As your business starts to scale, you may start to think about all the operational tasks that come with it—like streamlining your project management processes or reviewing your company’s financial operations. While these are critical to any growing organization’s success, they often overshadow another crucial activity: keeping track of your employees’ time, schedules, and PTO.
Failing to manage your employee schedules can slow your daily operations to a halt. However, using schedule management software like actiPLANS, you can manage employee schedules in a single platform. In this review of actiPLANS, we’ll explore the platform’s primary features, advantages, and disadvantages to see if it’s the right tool for you.
actiPLANS: The Good and the Bad
actiPLANS is a calendar-based software designed specifically for employee activity planning and scheduling. The platform offers a range of features that help organizations manage their employee schedules and workloads without needing to keep track of dozens of digital calendars and back-and-forth emails.
Here’s a closer look at the pros and cons of actiPLANS.
What actiPLANS Is Good At
Simplifies Employee Scheduling: actiPLANS simplifies schedule visualization and employee availability tracking through its drag-and-drop calendar functionality. Within the platform, you can create team schedules, assign tasks, and make adjustments as needed in just a few clicks.
The software also offers options for creating customized schedules and shifts. Additionally, actiPLANS users can avoid shift scheduling challenges and configure schedule templates, work hour rules, and time off policies to match their company policies.
actiPLANS also makes it easy to calculate employee leave time accrual without spreadsheets. Employees request time off, you approve it, and actiPLANS does the behind-the-scenes calculations to determine their remaining balance. There’s also a nifty calendar view that allows everyone to see who’s taking time off when, which helps you avoid scheduling conflicts.
Easily Accommodates Scheduling Changes: Along with tracking employee schedules, actiPLANS also offers several features that make it easy to accommodate schedule changes, including overtime, late arrivals, and early departures based on scheduled shifts.
The platform also offers automated notifications to employees regarding upcoming shifts and any changes in their schedules. Not only do these features improve communication between employees and managers, but they also ensure accountability across the entire team.
Detailed Reporting: When it comes to improving your employee schedules, actiPLANS provides insights into staff workload, productivity, overtime usage, and leave balances through custom reporting and schedule analytics. With the insights actiPLANS provides, you can review reports and analyze how you’re allocating resources to improve scheduling.
Here are some examples of the types of reporting you can do with actiPLANS:
- Leave Time & Balances Report
- Work Types Report
- Past Leave Calendar
- PTO & Sick Days Balance History
actiPLANS also makes its reports super easy to read, with colorful bar charts and detailed breakdowns. You’re not just getting a spreadsheet with a lot of lines and numbers that don’t make sense—the reports are actually helpful and can offer valuable insights into your team’s work habits.
Monitor Employee Location: One aspect of actiPLANS’ software that sets it apart is its employee location tracking feature. It’s more common than ever these days for businesses to have fully remote or hybrid workforces. Additionally, you may have employees traveling to customer sites and other locations. With actiPLANS’ employee location tracking, you can know where your employees are working from at all times.
actiPLANS gives you the option to either allot locations to employees or let them choose their own. Either way, you get a clean visual timeline to see exactly where your employees worked throughout a given time period.
You’re then able to run reports to see where your employees spend their time the most. This is another data-driven insight you can use to make smart scheduling decisions.
Convenient Mobile App: actiPLANS offers a convenient mobile app with its subscriptions. This means that even when you’re on the go, you can still remain connected at all times. In the mobile app, you’re able to submit leave requests, see who is absent, and see who’s working and who’s not.
Another handy little feature? You can let your colleagues know when you’re running late. The mobile app is a smart and slick cherry on top of an already robust platform.
actiPLANS’ Potential Drawbacks
Not Geared Toward Small Teams: It’s not that you can’t use actiPLANS if you have a very small team—you can. The platform offers a free plan for one to three users, though it comes with limited functionality. (You don’t get PTO balances, user groups, or work scheduling.) You can sign up for the lowest paid plan and get full functionality, instead, but it’s likely that very small teams won’t need the full scope of reporting and other features that actiPLANS comes with.
Overall, actiPLANS’ broad range of features may not prove useful to smaller organizations that can’t fully benefit from its extensive capabilities
Small Learning Curve: Like most technology, there’s a learning curve when you’re first starting out using the software. actiPLANS might seem overwhelming for some users who haven’t received training on the platform. You’ll first have to spend time configuring general system settings before you invite employees to join the platform. You’ll also want to make sure you have things like work types and leave types set up so you’re not scrambling to make changes later on.
Note that if you do run into issues, actiPLANS offers a robust help center as well as customer support options to provide guidance.
Not a Full-Featured HR Platform: What actiPLANS does, it does really well: scheduling. It’s hard to fault it for what it’s not. But if you’re looking for a full-featured HR or payroll software, that’s not what actiPLANS specializes in.
actiPLANS does integrate with actiTIME, which is a time tracker software that has additional features, so you have the option of creating a more comprehensive solution if you integrate the two platforms.
actiPLANS’ Plans and Pricing
actiPLANS offers four tiered pricing plans tailored to suit the size of your organization and the specific features you require. They also provide customized enterprise pricing options for companies who need to support more than 200 users. The platform offers a 30-day free trial so you can test out the platform and see if it fits your needs.
Here’s how the pricing breaks down across the four tiers:
Tier One: 1-3 Users
Price: Free
If you only have 1-3 users, actiPLANS allows you to access their platform for free. However, you won’t have access to certain actiPLANS’ features, including PTO balance, user groups, and work scheduling.
Tier Two: 1-40 Users
Price: $1.5 per user per month billed yearly
This plan includes the full scope of actiPLANS’ features, including reporting tools, overtime tracking, and role permissions.
Tier Three: 41-200 Users
Price: $1.2 per user per month billed yearly
In terms of available features, this plan offers the same functionality as the second tier. However, at the 41-200 user mark, there is a lower per-user price for greater cost savings.
Tier Four: 200+ users
Price: Fixed Cost
This plan encompasses all features and modules in the actiPLANs platform, including shift scheduling, time and attendance management, leave management system, analytics tools, integration options, API access, and much more. The pricing for this plan is determined through a customized quote based on your requirements.
Final Thoughts
To sum it up, actiPLANS provides comprehensive software for activity planning and schedule management. It caters well to medium-sized and large organizations by offering extensive customization options and analytics tools for effective team coordination and staff time optimization. This is a solid tool for businesses looking to dial in their employee scheduling management.
