Square Launches Shift Scheduling, Completing Square’s Suite of Labor Management Tools

Today, Square launched Shift Scheduling, a new first-party scheduling feature that works seamlessly with Square’s Team Management and Payroll offerings to create a robust, consolidated labor management solution for employers. Now, business owners have an all-in-one solution for scheduling, managing, and paying their staff with Square.

One of the most critical components of successfully managing a business is having visibility into daily team operations and labor costs. These insights give business owners a better understanding of the performance of their business and team members, enabling them to make more informed and cost-effective staffing decisions. Despite economic uncertainty, we saw the number of hours worked by Square sellers’ employees in November return to near-January levels, increasing the urgency to give employers a deeper level of visibility into the day-to-day operations of their teams.

Shift Scheduling completes Square’s suite of labor management tools by introducing new functionality into Team Management, a product integrated within the Square POS that offers clock-in and clock-out capabilities for staff, built-in timecards, permissions, and reporting and analytics for labor optimization. Complementing Team Management’s existing features, Shift Scheduling streamlines the ability for employers to manage their team by centralizing everything in one place:

• Easy to manage: Business owners can now easily create and publish shifts, assign work schedules by job or team member, and copy previous schedules for future weeks to avoid starting from scratch.
• Improved accuracy: Employers using Shift Scheduling can prevent their team from clocking in early or for unscheduled shifts, and timecards will now report scheduled vs. actual hours, automatically flagging discrepancies for review.
• Better visibility: Employees using the Square Team App can view their schedules, signal their availability, request specific shifts, and even swap shifts with their colleagues (with their employer’s approval).

“Having the means to easily set and change my team’s schedule from a single place has really simplified my ability to manage my staff, which can be especially challenging during the busy winter months given I employ a number of college students whose schedules can be erratic due to their other commitments,” said Peter James, owner of the London Tea Merchant in St. Louis, Missouri. “I am able to find schedules that work and duplicate those for the coming weeks, all while receiving accurate reports on labor costs. For my team, they’ve loved having an advanced view of their schedules and the ability to more easily plan ahead.”

Shift Scheduling, accessible via the Square POS or a seller’s Square Dashboard, is available today for free in all Square markets. For additional features and functionality, sellers can upgrade to Team Plus at a cost of $35 per month, per location. More details about Shift Scheduling, Team Management, and Team Plus can be found at www.squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/team-management.