Define staffing needs and required qualifications for each shift
Instantly identify overstaffing or understaffing
Fill shifts automatically or through employee applications
Avoid scheduling errors with traffic-light alerts
See scheduled hours and overtime in advance
Track late arrivals and absences live in the shift monitor
With TimeTrack’s digital employee scheduling software, you can automatically create staff schedules based on skills, availability, and working time models. Real-time staffing requirements, the shift monitor, and working hours forecasts show you at a glance whether every shift is staffed correctly. Ideal for HR managers, team leaders, and operations managers in shift-based businesses, including manufacturing and industry, hospitals and healthcare, hospitality and food service, retail, logistics, and service companies.
Benefits
Staffing Requirements & Qualifications per Shift
Define how many employees and which qualifications are required for each shift – overall or by skill.
Identify Overstaffing or Understaffing
The staffing requirements view uses color coding to instantly show whether a shift is fully staffed, overstaffed, or understaffed.
Fill Shifts Automatically or via Applications
Automatically fill existing shifts based on your priorities – or let employees apply and allow planners to make the final decision.
Scheduling Error Warnings
Scheduling conflicts, missing skills, and working time violations are flagged before the schedule is published.
Working Hours Forecast per Employee
See during the scheduling process who is expected to accumulate overtime or reduce their hour balance.
Real-Time Shift Monitor
Late arrivals, absences, and deviations from the schedule are displayed live throughout the current day.
With TimeTrack, employee schedules are created directly in the calendar: select the work area, define shift times and breaks, specify the required skills and minimum number of employees – and you’re done. Whether you’re planning early, late, and night shifts at a hotel reception, rotating service shifts in hospitality, or ward shifts in a hospital, recurring shifts can be scheduled daily, weekly, or monthly so you don’t have to recreate regular shifts every week.
For complex sequences of early, late, and night shifts, you don’t need to create each shift individually. Instead, use a shift pattern: a recurring daily, weekly, or multi-week schedule that can be assigned to one or more employees for a defined period, with shifts generated automatically in the background. Multiple teams can follow the same shift rotation with staggered start dates. Team A starting in week one, Team B in week two. This makes it easy to manage rolling 24/7 shift operations with staggered production teams, as well as rotating schedules in healthcare or security services.
As soon as a shift is saved, TimeTrack automatically checks whether the assigned employees’ availability, working time models, and required skills match the schedule. If there are any conflicts, such as exceeding contracted hours or overlooking an absence, a warning appears before the schedule is published. This helps prevent scheduling errors before they occur.
If you want to reuse the same employee schedule for the following week or at another location, you can copy shifts – including assigned employees – in just a few clicks. For complex structures with multiple work areas, automated scheduling…
With staffing requirements, you can define how many employees are needed for each shift – for example, five workers on the early shift of a production line, three nurses per hospital ward, or additional service staff for weekend shifts in hospitality. In the employee schedule, you can see at a glance whether staffing needs are met: each shift is shown as fully staffed, overstaffed, or understaffed.
If a shift is understaffed, the system highlights it in red – for example, when one person is missing from a night shift on a hospital ward or the early shift in a warehouse is not fully staffed. This allows planners to spot staffing gaps immediately and take action before the schedule is published.
Especially in industries with fluctuating staffing needs – such as hospitality, retail, logistics, and healthcare – the staffing requirements view eliminates the need to manually count employees in lists or Excel schedules and helps ensure consistent, demand-based staffing.
The employee schedule shows each employee’s target hours, hours already worked, and scheduled hours, and uses this data to forecast their expected monthly balance. This allows you to see during the planning process whether an employee is likely to accumulate overtime or reduce their hour balance by the end of the month.
For example, if a nurse is projected to finish the month four hours below their target, they are reducing their hour balance. By contrast, the schedule may show that a hospitality employee is expected to accumulate overtime. This planned-vs.-actual overview connects employee scheduling directly with working time accounts and makes your team’s monthly hour balances easier to manage and forecast.
This allows you to distribute shifts more effectively from the outset and prevent overtime from building up unchecked. It supports better labor cost control and helps ensure compliance with working time regulations, particularly in labor-intensive industries such as manufacturing, retail, and hospitality.
Managing multiple work areas or locations? TimeTrack’s online employee scheduling software helps you keep everything organized – whether you operate a retail chain with several stores, a hotel group with multiple properties, or a hospital with numerous wards and departments. By assigning a unique color to each location and work area, you can reduce confusion and prevent scheduling errors.
Customize your work areas by defining sub-areas and assigning employees – for example, kitchen, service, and reception in a hotel, or sales, warehouse, and checkout in retail. See all key information at a glance and manage staff deployment by day, location, and work area, even across multiple locations.
TimeTrack’s employee scheduling software offers multiple views depending on the perspective you need. Group the schedule by skills, work areas, or employees and switch between a high-level overview and detailed planning with just one click. Calendar, list, and compact views are also available for added flexibility.
The skills view instantly shows which qualifications are scheduled in each area – for example, junior doctors, specialists, and senior physicians in a hospital; shift supervisors, machine operators, and production assistants in manufacturing; or kitchen, service, and bar staff in hospitality. If a shift needs to be filled at short notice, you can immediately see which available employees have the required skills and qualifications.
The work area and employee views are ideal for businesses with multiple locations or departments. A hotel, for example, can schedule reception, housekeeping, and restaurant staff separately, while retailers can keep track of sales, warehouse, and checkout teams for each store. For individual shift types, you can also define minimum staffing requirements for specific skills. If these requirements are not met, TimeTrack automatically displays a warning before the schedule is published. This saves considerable time compared with manual scheduling lists, especially in organizations with man
Employees can enter their availability directly in TimeTrack, including times, recurring availability, and optional notes. This is particularly useful in industries with many part-time and temporary workers – for example, when students in hospitality are only available in the evenings or retail staff have fixed preferred working days. TimeTrack automatically takes this information into account when assigning shifts, so planners can choose only from employees who are actually available.
If a shift swap is needed, employees can apply for open shifts or take over shifts from colleagues without requiring planners to coordinate every change manually. Final control over the schedule always remains with the planner.
Absences such as vacation or sick leave are displayed directly in the calendar with dedicated icons, allowing planners to see at a glance where action is still required. Learn more in our blog article on employee schedule planning.
The scheduling system makes unfilled or partially staffed shifts visible to suitable employees based on location, work area, time period, and permissions. Interested employees can apply for an open shift with one click and withdraw their application if needed. Planners can view all applications directly during the staffing process and select the most suitable employee based on qualifications, work area, and current workload. This ensures that final responsibility for workforce scheduling always remains with the company.
Alternatively, companies can enable direct self-assignment, allowing authorized employees to claim a visible shift themselves, for example on a first-come, first-served basis. Shift applications and self-assignment are separate, permission-based processes, so each company can decide how much flexibility and individual responsibility to give employees.
This approach is particularly popular in manufacturing and industrial environments, where many equally qualified employees may be interested in additional shifts. It is also useful in logistics for short-notice warehouse shifts and in hospitals for on-call duties. If an employee becomes unavailable at short notice, they can offer their shift directly to suitable colleagues, with the first person to accept taking over the shift.
The shift monitor is a real-time dashboard for the current working day. At a glance, you can see who arrived on time, who is late, who is working longer than scheduled, who did not show up, and who is assigned to a different work area than planned.
Instead of noticing scheduling deviations only after the fact, you can take action while the shift is still in progress – for example, if a position on a hospital ward remains unstaffed or a hotel employee is assigned to the restaurant instead of reception. The shift monitor makes discrepancies between the planned schedule and actual staffing immediately visible.
This is particularly valuable for operations managers and team leaders in hospitals, hospitality, manufacturing, and service businesses who need to keep track of multiple shifts or locations at the same time.
TimeTrack analyzes your employee scheduling data using a range of KPIs based on actual recorded working times. For each work area, you can track metrics such as punctuality rates – for example, 95% on time and 4.7% late – and quickly identify which areas are running reliably and where issues may occur, whether across individual production lines, hospital wards, retail locations, or hospitality service teams.
Historical data analysis shows, among other things, which employees are frequently late, who works longer than scheduled, who leaves early, and who consistently follows their planned working hours. This enables you to make workforce decisions based on data rather than gut feeling.
Together with staffing requirements, working hours forecasts, and the shift monitor, TimeTrack provides an end-to-end workforce management process: plan staffing based on demand, monitor operations in real time, and analyze performance afterward. Learn more about reports and KPIs in our reporting section.
Share your finalized schedule in just a few clicks. The compact view lets you generate a clear PDF file that is ideal for digital distribution or for printing and posting at the workplace.
Existing shifts can also be copied to the following week or another work area, either with assigned employees or as unassigned shifts only. Schedules can also be exported in iCal, Excel, or list format.
For flexible assignments or shifts that have not yet been fully scheduled, TimeTrack automatically connects attendance data with employee scheduling, significantly reducing manual follow-up. As soon as an employee clocks in – via terminal, web, app, or interface – the system compares the timestamp with the shift types approved for that employee and assigns it to the matching shift. For example, if someone clocks in at 5:54 a.m., TimeTrack recognizes the approved early shift starting at 6:00 a.m.; overnight shifts spanning midnight are also taken into account.
You decide how flexible automatic shift detection should be. Configurable time windows and permitted deviations determine when a time entry is assigned to a shift. If the matching shift already exists, TimeTrack links the time entry to it; if not, the shift can be created automatically based on the corresponding shift type. Full-day public holidays can also be excluded from automatic detection for individual shift types.
Most importantly, clear-cut cases are processed automatically, while ambiguous or unusual cases are sent to a review list instead of being assigned incorrectly. This keeps the automation transparent and the employee schedule accurate – ideal for businesses with short-notice assignments, flexible start times, or rotating relief staff.
Once shifts and staffing requirements have been defined, TimeTrack can automatically assign employees to open shifts. The scheduling process matches suitable employees to available shifts in the background while taking into account a wide range of criteria that you can prioritize yourself, including approved and requested absences, daily, weekly, and monthly working hours, qualifications, eligible work areas, shift applications, employee availability, fair workload distribution, and permitted shift types.
This means the automation does not operate as a rigid black box, but follows the scheduling logic of your organization. In healthcare, for example, qualifications and absences may be mandatory criteria, while the fair distribution of late shifts can be given a lower priority. The result appears as a regular employee schedule and can be adjusted using the same tools as a manually created schedule. Planners remain in control and only need to handle exceptions.
The shifts themselves are created from templates, shift patterns, working time models, or submitted availability. The automation then assigns employees to existing shifts. Revenue- or volume-based demand forecasting is intentionally not part of this process. Learn more about automated scheduling.
TimeTrack’s reliable alerts help prevent scheduling errors before they occur. The software automatically flags conflicts involving work areas, required skills, regular working hours, working time models, public holidays, and unaccounted-for absences.
This ensures that employee availability and skills are always taken into account correctly when creating the schedule, helping reduce errors and improve employee satisfaction. Our linked blog article explains in detail what overscheduling can mean from a legal perspective.
Once the employee schedule is finalized, you can notify scheduled employees about the updated period in just a few clicks via an automatically generated email. If changes are made, you can notify only the employees affected. Because availability is already taken into account during scheduling, the number of follow-up questions is reduced as well.
Employees also receive relevant updates as push notifications directly in the TimeTrack app, making schedule changes easy to see even when they’re on the go.
TimeTrack integrates with Personio by synchronizing teams between both systems, keeping your workforce structure consistent across platforms. This allows you to plan shifts in TimeTrack without having to maintain employee data twice.
For companies using Personio as their HR system, TimeTrack adds operational employee and shift scheduling, including time tracking, scheduling alerts, and reporting. You can find an overview of all available integrations on our Integrations page.
What Is Digital Employee Scheduling Software?
Software that creates work and shift schedules centrally, clearly, and with rule-based support. It replaces Excel spreadsheets and paper lists with a shared schedule that includes employee availability, automatic warnings, automated shift assignment, and reporting.
Can I Automatically Create an Employee Schedule with TimeTrack?
Yes. Shifts are created from templates, shift patterns, working time models, or submitted employee availability. Automated workforce scheduling then assigns employees to these shifts based on your prioritized criteria. Planners review the result and only need to adjust exceptions.
Does TimeTrack Create the Entire Employee Schedule Fully Automatically?
Not from scratch. The automation assigns employees to existing shifts. You create these shifts in advance – manually, as recurring shifts, from templates or shift patterns, or based on employee availability. This keeps planners in full control of the scheduling process.
What Is the Difference Between Employee Scheduling Software and a Shift Planner?
The terms are often used interchangeably. In TimeTrack, you can plan both work schedules and shifts in the same calendar – including shift types, staffing requirements, qualifications, and reporting. The term “shift planner” places greater emphasis on multi-shift operations.
Is TimeTrack an Alternative to Excel Employee Schedule Templates?
Yes. Compared with Excel, TimeTrack offers automatic alerts, staffing requirements, employee availability, automated shift assignment, live monitoring, and reporting – without error-prone formulas or manual data consolidation.
What Is a Shift Type?
A reusable template for a typical shift with predefined working hours, breaks, work area, required qualifications, color, and tags. For example, a template such as “Early Shift 06:00–14:00” lets you create consistent shifts quickly and helps prevent data entry errors.
Can I Create Recurring Shifts?
Yes. Shifts can be set to repeat daily, weekly, monthly, or annually, with configurable intervals, weekdays, and an end date. When changes are made, TimeTrack distinguishes between a single occurrence and the entire recurring series.
What Is a Shift Pattern?
A recurring daily, weekly, or multi-week shift pattern that is assigned to employees for a defined period and automatically generates the corresponding shifts. It is ideal for rotating early, late, and night shift schedules. Multiple teams
Can I Copy an Entire Scheduling Week?
Yes. A source week can be copied to one or more target weeks – either with shifts only or including assigned employees. You can also save entire weeks as named templates, such as “Standard Operations” or “Holiday W
Can I Add Breaks to the Employee Schedule?
Yes. For each shift type, you can define multiple scheduled breaks with a start time and duration. Overnight shifts that extend past midnight are also supported. Scheduled break time is included in the displayed working time and can be adjusted for each individual shift.
How Can I Identify Overstaffing or Understaffing?
Using the staffing requirements view, you can define the target number of employees for each shift – either overall or by qualification. The schedule uses color coding to show whether a shift is understaffed, fully staffed, or overstaffed, for example “2 of 3.”
Can I Take Employee Skills and Qualifications into Account?
Yes. Skills can be assigned to employees, while shifts can require one or more qualifications with a defined minimum staffing level. TimeTrack highlights any gaps and takes employee skills into account when automatically assigning shifts.
How Can I Fill Open Shifts Quickly?
In the compact view, you can drag and drop an understaffed shift onto an employee. TimeTrack automatically checks the work area, required qualifications, duplicate assignments, and scheduling conflicts.
Can Employees Enter Their Availability?
Yes. Employees can enter both available and unavailable time slots, including priority, notes, and preferred work areas. This information is automatically taken into account during scheduling and automated shift assignment.
Can I Lock Availability Requests After a Deadline?
Yes. Time periods can be locked to prevent later changes to employee availability, keeping the basis for scheduling stable. A separate permission allows authorized roles to make controlled adjustments when needed.
Can I Create Shifts Directly from Employee Availability?
Yes. For selected employees and time periods, you can convert submitted availability directly into scheduled shifts and assignments – ideal for availability-driven workforce planning with temporary and part-time staff pools.
Who Decides Who Gets an Open Shift?
With shift applications, the planner makes the final decision: they can view all applications and select the most suitable employee. Only when direct self-assignment is enabled can an authorized employee claim the shift immediately.
What Is the Difference Between Shift Applications and Self-Assignment?
With shift applications, employees express their interest and the planner makes the final assignment. With self-assignment, authorized employees assign themselves directly to the shift. These are two separate, permission-based processes.
Can Employees Swap Shifts?
An assigned employee can offer their shift directly to suitable colleagues for coverage, with the first person to accept taking over the shift. This is a shift handover or replacement process, not an automatic swap between two shifts.
Which Criteria Does Automated Shift Assignment Use?
Based on criteria you define and prioritize, including absences, daily, weekly, and monthly working hours, qualifications, eligible work areas, shift applications, employee availability, fair workload distribution, and permitted shift types. You decide which criteria are mandatory and which are lower priority.
Can I Combine Automated and Manual Employee Scheduling?
Yes. The automatically generated result is a regular employee schedule and can be edited just like a manually created schedule. Automatically generated assignments can be selectively undone without affecting manual scheduling decisions.
How Does Automatic Shift Detection Work?
TimeTrack compares the clock-in timestamp with the employee’s permitted shift types and automatically assigns it to the matching shift. For example, if someone clocks in at 5:54 a.m., TimeTrack recognizes the early shift starting at 6:00 a.m. – eliminating the need for manual selection.
Can I Customize Shift Detection to Fit Our Business?
Yes. You can define time windows and permitted deviations and enable automatic detection for each shift type. Full-day public holidays can be excluded. This allows you to decide how strict or flexible the shift detection should be.
What Happens in Ambiguous Cases?
Clear-cut cases are processed automatically. Ambiguous or significantly deviating cases are added to a controlled review list, where responsible users can decide how to handle them instead of risking an incorrect automatic assignment.
What Does the Shift Monitor Show?
A real-time dashboard for the current day showing who is working, who has not yet clocked in, who is late or absent, who is working longer than scheduled, and who is assigned to a different work area. From any issue, you can jump directly to the relevant shift or time tra
Can I Set Tolerance Thresholds for Late Arrivals?
Yes. Thresholds for late arrivals, no-shows, early departures, and extended shifts can be configured. An issue is only flagged as critical once it exceeds your defined threshold, while minor deviations remain unflagged.
What Reports and Analytics Does the Employee Scheduling Software Provid
Reports by work area or employee show key metrics such as attendance, on-time shift starts, coverage of scheduled working hours, no-shows, late arrivals, and extended shifts. You can drill down from summary data to individual cases, while historical data remains available for comparison.
Can I Identify Overtime in Advance?
Yes. The working hours overview compares target hours, recorded hours, and scheduled hours and shows the projected monthly balance for each employee. This lets you see during scheduling who is likely to accumulate overtime or reduce their hour balance.
How Are Employees Notified About the Schedule?
From the filtered employee schedule, you can email scheduled employees about the updated period or notify only those affected by specific changes. Push notifications can also be sent directly through the TimeTrack app. (Confirm the scope of push notifications with the product team before publishing.)
Which Formats Can I Export the Employee Schedule In?
Schedules can be exported as PDF in list, calendar, resource, or compact view, as well as in iCal and Excel formats. You can filter by time period, work area, and tags – from a simplified staff notice to a detailed management overview including staffing requirements and totals.
Can I Schedule Employees Across Multiple Locations?
Yes. Locations group their respective work areas and responsible managers. Central scheduling teams can see the overall picture, while local planners only manage their own area – ideal for retail chains, hotel properties, or branch offices.
Can I Combine Centralized and Decentralized Scheduling?
Yes. Global scheduling permissions can be combined with local responsibilities for specific locations and work areas. This allows the people with the relevant operational knowledge to manage schedules without granting unrestricted access.
Does the Employee Scheduling Software Take Legal Requirements into Account?
TimeTrack provides early warnings for rest periods, working time limits, public holidays, consecutive working days, and absences. The actual outcome depends on your configuration, master data, and applicable collective bargaining or company agreements – it does not constitute a general guarantee of legal compliance.
Does TimeTrack’s Employee Scheduling Software Integrate with Personio?
Yes. Teams from Personio are synchronized with TimeTrack, keeping your workforce structure consistent across both systems. TimeTrack complements Personio with operational employee and shift scheduling, including time tracking, scheduling alerts, and reporting.
Can Employee Scheduling Be Integrated with Time Tracking?
Yes. Planned shifts can be used to create attendance records for time tracking, while automatic shift detection assigns incoming clock-ins to the corresponding shift. This keeps scheduled and actual working times closely aligned.
Which Industries Is the Employee Scheduling Software Suitable For?
For any business operating with shifts – including manufacturing and industry, hospitals and healthcare, hospitality and food service, retail, logistics, security and technical services, and other service-based industries.
