The Harvest Health team love using Deputy to streamline business operations.

Harvest Health Foods is a family-owned, community-based health food store that promotes a healthy lifestyle. Running for 50 years, they supply the Coachella Valley with the best in organics, local produce, raw foods, and organic and food-derived supplements. “We are always expanding our inventory, and keeping up with the latest and new products,” says owner Craig Stone, “My family and I bought this store 2 years ago and have made it our own.”

Since being a family-run business, Craig’s daughter Danielle, helps her dad run the store out in Palm Desert, California. “We really do pride ourself on being a place where people can trust us and our products. Customer service is extremely important to us,” says Danielle, “We have a lot of seasonal customers, so we offer services like online shipping so that we can keep our customers happy, wherever they are.”

Before Deputy, Craig and Danielle used pen and paper for scheduling their employees. Each time the schedule changed, they had to scratch out the shift! Obviously, this was not the solution for their business, so they started using their payroll’s scheduling feature.

However, this required more work than they thought. “You would think scheduling would be easy for a small business like ours, but it’s not!” stated Danielle. Danielle would not only have to manually insert in everyone’s schedule, but she also had to print out the schedule and hand a copy to all 6 of her employees.

“Sometimes our employees would forget to grab the schedule. The next day, no one would show up! We had to call the missing employee and to find out where they were,” says Craig. “It was a mess tracking everyone. We knew we needed to keep looking for a better solution.”

Craig and Danielle discovered Deputy after researching for employee scheduling solutions. “The cost of Deputy was about the same as our last provider,” explains Craig, “But the Deputy product is about a thousand times better!”

Now, the Harvest Health team loves using Deputy. “Our employees love Deputy because it’s personalized to them,” says Danielle, “Deputy makes it all very clear and provides visibility that we didn’t have before.”

It used to take Danielle and Craig an hour a week to create and print out schedules for their team. With Deputy, it only takes 10 minutes—a 500% decrease in time spent scheduling! “It’s so much easier than before!” exclaims Danielle with relief, “Now I don’t have to keep answering, ‘what are my hours?’ Everything I need is right there on the app.”

Craig also noted that Deputy provides accountability to his team, “The most significant outcome, other than the time scheduling that Deputy provides, is that it creates accountability for the employee. Now, our employees show up to work on time.” Craig and Danielle credit Deputy for reducing their employees showing up late or for by 80%. “Because our employees are interacting with the product, we know where they are and they show up on time because of that.”