Looking for more details on Famly’s new system for scheduling staff and tracking hours for payroll? You’ve come to the right place.
Check out the videos below to get a tour of the tool and check out some frequently asked questions:
So what's new?
We wanted to create a system that was more flexible to change, more transparent for your employees, and made it easier to closely manage your staff costs - plus get it all out for payroll.
You can see a full list of the changes below, but at its core:
A more transparent and dynamic overview of staff availability, with built in ‘shifts’ which you can reassign easily.
An at-hand overview of contracted vs scheduled hours to make sure you manage overtime carefully.
More tools to track, compare, and export staff hours info out of Famly to inform your payroll.
And that’s not all. We will soon be implementing a bunch of highly requested stuff, which includes:
Work tags: fully customisable labels for organising schedules and feeding extra information for payroll.
Bulk deletion of shifts: be able to delete shifts within a date range, by room(s), or staff.
Shift recurrence: set recurring shifts for your staff and avoid doing it manually regularly.
Break rules: automatically deduct break times based on daily attended hours.
What is new in the revamped staffing tool?
Below are just some of the things you can do in the revamped staffing, that you couldn’t do before:
You can now accurately track staff availability down to the minute, including contracted hours and staff leave so it’s easy to see where your gaps are and how to fill them.
You can easily reassign and adjust shifts between staff, including setting shifts as ‘open’ so you know you need to address them.
You can copy and paste complex shift patterns from one week to the next, saving significant admin time.
You can create schedules based on expected child attendance info and staff availability all in one place.
Way more granular permissions by separating view and edit permissions for staff schedule, staff attendance, staff leave, staff management info.
Staff can now easily see their own schedule from home without having access to other information in the app.
You can now play around with the schedule, editing and making changes but only notifying staff of those changes once the schedule is published.
Staff hours are summed up so that you can keep your eye on totals, compare to targeted hours, and track ongoing ‘balances’ so that you can avoid overtime before it happens.
You can track overtime to payout or use as time off in lieu.
Way more data export options to get the right info out of Famly to inform payroll and HR tracking through a CSV export or direct through an API (access to our API starts at £19 per month).
What do I lose?
It’s worth noting that you will need to set up your staff patterns again in the new scheduling tool. There was just no solid way to switch them over when the foundational logic is so different (because it’s much stronger). The good news is that setting up new staff schedules is easier than ever and you have plenty of time to do it if you get started now.
We also wanted to take the chance to be transparent about some things that will be missing in the new staffing setup, so that you know in advance in case this is something really key for you. They are:
Recurring shifts - You can’t currently set up recurring shifts in this beta version, but we are building it and will release it as soon as possible this Spring. For now, you can duplicate shift patterns to repeat shifts.
Visual graphs on the overview - We found most of you didn’t get much use out of the very visual graphs to explain the current state of each room on the overview - instead they’ve been replaced with ratio smileys, which you can click to get to more visual graphs.
Room-based ratios - We are now only supporting age-group based ratios as they are the best way to stay compliant, and it’s what the vast majority of you are using.
What will it cost?
Nobody who currently has access to staff rotas will pay a penny more to get the new tool.
If you’re on our Professional package - this is all included as standard in that package.
If you’re on Premium but pay our per-seat price for staff rotas, you can continue to pay per-seat with the new system.
How does the switch work?
Right now, you can turn this on and play around by going to Settings > Playground and toggling ‘Staff schedule & hours (Beta)’. We’d definitely recommend making the switch sooner rather than later so you can get used to the system.
For everyone who doesn’t manually switch, you’ll be automatically moved over on Wednesday, April 3rd.