by day/week
  • Ability to schedule a team member to work in a specific location
  • Mobile app makes it very easy to review schedules
  • If using the schedule to block off time during a shift, the hours are counted twice. For example, if I schedule someone to work 11a-7p and want to block off 12p-1p for a meeting, it would count as 9 hours.
  • Team member pay rates are visible to all users. Inability to track/forecast pay.
February 10, 2017

HotSchedules Review

Jason Tognarina | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Costing of schedules is immediate, imported pay rates from POS system allows real time schedule costing for budgeting purposes.
  • HotSchedules is fast to publish schedules to staff via personal cell phones and email platforms. As soon as we publish the schedules they are live.
  • Hotschedules allows an efficient method to swap, drop, and trade shifts for staff. Also gives managers the ability to approve or decline based on pre-set criteria.
  • Generating reports is clunky. Roster reports should be part of the daily plate or dashboard.
  • New views while writing schedules are not as ideal and are harder to navigate.
Kim Cargill | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Communicating with staff, quickly and clearly
  • Communicating with staff in advance about upcoming specials and sales points is super easy
  • The "paper trail" that HS provides is extremely helpfull in all aspects of scheduling and time off.
  • I love that HS is ever evolving. The software developers are constantly taking our feed back and making effective changes that work intuitively with our scheduling.
  • I would like to have the schedules separate. If one user is in the schedular tab at the same time as another user, one cannot move out of the schedule without "posting" said schedule. It causes some kind of glitch and the scheduler doesn't work properly. Only one user needs to be able to make changes to a schedule at a time.
  • HS has gotten better at letting users know the intended purpose or best practice for an intended task, such as the request /time off functions. This information wasn't always conveyed previously, therefore limitations were exposed that could have been avoided.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • HotSchedules is very user friendly. We have staff ages 14-80 and every one in between. Not one person has difficulty using this program.
  • HotSchedules reporting gives great insight to help keep our company's labor under control.
  • HotSchedules Logbook is a great way to communicate with managers store-wide. We track every thing that happens in the same place that we all have way access to. Way less things get missed this way!
  • I think as a manager, you should be able to assign to-dos to anyone on the organization and not just people on your schedule or job level.
Dixon Hollis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The requesting off option: it makes it easy to keep track of who is already approved and what slots are avaible. The new calendar option has improved this even more.
  • The customer service this company offers is one of my favorite things. Everyone is always super nice, very helpful and quick to find someone to answer your questions if they cannot. They are fast, efficient and patient. Very good at coaching and walkthroughs with new products.
  • The website and the app are easy to navigate.
  • I love the new interface of the scheduling portion. You can cut and paste, you can do numerous schedules from just one page if you wish and it is easy to do multiple shifts for one person at one time. Love it.
  • This is a small glitch but irritating: when a person is requesting time off, it only has two options: a) unpaid time off and b) request to work. This mixes my employees up who are trying to request paid time off. I don't know why they need to pick anything at all since they can put the "why" in their comments section.
Elizabeth Button | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Keeping track of ACA employee compliance.
  • Allows managers to easily reach employees by using the mobile app.
  • Training videos, ongoing employee training.
  • Allowing admin to add a photo of the employee so we can easily identify all our staff in our organization. A name and a face is important!
  • Allow certification reminders to go to select individuals depending upon the certification.
  • ACA compliance, ability to adjust how the measure period is used. If an employee changes from part time to full time status (or vice versa) the measurement period shows hours worked as out of compliance.
  • I've been trying to organize the HotSchedules team to present to our independent restaurant association. HotSchedules has the potential to add many more users in our county but they've been negligent in following through after an initial conversation with our rep. It's been surprising to me that they're not interested in pursuing more restaurant users.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Maintenance of schedules regarding shift trades and switches with mandatory management approval.
  • Messages feature is the best and most convenient method of communication between managers and employees.
  • Templates make scheduling quick and easy week to week. No starting from scratch every time.
  • Shift trades, picking up shifts, easy communication from management to employees and easy template set up for easy scheduling each week.
  • Being able to block days by schedule, not a blanket block on everyone.
  • Client ability to change names of schedules and jobs, not set by HotSchedules.
  • Do not allow someone to even attempt to pick up shift if there is time conflict. (If someone is scheduled 12pm to 8pm they should not be able to try to pick up a shift that is 4pm to 11pm.)
Meghan Dager | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Ease of scheduling multiple areas.
  • Easy access to employee numbers and schedules.
  • I like to see the roster on my phone.
  • Unavailable days should be "grayed out" or blocked somehow. The wording inside the square is too dim and easy to override.
  • Too many steps to preview the schedule.
  • You have to re-log in too often.
  • Templates should be easier to set up.
  • It doesn't sync with our current POS (Clubsoft) so we miss out on a lot (!) of important features.
  • Entering sales is TOO cumbersome.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • I like the template tool for scheduling. When running a restaurant, you often want to have a similar number of servers scheduled on a week by week basis and the templates made scheduling much easier. It also helped with forecasting labor for budgets.
  • I think the digital log book is a wonderful tool that when used appropriately can be a game changer for management communication. Its a great place to keep track of daily operations as well as any staffing issues that occur.
  • Obviously, having an app that makes accessing schedules, requesting off, logging notes, sending messages, etc, makes HotSchedules much more powerful. It is easy to use, and has all the tools needed at your fingertip.
  • One of the minor things that I found many staff complained about was the charge for the App. Although $3 doesn't seem like a big deal, many of our staff do not even have a credit card to be able to purchase apps. It seems like the cost for the app could easily be folded into the monthly charge for services to not add that burden to the staff.
  • I think the time off request tool is not very user friendly and confuses a lot of people. I definitely think it could be fixed to make it easier to understand and easier to complete.
  • Although the scheduling works great when you use templates, manually entering in shifts is a big ordeal. I wish that was an option that was easier.
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