For months now, employees all around the world have been using our iPhone app and accompanying mobile web app to easily start and stop their shifts. We've received a lot of valuable feedback from customers and this is the result of a lot of hard work based on that.
You told us that not all of your employees have smartphones (something the team had a hard time believing). You also said that, for a variety of reasons, you would prefer that your employees did not access their phones while working. Today, we are proud to announce the Deputy Kiosk, an iPad app bound to your workplace, where your employees may log in using a PIN to start and stop shifts or meal breaks, see their tasks, read announcements and set their preferred working hours.
Your employees can get their PINs by logging in to Deputy and viewing their profile or by tapping on the “Forgotten your PIN” button on an active Deputy Kiosk. We’ll email or SMS the PIN to them, based on the details we have on record.
If you haven't had time to add an email address or phone number for all of your employees, don't worry. We’ve included the ability for those employees to log in by allowing the app to take a photo of them, this photo is attached to the resulting timesheet so it can be verified by the manager. Employees who log in using this method won't have access to their tasks or availability but it's a great way to get up and running with Deputy quickly.
If you'd like to turn on the photo verification feature for all users, or even disable the ability to start and stop shifts via smartphone, making the Kiosk the only port of call, you can do so by logging in to Deputy and hitting the edit button for any of your locations. You’ll find the options for the Kiosk in there.
For those of you wondering about Android tablet support, it's on the way. Promise. For now, head over to the App Store and check it out.
At Deputy we are always learning. We listen carefully to our customer requests and we do our best to satisfy as many needs as we can. Over the past few weeks Deputy has been working on a new layout and some new features that will answer a lot of requests we have been receiving.
After extensive usability testing we have re-arranged the system layout to better portray and simplify your workplace operations. We are doing our best to make Deputy as easy as possible, so we think that this latest update will help increase your ability to manage your business as Deputy is now easier to use than it has ever been!
Some major changes to our product include :
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Change the Navigation bar. It now only requires 1-click to get to your rostering (aka scheduling) and timesheets.
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Locations have been transformed into mini cards on the left hand side of your home page so you can quickly see an overview of who is working, who is late and who is rostered.
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If you click on the Location map on your home page it will display a larger interactive map.
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By popular demand, if someone has called in sick or is coming in late, you can now click on that person and select within the side panel "Find Replacement".
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And here is the BIG one: Reporting
Our Reports will allow you to see exactly where your employees have started or ended a shift on a map. Determine the variance between the total hours rostered and total time actually worked. See an overview of your staff's performance and see all their upcoming availability and leave requests all in one place, across all of your locations.
To see more detail about our Reporting features, click this link http://www.deputy.com/blog/introducing-deputy-reports
Alongside this updates we have also improved our iOS Application. You will notice significant performance increase and several bug fixes.
In the coming weeks, there will be more updates to the iOS Application. Stay tuned!
When using Deputy you begin to create and store information that is crucial to your business success. We at Deputy have realised that there is no physical way to analyse this information about your company so that it can be further used to make sure your business operations are running as well as they should. It was at this point we came together as a team and discussed what reports we believe from our experience will be the most beneficial to our customers. As a result of this discussion and weeks of development, we have built 5 reports that we truely believe will strongly enhance your business performance.
The following are the 5 reports we are very pleased to release:
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Map Locations Report
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Roster vs Timesheet Report
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Journal Usage Report
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Availability & Leave Report
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Employee Details Report
We'll go through each one below and show you how they can help bring you more success.
Map Locations Report
The Map Location Report will allow you to view every single location on a map of where exactly your Employees have started or ended a shift. This report will allow you to monitor and check that your staff are starting their shift at work, not from home.
You will also have the ability to filter what you see on your map. The filters you can sort on are:
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Specified Locations
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Specified Date Ranges
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Specifc Employees
Roster vs Timesheet Report
The Roster vs Timesheet Report will allow you to quickly determine the variance between the total hours rostered and the total time actually worked. This variance will quickly determine if an Area, Day or Employee had Time sheets that exceeded that of what was actually rostered, and vice versa. This information will help your business in many different aspects including:
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Building a more accurate roster that has the appropriate level of man power
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Exploring a specific staff member's work hours to monitor their performance
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To quickly see which Areas and Employees are saving you money or are costing you money
You will also have the ability to filter your Roster vs Timesheet Report by:
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Specified Locations
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Specified Date Ranges
Journal Usage Report
The Journal Usage Report will allow you to view and analyse journals made about your staff. You will be able to filter on the journals made within your various locations, the journals created by your managers and the journals created about a specific staff member. The ability to overview the Journals written about your staff gives you an incredible insight into your staff operations. This report provides an important aspect to your business as you now have the ability to monitor your staff's performance and if necessary apply staff appraisal.
You will also have the ability to filter your Journal Usage Report by a specified date range.
Availability & Leave Report
The Availability & Leave Report will allow you to easily view all your staff's upcoming Availability and Leave requests. Within this report you will also have the ability to perform numerous business actions including:
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View a 2-week overview of who is rostered for each day
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Approving or Declining your staff's leave requests
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Managing trending Availability and Leave requests
You will also have the ability to filter your Availability & Leave Report by:
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Specified Locations
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Specified Date Ranges
Employee Details Report
The Employee Details Report will allow you to easily manage your staff's details. The staff details that will be visible within this report are:
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Birthdays
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Tenure
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Contact Details
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Work Location
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First, Last and Display name
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Age
This overview of information can help you manage which staff have not entered the details you may required. You will also see important activites such as, upcoming birthdays and total work tenure. You will also have the ability to filter your Employee Details Report by a specified location.
if you have any questions, please contact support within Deputy.
You may have noticed our shiny new website that we’ve been working on!
We thought our previous website was overly complex for our simple solution so we rebuilt it from scratch.
We’ve also updated some of our terminology to avoid confusion and remove ambiguity:
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“Areas of Work” has replaced “Activities”
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“Rostering” has replaced “Scheduling”
The functionality remains the same, its just a wording update.
In addition to this, our team has also been feverishly fine tuning and improving the product. Below are the updates we’ve just pushed out:
Home
Quick access to Rostering, Time Sheet Approval and Export
You’ll notice the new “Shortcut” section on the Home page. You can now access Rostering, Time Sheet Approval and Export with one click.
Rostering
Edit Locations and Areas of Work directly from Rostering
In Rostering, simply click “More Actions” and select “Edit Location and Areas of Work” to add a new Area of Work or modify your location.
Add employee from Rostering
In the middle of rostering and noticed a team member is missing?
By clicking “Add Employee” in the employee selection popup you can now add an employee directly from Rostering, keeping you focussed on building your roster.
Locations
Simplified wizard to create Locations
We’ve streamlined the wizard to make it easier to create locations, saving you time. Give it a try!
Notifications
We understand you're busy and don’t always have time to read your emails so you will start to see notifications within Deputy about exciting news and new features from us.
We’ve made this noticeable but not intrusive so you can get on with running your business.
Thanks again,
The Deputy Team
At Deputy, we’ve been busily working on a few new updates that we’ve just released.
Our latest release covers not only new features but also a raft of optimisations to help improve the experience.
Below is a summary
Scheduling Improvements
Quickly switch between Locations
A lot of customers requested that we make it easier to switch between locations when scheduling.This is now possible via the Location selector in the top left of scheduling.
SMS
Not everyone has a smartphone so rosters can now be SMS’d or text messaged to your employees. Note that this is only available in Pro and costs $15c per SMS.
Easier to select employees
Previously to select certain employees you may have had to switch to the “Other Employee”s tab. If you weren’t aware of this, don’t worry you weren’t the only one!
This has been improved so now all employees are visible in the one list.
Edit new employee details
You can now edit employee details, up to when they accept an invite. This includes mobile number, email, DOB, etc.
Mobile
Employees can now accept invites into Deputy on mobile. They no longer need to go to a desktop computer to do so.
Get your employees in quicker
We’ve removed the requirement to have an email for all staff. Now you only need their name!
Optimisations and bug fixes
To enhance the experience we've continued to optimise Deputy and squish bugs making it speedier and smoother.
There’s more features and improvement to come so stay tuned!
