When I Work Reviews

Pros

- Shift templates, makes scheduling a lot easier
- The ability to copy and paste any shift, even faster than clicking and choosing
- Simple to add and remove employees
- App is fairly easy to use
- Time clock is awesome, easy to use

Cons

- Looking at the full staff schedule on a particular day can be tedious.
- For those making schedules, it's so much easier to do on a computer
- In order to have a printed schedule, it downloads the PDF which you then have to print. I wish this printed right off the website.

Alternatives Considered

Gingr

Reasons for Switching to When I Work

The hourly staff scheduling that comes with Gingr leaves a LOT to be desired and has a lot of catching up to do to even be basically useful.

Pros

The ability for employees to clock in from their smart phone and the system logging their location is very useful. The chat feature also helps employers to communicate the days tasks quickly.l

Cons

The pricing structure seems to always be changing and every time I recommend it to a new or existing client, the current pricing is different than what my other clients are on. I need to be constantly checking the newest pricing before I recommended and begin setup for new accounts.

Alternatives Considered

QuickBooks Time

Reasons for Switching to When I Work

I have tried other time tracking solutions but they all were a little clunky on the admin side when making adjustments. When I work has a spreadsheet like layout that makes it every easy to visualize and make adjustments.

Pros

Interface is simple and provides an organized structure that is responsive. Inviting and adding employees is automated.

Cons

Your employees cannot "turn in" or "submit" their timesheets! There is no way to know or have them verify that what they have entered is ready for review. A mgr has to chase down each employee to verify they have finished, or have a side system of notices, or double tracking.
Employees cannot enter PTO after the fact, they can only REQUEST PTO for future dates. If a company is using the timesheet function to have employees enter their time, breaks, PTO, etc, there are many limitations that require managers to do additional work. For instance, if an employee has an unexpected family emergency for two days, they cannot request PTO after those days are past. So how does PTO get entered for those days? Somehow the employee has to communicate with the mgr to enter it for them!
Very simple but integral functions that are important to a timesheet app that are missing!!
When giving feedback to WIW about these missing features, we were told that it was fine for us to move to another app since WIW wasn't a good fit. In other words, they are not open to feedback for improvement.....like it or leave.... We are leaving and taking the two clients we already setup on WIW trials to another platform, along with the 5 other clients that were waiting for the results of our trial run. All of which would have been paid subscriptions for WIW!

Pros

When I Work allows us to schedule for all of our locations in one place. We love that we can color code each location and positio, making it easy to break the schedule down into various views.

Cons

We once attempted to integrate When I Work's time tracking feature, but there were several issues that could not be corrected for our needs.

Pros

The simplicity and accuracy are notable. It helps you from scheduling multiple employees on shifts. It allows for employees to swap shifts or release and pick as well. Notifications are immediately sent and acknowledgment of schedule and communications are recorded. Which is absolutely needed to employee accountability.

Cons

There are potential areas where this program could fail at advising the appropriate authority. If a shift was let go and needed to be picked up. Leading to understaffing concerns.

Alternatives Considered

ADP Workforce Now

Reasons for Switching to When I Work

The layout was simple and easy to comprehend for any person to use.

Pros

WhenIWork is great for our workplace because it allows us to easily see our schedules, request time off, and punch in and out for shifts and breaks.

Cons

In addition to this platform my workplace has to use another site in order to offer employee benefits. Would be nice to have everything in one.

Pros

This is a very straight forward software that focuses on online scheduling. It’s very easy to use. It’s very responsive, and fast. IM feature is very good. Great for communication between staff.

Cons

The cost is quite expensive, as it’s calculated based on number of active employee per month vs a flat fee, so the bigger the company, the more it costs. We have almost 150 employees in total, so it was not the best option for us to use.

Alternatives Considered

7shifts and MakeShift

Reasons for Choosing When I Work

Excel was too basic and I had staff tell me they “did not receive their scheudule” or fail to check their email.

Switched From

Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to When I Work

I end up going with 7shifts because it was an overall superior product, and has better value.

Pros

The features are so easy to use and easy to teach to staff.

Cons

The least I like is the first payroll we had a glitch, but that can happen to any software

Alternatives Considered

Homecare Homebase

Reasons for Choosing When I Work

They were antiquated and hard to use, no support and expensive.

Reasons for Switching to When I Work

Ease of use and features that Homebase did not have

Pros

I love that I can create multiple schedule templates and positions. Also, LOVE the "drop shift" feature for our employees. This feature has made managing this for my managers much easier.

Cons

I wish there were more specific reports I could pull for payroll.

Pros

Great user interface. Essential for shift worker management

Cons

The app itself sometimes take very long to load

Pros

The Scheduling module works well for our 25-person veterinary practice where staff work rotating schedules. We can set up templates for each group and quickly deploy and tweak the schedule.

Cons

We tried to integrate with Gusto Payroll to streamline time-sheet reporting. It's a mess, and does not often work. It's really hard to troubleshoot because WhenIWork hides all the integration details. For instance you can not see the mapping of employees and their roles/jobs between the two companies. After a while I realize that it's faster to manually type in all the data since troubleshooting this is so time consuming. Plus you can not get support on the phone!

Pros

When I Work has saved me daily headaches. Public Libraries don't have the funding to implement expensive employee scheduling software. When I Work even offers a free version which we started out with awhile ago but as our staff grew we moved into the paid format. Our library and employee pool has grown and changed, When I Work grows and changes alongside it. They continuously offer new resources and seek to keep ahead of us and just "know" what issues we may have as our staff is in flux.

Cons

The only issue I've seen thus far is a slight problem with the remote ap. Let me first say that having the ability to have an ap at all is great. My staff often is out of the library for programs and if they have an event prior to actual library hours they can clock in from their own phone. The issue that I speak of was mostly in calculating the distance that clocking in was allowed. It took a few tries to make sure that staff can check in, with a decent range, but not be so far from the library that it could be abused by someone wanting to beat the clock when they're late to work.

Pros

It is EXTREMELY easy for the end-user to utilize this software. There are also some pretty good mobile applications that it offers which makes tracking your schedule very easy!

Cons

There are a lot of overly-helpful tips and suggestions that constantly spam the administrators' email accounts and scheduling interfaces. (Essentially the company does this to assist the administrators, but there is no way to stop it, which makes it very annoying after awhile). The mobile application can also be buggy at times, and the website schedule does not work properly on mobile phones that don't have a "desktop view", as the website does not have a mobile version designed for it. This forces you to use the mobile app on mobile devices unless your mobile phone can display it in a "desktop view". On a normal computer interface, this works just fine.

Pros

When I Work is a simple and truly effective time scheduler for resourcing projects in your organization. You can track across one or more projects, as needed, and identify time availability for the work that needs to get done. This is often one of the most challenging aspects of keeping projects on track and very few project management tools can help you like When I Work can.

Unlike the "capacity" view of other applications, When I Work gets down to the most granular details. It allows you to identify when and where a team member will be used, including time-off, breaks, lunches, meetings, etc. You can use these categories to identify how best to allocate their time.

The scheduler allows you to see teams based on shift or positions (roles). You can track un-paid breaks and time off, as well as customize schedules and create templates for reuse. You can even create specific shifts for one time or recurring use and maintain notes on each entry. It also provides high level visibility of total individual team member capacity as well as what is scheduled and what has already been used.

View your teams across one or more projects or job sites and distribute resources across them all as needed. It offers program-like management of projects and does not restrict you to individual projects, which can become cumbersome when re-allocating time of one team member across two or more projects.

When I Work is a great tool for planning, or simply use it in addition to your project management application. Its scheduling features make it a powerful tool that lets you forecast as well, by easily making changes in schedules as needed. You will spend less time manually calculating your resources and where to place them, saving you time and money. Changes to any schedules are easy to see and the responses are easy to manage.

When I Work also offers features like task management, which allows you to manage projects of less complexity in the same application. And if you are looking for integration, yes, you can use their library of APIs for that. But, you need to click on the developer link at the footer for more details. Their integration features are not prominently displayed on their website.

Cons

No cons I could personally find for the application and its use. Integration via APIs are present, but this is more for organizations who have techs who can implement them. I have seen organizations with limited development capabilities due to their areas of expertise, where integrations might pose a small challenge... but this should not necessarily pose as a true con for you.

Pros

When I Work is a great product that our company loves to use. We love how easy it is to create a schedule and assign employees, and all of the features are very easy to work with and aesthetically pleasing. We also like the ability to keep a detailed database of employees in the system. Their customer service team has been very friendly and are always there to answer our questions in detail. It is also a great platform for time tracking and exporting time sheets every week to send to payroll. Overall, it's the best platform we could have found to help us do what we need to do every day.

Cons

A couple features we wish they had:

- The option to create a preferred list in our employee database (A-list, B-list, C-List, Do Not Call List, etc)
- The option to be able to look at all events at once on the Time Tracker for the day (right now you can only look at one event at a time, which is hard when we have multiple events and sometimes forget which ones are happening in a day)
- To have a log of attendance (who was late, who called out, who was a no show) that is linked to a person's profile so we know who the problem people are (maybe a color coding that's like "green" if they are good on attendance and then gets closer to "red" if they have had several call outs/tardies)
- A way to add the zip code of an event to a schedule/job site that shows up on timesheet exports
- A way to send a crew memo or mass notification ("this shift has been cancelled" or "this shift has had a time change, please confirm") to all or selected crew members via WIW.

Pros

It does what it is supposed to - enables us to schedule employees, notify them of their shifts, sends us a text when someone did not clock in or out.

Cons

Their billing practices are very deceptive and not user friendly. They sell you "user spots" in increments of 10. It is very confusing how to downgrade but very easy to upgrade. I urge every customer who uses this program to check their billing to see what they are being charged for. Customer service is not helpful and seems like they are not interested in providing good customer service.

Pros

The ease of the program. It was very user-friendly. Scheduling used to take 2 hours, but it was cut down to 30 minutes with WhenIWork. I love that I could customize the shifts. I especially loved that employees had to acknowledge their shifts. There was no more miscommunication that an employee didn't see their schedule. It's also been a great tool to get staff on the same page. The ability to message everyone at once was awesome. Plus the program tells you which employees have viewed the messages. It also has the option for employees to clock in via the app and you can link it with payroll. Employees are able to submit requests for time-off or vacations. Everything you need is in one place. The customer support team is available immediately through their live chat. They have always been very helpful and friendly. Absolutely a wonderful program!

Cons

The only thing I would modify is to have the ability to block off certain dates for requests. That way an employee wouldn't be able to request off Black Friday for example.

Pros

We love the fact that our employees can access it on their phones. Our employees are college students, so being able to use it on a mobile device is crucial. Our old program didn't have that functionality. I also like that I can go in and move someone's shift to "open" for any other employee to accept. Since our employees are college students and anything required for a course is excused from work, so it is really nice to be able to go in and move a shift for an employee that has an exam or something like that. I also like that employees have to acknowledge their shifts.

Cons

Two things - I can't go in and schedule just one person. We are on a college campus that operate on quarters. I would like to be able to look at an individual schedule for a certain time period and edit it as necessary, but that functionality doesn't exist. My employees are frustrated with the notifications. It is great that someone can do a "drop shift request" that goes out to all of the other employees, but it is frustrating to get 10 emails about that. We (mainly our hourly employees) wish there was an option to get the notifications in a digest once a day instead an email for every single notification.

Pros

It’s a great application if you handle a large team and you need to keep track of your employees schedule, time clock , and shift staffing. It can handle up to 75 users. We used this application when i joined a part time job in sales. And it was easy to set up both in desktop and mobile. And when i logged in I can see all members of our department in the Team messaging feature. You can easily read and track all conversation within the team. Choosing your shift or schedule was easy. Just add the shift or schedule you chose for up to 2 weeks and the Manager can view your schedule for the day. Time clocking was easy, just press the IN button and break button if you are on break. Its an awesome application and whats good is that its free to sign up and use these features.

Cons

Well since its free, the features and function are just limited to what the employees clicked on the app but no screenshots of their desktop or other feature that other time applications have that can testify that the logged hours are indeed productive. Unlike Some paid applications that would have integrations to payment system after approval of hours, When I Work does not have other app integrations that would be complete the staffing and accounting system of your business. But so far everything went fine for this application, and moving through features or tabs does not hang and does not have much errors.

Pros

The functionality and features offered are by far the best thing about this Software.
Ease of use, and control of use. Fairly Intuitive, and addresses most all of my needs for my small business!! The Cost! This software is very affordable for a small company.

Cons

I think that the Customer Support is not up to Par. The only way to get support is via Chat or to submit a Ticket. I have been ignored or neglected in the past, and just needed some help and no one was available and Did not respond either. This was when I first started using the Software and so it left a bit of a bad impression with me... I wish the Reports were not just limited to CSV files. I wish the reports were nice and clean and well presented like some of their competitors offer...

Pros

The ease of navigating the app. Being able to put the scheduling software directly on the phone of the employees is outstanding.
We also really enjoy utilizing the messenger tool. Its a great way to speak to everyone in an efficient manner.

Cons

We dont like the add drop portion of shift scheduling and changes. As a management staff we would like to use this but it has been difficult to create a process do to implement this do to it not requiring a manager approval.

Pros

What I like most about this software is the ability to track my hours in multiple manners. Not only does the app show me how many hours I am scheduled to work a week, it shows me the scheduled hours of everyone on staff in a larger format, and can even show my timesheets, giving me the breakdown of negative or positive hours correlating to clocking in early or clocking out late. This last feature is extremely helpful as it quantifies the fruits (whether ripe or rotten) of your labor, letting you know exactly what you need to keep doing or improve on.

Cons

Yes, when I am accessing availability and have repeating schedule preferences, if there absolutely any overlap, it simply does not allow you to make changes and it is then your job to find the overlaps and shift them to allow for your original change. Often, this process is tedious, but it doesn't come up often as the initial mistake is human error. If there was a way for it to offer options on how you'd like to fix the overlap, that would be perfect.

Pros

It simplifies communication with staff and freelancers, pushing updates to them en masse. It is an attractive UI and the app functions pretty well. Support is responsive and communicative.

Cons

The permission levels need a lot of work. They are limited and global so you really don't have much control over who sees what. You can't copy a shift from one week to the next, this seems kind of basic, especially if an event spans multiple weeks it's inconvenient to have to build the shift twice. It would also be nice to have the ability for someone to view a schedule at a location other than the one they are scheduled at...for example, someone in one office wants to see if someone in another office is scheduled to be available or not without showing up in that locations schedule. Currently this is not possible.

Pros

it helps put the schedule and timesheets all in one software, it will send out the schedule to all of the employees with one click, it can be used from a phone

Cons

It seems to have a fair amount of glitches, I have had it delete full schedules, autocorrect times to something completely different, and it jumble around shifts. I also think it is pretty pricey per employee on it.

Pros

It was very easy to put in schedules and candidates were able to check and view their schedules and if we needed to make changes it was very easy - a click of a button.

Cons

For a Staffing Company - You were able to put in multiple locations but when we used it - I would have to get the schedules from the candidates and then enter it into the app so they could see it, They wouldn't able to change their schedules unless they texted me then i would have to change it in the app which took time - wasn't as simple as their just cancelling or removing shift themselves.