Deputy: Comprehensive Workforce Management
Updated December 16, 2021

Deputy: Comprehensive Workforce Management

Gary McCarthy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Deputy

We utilize Deputy as our solution to a traditional time clock system. We had issues with our previous systems not providing a robust feature set. Deputy provides a traditional "punch clock" solution alongside "web clock" solutions for our customer service and off-site staff. The overall scheduling features have been impressive, allowing us to generate disparate schedules that we can cycle between according to the staffing needs for each day.

Pros

  • Deputy is very good at allowing us to structure and maximize a staffing schedule for our production floor. It provides very useful features to ensure that a schedule's open seats have all been filled with available staff.
  • It provides a very flexible system for adding new types of working and non-working time types. This is very valuable for us, as we sometimes have unique needs as a small company; Recently we went through a physical floor redesign where we had associates that were paid off-site on an "on-call" status. We wanted to keep track of these hours separately and Deputy allowed us to do that seamlessly.
  • The process for approving and exporting payroll hours is very user-friendly. We've had great success training our managers on the system. The export fields are a huge convenience for us, as we export the data to be handled by an external HR program.
  • Their behind-the-scenes API was a must-have for us. We were able to build a middleware program between Deputy and our HR software to both audits and process the data in a clean and efficient manner. Having that access allowed us to cut hours off of payroll processing each week.

Cons

  • Deputy's UI is constantly changing, which is good, but there are still a lot of gains to be made. Some areas are a little opaque when it comes to training new users.
  • The system for applying types of available time off (vacation, sick, bereavement, etc) to employees in the system needs work. We shouldn't need to upgrade to an enterprise solution just because we want all of our employees to have the same set of time benefits by default. We should be able to set up a template that can be applied to new employees, but Deputy does not currently allow for this.
  • Deputy needs to improve the ability to round up and clean up/archive old data. We had an instance where a manager incorrectly set up a bunch of new time types during COVID to cover the governmental time benefits at the time. There was no way to remove/hide/delete those types, so we're stuck with them forever now. It has made it extremely confusing for other managers moving forward, even after we renamed them.
  • We've saved time and hours on payroll every week for over a year. We've also saved time and aggravation in our workforce when it comes to quickly clocking in and out. When you need to get 60 people through 2 kiosks in the same 5 minute window, it's critical that the interface is fast, easy, and responsive. Deputy does a great job of that.
  • There was however a fairly significant uptake time with the company. It took about 6 months for everyone to get comfortable and make enough mistakes to learn how they wanted to do things. I've seen a quicker turn around with other programs, but this felt about typical.
  • It took some work to learn the API, but the dividends on our middleware program have been tremendous when it comes to dealing with our integrated HR software. Deputy did a lot on their end of things in the API to make it accessible and easy to use. Learning their API was a time investment, but a worthwhile one for what we got out of it.
We had used some older, traditional time clock software that ran on Windows Server. Deputy simply blows those types of solutions out of the water. We're in a geographically unreliable location when it comes to the internet. Deputy's ability to operate with or without internet connections for up to a few days at a time was a critical feature for us. Furthermore, Deputy's management systems are far beyond the traditional solutions we had experienced in the past. The ability to access that data from an API was the icing on the cake.

Do you think Deputy delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Deputy's feature set?

Yes

Did Deputy live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Deputy go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Deputy again?

Yes

Overall the usability is good. That being said, we have had some less tech-savvy employees have difficulties getting used to the system. It has a pretty modern approach to UI/UX, and as a result, it can alienate less savvy users. In particular, some of the interfaces for managing schedules make assumptions about how the user will interact with the interface. As a result, some of our older managers felt a little lost when they were trying to understand what the system could do, and how they could accomplish it.
I don't recall any specific concerns or memorable positives to the implementation. We handled most of the setup ourselves. That being said, Deputy's support has been consistently top-notch. Any issues with implementation or usage have been handled promptly and to our satisfaction. The system was able to integrate with the tablets we had available, and the overall turnaround to get us onto the system only took a few days. We were able to cut over to Deputy after only about 1 month of spin-up time to accommodate training our workforce.
Deputy is really great at managing large workforces, especially across multiple locations. The system exceeds expectations when it comes to managing roles in a company; It makes it easy to cover jobs without concern. However, it is not as great at managing a workforce with static responsibilities. It leans heavily towards the idea of "filling roles with bodies" rather than "each worker has a unique role." That may just be a factor of the type of work we do, but it means that while Deputy is great at what it does, it can be a little awkward for us to use. For example, it is not really appropriate in our situation for Deputy to offer to "fill a role" from an absentee with other workers; They don't have the same skill set, but Deputy doesn't make it particularly easy to define all of that. If we had a lot of generalists in our employ, I could see how it would make things much easier.

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