Deputy Expert Reviews, Pricing, Alternatives - 2023

A comprehensive reporting system with drag-and-drop functionality and a 31-day free trial, Deputy is a robust option for Windows users.

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Deputy got its start in 2003, when Deputy Co-founder Steve Shelley's business was experiencing rapid organic growth, and he was losing most of his time to managing constant schedule changes and overseeing his teams. To solve this problem, he hired future co-founder Ashik Ahmed to build a platform to automate scheduling and time and attendance. With the advent of the cloud in 2008, Steve and Ashik saw the potential impact Deputy could have on businesses everywhere, and launched the company.

Since then, Deputy has continued to improve its offerings, supporting a wide range of employer needs. While the comprehensive reporting system is only for Windows desktops, it also provides mobile apps for iOS and Android for easy on-the-go use. Deputy also makes compliance a breeze by simplifying recordkeeping with digital records and employee confirmations.

Deputy is great for companies that need to make many individual shifts but not those who set shifts for all their employees at once, as there is no bulk timeshift action.

Also, smartphone clock-in access can only be applied to the whole team at a location. So, if there is a mix of on-site and remote employees, this feature cannot be used.

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• Administrative dashboard: Organize your team in minutes and reduce unnecessary costs.
• News feed for company posts and document sharing: Easily communicate to your employees from the main hub. 
• Single sign-on for easy logins: Allows employees to log in to Deputy via your company's identity provider (IdP), meaning that employees will only need to remember one password.
• Paid time off (PTO) and leave management: Manage all the different types of leave and PTO requests, from annual leave to community service to unpaid and sick leave. 
  

Deputy also has capabilities for:

• Demand forecasting
• Auto scheduling
• Timeclock app
• Attendance tracking
• Payroll and POS integrations
• Break compliance
• Overtime management
• Fair work week compliance 
• Tasking
• Performance management

Currently, Deputy integrates with software such as ADP, Gusto, Paycor, Square, Dropbox, Xero, QuickBooks, Clover, and Lightspeed.

Deputy offers a 31 day free trial. The paid annual plans are:

• Scheduling - $2.5/user/month 
• Time & Attendance - $2.5/user/month
• Premium - $4.5/user per month
• Enterprise - Custom pricing

Implementing Deputy is quite a straightforward and self-service process, detailed as follows: 

1. Sign up for your free trial and create an account. 
2. Log in and take the onboarding tour or skip it and start exploring the features on your own. 
3. Set your location so that your employees can access your business on the smartphone app to clock in. 
4. Add the different areas of the location in which team members can work, for example, Cashier, Admin, and Office. 
5. Time to bring on your people. Here's how: Manually enter your team members' names under the Add People section; Load payroll files from Xero, Quickbooks, Netsuite, Gusto, MYOB, ADP, or WageEasy; Add your team by uploading an Excel or .csv spreadsheet.
6. Invite employees to join by sharing the link that they can open with the Deputy smartphone app. 
7. Start scheduling, posting, and more. The whole process should take "less time than a coffee break."

Describing themselves as "the best scheduling app based on third-party reviews from real users", Deputy boasts impressive customer use cases. Deputy's goal is to "make success fun again" by replacing the manual spreadsheets, paperwork, calls emails, and administrative chaos with a streamlined system designed to be easy to use for teams large or small. Plus, staying up to date on labor laws is easy with compliance alerts integrated into the system and timesheet details available for employees and regulators.