7shifts

It's a really nice layout, it has thought of just about everything you could possibly need to use the software for. I have personally found it very useful for looking up the contact information of my coworkers and keeping track of request off time. For people like servers who constantly drop/add/trade shifts with other people, there is a useful feature to do that as well.

It logged me out when I changed phones, don't think that's necessary to protect information on this kind of app, but was easy to recover password. Overall a very minor con.

- Very Short Learning Curve
- The App is very stable and accurate
- Our staff enjoy using the app and don't see it as a burden, but a convenience
- With our package, the app is feature-rich without bloat.
- Developers listen to the community and add value as often as possible.

As with any software development, some features that would be useful for you may take time if they are more niche use cases.

7shifts is really geared toward restaurant shift/labour management and communications, whereas so many of the other scheduling softwares out there try to fit the general case and don't handle the high-paced, dynamic nature of restaurant staffing nearly as well. From our perspective, 7shifts literally cuts down 5-10 hours a week of admin time, while also providing us a convenient, central location for communication with staff, basic HR data, etc. We use the free 7punches app to track time punches, which also has some nifty features that help us manage labour costs and keep better tabs on things like lateness. What I'm most excited about now is 7shifts' built-in "Optimal Labor" tool, which combined with our POS sales integration, provides me with HOURLY forecasts for my sales on given upcoming week, then tells me how many servers, bartenders, etc it thinks I should have on based on my sales, labour targets and past scheduling. It's not perfect, but its hugely helpful and lightyears ahead of what we were doing in the past, taking only a fraction of the time. 7shifts is a tech company that really gets restaurants and what we need, I eagerly anticipate every update to the software.

I'm a techno-geek at heart, with my own tech industry experience, and by working with the 7shifts people and products, I immediately see a really healthy, creative tech culture at the company, which are poised to keep moving at a phenomenal pace and quality of output.

I wish we could get the Machine Learning auto-scheduler feature at "The Works" package level, even as a priced add-on. Currently the only way to get it is to sign up for a massively more expensive package that is really designed for franchise chains with many locations to handle. We have just one location, but really want the auto-scheduler (it's absolutely brilliant).

I love the 7shifts web API and use it for quite a lot of our own software, but the documentation is really incomplete/out of date and I have to do a lot of reverse engineering either from their website or by making educated guesses. I can imagine that this might cause some friction or limit the abilities of third parties to integrate with 7shifts.

Third party integrations have not been as robust or full-featured as I'd hoped, at least the TouchBistro/7shifts integration, but I think that's more due to the other side of the integration than the 7shifts people.