When creating an employee work schedule, one can stress over finding a good balance between employee requests, shift scheduling requirements and complying with labor rules and industry standards. If you create your employee work schedules using Excel spreadsheets, there are many conflicting aspects that are not being controlled.
Excel spreadsheets do not calculate understaffing or overstaffing of your employees. This means unnecessary spending that could easily be spotted if you weren’t using Excel templates to schedule your employees. Excel spreadsheets are limited in the information it can produce. It is difficult to track employee absences, avoid overtime and be able to see upcoming needs with staffing. There is no way to set up rules or preferences to control costs. Excel templates are insufficient and lack many capabilities that are essential in today’s businesses.
Managers waste too much time creating, correcting and re-coordinating shift schedules in Excel spreadsheets. Time spent on creating usable work schedules that change weekly, daily and sometimes even hourly can be extremely distressing. The purpose of a employee work schedule, is to save time, not waste it. Does Excel let you drag and drop employees based on their skills and training? No. What about notifications of upcoming employee trainings, expired certifications or employee skills/limitations? That is also a no. Using a basic Excel template doesn’t allow you to truly schedule employees in an efficient manner.
Using Excel spreadsheets makes one vulnerable to human error. Those who use Excel spreadsheets have to deal with daily upkeep, formatting maintenance, entry mistakes and even updating formulas. Excel spreadsheets can also be quickly corrupted when altering only a little content. If there are errors in a formula, every calculation on the spreadsheet will be incorrect. That can be extremely hard to trace back! Even if you are able to pinpoint the location, tracing the logic formulas from one cell to another can take forever.
When using Excel spreadsheets, you are not fully utilizing the data entered. It’s impossible to set up Excel spreadsheets that actually help you adhere to labor and industry laws. Excel doesn’t print out an automatic, organized report showing overages in employees per department. This all needs to be set up manually, and again, monitored constantly. Nor does Excel let you set up rotating schedules efficiently. This can be a redundant process that can be solved instantly with employee scheduling software.
Manually managing all of these aspects can be a huge financial loss – if you are using Excel spreadsheets. Imagine how much time could be saved if you were using employee scheduling software. Employee scheduling software is advanced to work for you. It allows you to quickly drag and drop employees onto a user-friendly interface. This automatically updates across the board and creates a live schedule that can be distributed however preferred.
If you are still using Excel spreadsheets to schedule your employees, then you are surely wracking your brain trying to set up, and effectively manage, an employee work schedule. Employee scheduling software will calculate and control overtime, produce payroll costs, organize employee requests and help reduce unnecessary spending that is usually overlooked. Planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting has never been easier. Avoid the headache and let today’s technology deal with the stress for you.