Team Scheduling

[BofBArtStudio]

We have been using team scheduling for at least a couple years now.

Some issues that I would like to bring up:

• When time off requests are entered by a team member, and we duplicate the schedule, it is not apparent that a day they are scheduled is a time off day.  Plus there seems to be no way for someone to ask for part of a day off.  For example, someone has a doctor's appointment at 10am, but is ok being scheduled in the afternoon shift.  Currently our team members put in the notes of the time off request that they can work after 1pm for example.  We have to click on each schedule block for each day of the week for each employee to see if they asked for time off for any given shift or if they can work an earlier or later shift.  I know sometimes it adds a triangle with an exclamation point in it.  But not always.  Since we have three shifts each day that anyone can work, it would be nice if it were more apparent that they only need morning shift off for example.  But currently, it puts a time off request as all day and we have to read the notes manually on each day to see if they can work an alternate shift that day.
• Shift swapping does not work as expected.  Two team members put in a shift swap request.  They saw it still pending after several days and asked me about it.   I could not approve their shift swap.  It remained pending.  I called support about it and emailed the screen shot of both of the team members screens showing the pending shift swap.  Support never got back to me with an update about this, but it would be nice if shift swapping were a thing that they could do easily and for me to approve it easily.  We have tested it with multiple team members, all of us standing together, trying to figure it out.  So I have had to alert my team, that for now, any shift swaps need to be requested by email to me and not in the app, as they cannot assume that it is working properly.
• I wish the color coding was a bit more advanced for certain jobs instead of per shift.  I have to click on each shift for each employee for each day to choose the color.  It would be nice if we could globally set up the colors for specific jobs or titles or shifts (open, mid, closing).  Also, when I click on a specific shift block to create a shift, it automatically makes it the last color I chose and then I have to manually go in and change the color.  
• We currently have to do a hand-written paper schedule along with the Square Schedule each week so that we are sure that there is an Open Manager and Closing Manager as well as Open Front, Mid Front, Closing Front, Back Of The House, etc.  We wish that the schedule could have customizable views.
• When we print the schedule, there are empty rows for those who are just dashboard users and not scheduled team members.  None of these dashboard users are scheduled employees.  We wish there was a way to print the schedule with only scheduled employees showing in the printout.  Or if someone has requested time off for the week, that row shouldn't show on the printout either. We would also love it if page 2 and beyond of the printout would have column headers (but this is a super minor thing).
• The Square Team app times out constantly, so our team has to close out of it on their device and then open it again and re-login.  Kind of a pain.  Wish there was a biometric option so they could quickly view the app and see who is coming in next, especially the managers who are needing to know who is coming in for the upcoming shift.  

Thanks for all of the wonderful features of the app.  We LOVE Square, and hope these few items are something that can be considered for the near future roadmap. 

[_Violet]

Hi @BofBArtStudio - Thanks for reaching out to us here on the Square Seller Community to provide your suggestions for Team Scheduling. I’ve shared your post with our Product Team, as they are constantly improving our products based on feedback like this.

I'll follow up with you here if they provide me with any additional information that I can share 🙂

[JasonSQPM]

Hi there Cheryl - I'm Jason, a Product Manager at Square working on Shifts.  Thanks for the feedback!  I wanted to provide some additional info on your notes above.

Time Off - We are actively working on flagging conflicts when duplicating a schedule.  That will be available in the near future.  Requesting partial days off is also on our roadmap in 2023.

Shift Swapping -  On the issue you are seeing, have your team members accepted the trade request prior to you seeing this "Pending" status?  The team members must accept the trade prior to it being available for you to approve.

Colors/Scheduling Views/Printing - You're not the first person to ask on these topics...we are continuing to look at what we can do in this area but don't have anything officially committed.

Team App - We have improvements coming over the coming months with regard to login issues.

Glad to hear you are loving Square!

Jason

[BofBArtStudio]

Hi Jason, thank you for the update. I look forward to seeing those changes and improvements that you mentioned.

For a shift trades I learned that both sides need to approve it on the app as you mentioned. I thought they put in the request and then it came to me for approval and that's what I was confused about. Thanks to Square support for explaining that to me and clarifying it. We are going to test it out soon to make sure that it works as expected.