Schedulefly Reviews in 2023: Alternatives, Pricing, Reviews - SSR

Schedulefly offers basic scheduling services in an efficient and simple manner. The company has grown mainly via word-of-mouth with its focus on scheduling fundamentals and personalized customer support.

Schedulefly is a simple and easy-to-use tool for businesses looking for an upgrade from paper-based employee scheduling. It was founded by Wes Aiken in 2007, has a small team of five people, and over 6000 customers across the United States.

Over the years, Schedulefly hasn’t felt the need to adapt to newer technologies due to the absence of external investor pressure. Therefore, the tool remains web-based with a desktop and mobile site.

Using Schedulefly, you can easily create employee schedules, send alerts and notifications via email and text, and upload files to a library that can contain training manuals, instructions on daily tasks, announcements, or whatever you want. 

Employees can request time off, leave notes for managers, pick up open shifts, or get in touch with other employees to swap shifts. There’s an inbox feature that allows you to receive messages from your colleagues and respond to them. Employees can also choose to list their phone numbers for everyone in the company. This can allow team members to get in touch for urgent communication for shift swapping or other reasons.

When users sign in, they get a summary of their weekly schedule. Employees can choose to have this schedule emailed or texted to themselves or others. Below the schedule is the company message wall that lists general messages and announcements. All team members can post messages and photos in this area.

A panel on the left shows important alerts such as information about available shifts and new inbox messages. The panel also shows the weather and quick links to important documents in the file library.

In addition to the home page, there are dedicated tabs for employee schedules, time-off requests, shift pick-ups, employee information, job posts, reports, and the file library that are visible to users depending on whether they’re an employee or an admin.

Using Schedulefly as an admin is fairly simple as well. We started with creating an account, logged in, and went straight to the Employees tab where we were able to add employees by simply providing their first and last names.

There are additional fields such as contact information, birthday, and notes, but they’re optional. Each employee receives a unique set of login credentials once their profile is added to the database.

The main strengths of Schedulefly are its simplicity and ease of use. It is a light tool that employees can access on their web browsers on desktop and mobile. Even though the mobile site doesn’t work as smoothly as a mobile app would, it’s sufficient to provide managers and employees with a way to access the company schedule.

Scott Maitland from the Top of the Hill Restaurant & Brewery in North Carolina has been a Schedulefly customer since 2009. He says, “Schedulefly gets us - the few, the proud, the independent restaurants - and because they are not running around trying to scale and penetrate other market segments, their service stays affordable, simple, relevant, and tailored to our needs.”

Schedulefly is not suitable for large restaurants or businesses growing quickly. You might be better off looking elsewhere if you or your employees require the flexibility of using a mobile app or advanced features such as GPS and selfie time clocks.

Sup Dogs, Baked & Wired, Le Farfalle, Avery Brewing

• Used by over 6000 restaurants
• Runs a tight ship with a small team of 5
• Over 179,000 monthly web visitors

• Reporting: Schedulefly provides solid shift reports for managerial analysis. Check how many hours per week are scheduled per employee, what is the weekly labor cost, how actively are employees checking their schedules, time-off requests, shift trades and pick-ups, and more.‍
• Scheduling: The scheduler is simple yet solid. Presented like a spreadsheet, it allows you to easily assign shifts, post events, add notes to individual days of the week, upload schedule templates that have worked for you in the past, and create unique schedules for different departments or categories at your establishment. ‍
• Personalized Customer Service:  Schedulefly is a small team of five people who run the show at the company. When customers call for help, the phone is answered by a company partner who provides warm and personalized assistance to customers.

Schedulefly also offers:

• Mobile access
• Messaging
• Online time clock

Schedulefly does not offer any third-party integrations.

Schedulefly offers a simple pricing structure based on the number of staff you need to create accounts for. You can start with $30 per month for up to 19 users and scale up to 79 people at $60 per month. Beyond that level, you can request a custom quote.

Schedulefly offers a 30-day free trial for you to see whether the software meets your requirements. You don’t need a credit card to sign up.

The different pricing slabs offered by Schedulefly are:

Schedulefly is best for restaurants on a budget that are only looking for basic scheduling features.

Implementing ScheduleBase at your restaurant is quite simple.

Step 1: Go to schedulefly.com.

Step 2: From the home page, click “start free trial”. This will take you to a signup form.

Step 3: Create your account by entering your first and last name, contact information, the name of your business, and the different schedule names.

Step 4: Once you’re logged in, add your employees to the database by entering their basic contact information.

‍Signing Up as an Employee

Step 1: Open the invitation email from your employer.

Step 2: Activate your account by clicking the activation link

Step 3: Log in to your Schedulefly account to complete your profile and view or manage your schedule.

• Phone and email support are available to all customers.
• The phone is answered directly by a co-owner, ensuring the highest levels of customer support.

During his college days, Wes Aiken, the founder of Schedulefly, worked as a restaurant waiter where he learned about how the weekly employee schedules were made. He noted how he, like other waiters, had to put in a request every week for what he’d like his schedule to be the following week. Then a restaurant employee would make a final schedule based on those requests and hang it up on a wall. Wes knew there had to be a better way.

By 2005, Wes had been working as a software consultant and knew how to create databases and software applications. This is when he decided to create Schedulefly, a simple and user-friendly web-based app designed to address the specific scheduling problems faced by restaurants. 

Fast-forward to 2007, Wes launched Schedulefly as a passion project using his knowledge of software development and the restaurant business. Tyler Rullman and Will Brawley joined Wes as partners to help create more awareness about the company’s tech and grow its customer base. Later on, Charles Short and Hank McCauley joined the team as well to form The Schedulefly Crew.

Expanding organically through word-of-mouth and without any outside investment, Schedulefly serves over 6000 restaurants, bars, breweries, and others in the hospitality industry today. 

The company has found its niche in simplicity, efficiency, and great customer service without any external pressure to add new features. Consequently, Schedulefly isn’t the most advanced tool on the market today. But it’s a great option for restaurants looking for an entry-level, minimalistic scheduling solution.