Droppah is new scheduling software from the FlexiTime team designed to help roster your shift workers. It can assess the skills and tenure of employees and assign them to shifts based on your priorities for each roster.
Droppah is in its late beta stage - we welcome our rostering clients to register to give it a whirl here. Please note that Droppah is still in development, which means some features aren’t available yet.
You can reach us with any questions or feedback at support@payhero.co.nz
In addition to managing your rosters with Droppah you can also have your employees clock in and out, and integrate with PayHero - learn more here:
Rostering with Droppah
You can navigate around Droppah using the sidebar - click the Droppah logo if you wish to see more detail.
For more information on setting up Droppah before creating your first roster, see the ‘Setting Up Droppah’ section of this article below.
From the Calendar screen, you can create rosters for each of your teams. First, ensure the correct team is selected in the sidebar -
Click the + button on the first day of the roster period and select Load Roster Plan.
A popup window will allow you to pick the appropriate plan for the roster, as well as setting the start date. The end date will automatically generate as the last day of your selected plan. You can leave the 'Optimise For' sliders at their default settings for a balanced roster, or you can change them to suit your preferences. 
Drag a slider further to the right to increase its priority. The available priorities are:
Cost - How affordable the roster is. When Cost is set as a high priority, Droppah will attempt to optimise your roster for the lowest labour cost.
Experience - How much experience your employees have with their skills. When Experience is set as a high priority, Droppah will attempt to utilise employees who have more hours of experince at a particular skill.
Rating - How well rated your employees are for their skills. When Rating is set as a high priority, Droppah will attempt to roster on employees who have a higher skill rating applied to the skill they're being rostered for.
Once you’re happy with the roster settings, click the green Roster button.
Droppah will begin loading and then optimising your roster, to find the best employee matches for each skill in your shifts, based on your preferred employees and selected priorities.
Once the green loading bar has completed and your roster is optimised, click Load Roster. Note: You can click Load sooner if you wish to manually populate the roster, but waiting until filling and optimisation is complete allows Droppah to find the optimal roster solution for you.
Droppah will provide a summary of the roster that's been generated for you.
Your roster will now be generated with employees automatically assigned to each skill in each of your shifts.
The Staff Coverage and Cost Estimate toggles allow you to view coverage and cost graphs for each day.
You can filter your view of the roster to show specific employees, skills, and/or shifts by clicking the filter button and applying your desired filters.
You can switch your view of the roster between shifts or people using the dropdown menu.
You can make different changes and alterations to your roster depending on which view you're in. To add or remove staff from a shift, ensure you're in the By Shifts view and click on the appropriate skill in the shift you want to make changes to. You can click the x on a rostered person to remove them from the shift, or click the + on an available person to add them to the shift. In this example, clicking on the Front of House skill for Friday's 'Opening - Late' shift allows us to remove John and/or add others to Front of House for that shift:
You can also add additional skills to the shift, or click the pencil icon to edit John's shift times.
Alternatively, to edit the start or end time for employees, ensure you're in the By People view and click on the roster entry you want to make changes to. In this example, clicking John's Front of House entry for Thursday allows us to change the time details for the shift, or to delete the employee from the shift:
When you're happy with your completed roster, click Publish.
You can choose to download the roster schedule sorted by shifts, by people, or both. You can also choose to email employees their shifts for the week.
Click Publish. Your selected schedule(s) will download, any selected employees will be emailed, and when you view the roster from this point, there will be green ticks beside each date indicating that the day is published.
If you have any last minute changes you need to make to your roster, you can change them and later republish the roster. Days that have been changed will display a blue circle with the number of changes that have been made.
Once the required changes have been made to your roster, click Publish to republish the roster and choose which employees should be emailed new rosters.
Setting Up Droppah
Before creating your first roster it's important to ensure your Droppah account is setup to suit your requirements. You'll need to setup:
- The People who should be included in your roster
- The Shifts that determine when employees start and finish
- The Skills each employee will be assigned to within each shift
- The Teams you'll be creating rosters for
- The Roster Plans that you'll load for each roster period
Click a heading below to learn more about how to setup and use each of the building blocks of Droppah.
The Settings tab allows you to manage your general company and rostering settings. In the Details section you can enter your company and contact details.
Under User Access, you can set up a pin which can then be used for locking Droppah to the Time Clock only, so employees can clock in and out without accessing other areas of Droppah.
After clicking Set up Pin you'll be prompted to enter and then confirm your 4-digit pin -
Under Rostering you can apply default rostering rules for your company.
Week Starts On - Determines which day of the week your Calendar view begins on.
Maximum Stint Duration - The longest duration of time an employee should be rostered in a single stint (a stint could be a single shift or multiple, depending on how you apply these settings).
Minimum Stint Break Duration - The minimum break period that should occur between two stints.
For example, if this is set to 12 hours Droppah's automatic rostering will avoid rostering an employee onto a new shift if it starts 12 hours or less after their last stint ended.
Stint Gap Tolerance - How much of a gap can occur between shifts before they are considered separate stints.
For example, if your Stint Gap Tolerance is 2 hours then an employee can be rostered onto multiple shifts back to back, and so long as there is no more than 2 hours between them the shifts will be considered a single stint. Stint gaps are counted in the Maximum Stint Duration, so two 5 hour shifts with a 1 hour gap would be considered an 11 hour stint.
Under Planning you can choose the default settings for automated planning in Droppah.
Optimisation Buffer - The maximum amount of time Droppah should spend trying to optimise your roster without finding an improved solution. For example, if this is set to 20 seconds the planner will finish optimising once it's been 20 seconds since the last improvement was found.
Minimum Fill - The minimum percentage of the roster which should be filled by the automatic planner before the user can choose to load the roster early. Lower percentages will allow you to load a roster more quickly but may result in needing to populate more of the roster manually.
The Shifts tab allows you to view and create shifts, which define the possible start and end times employees may be assigned to your rosters. You can have as many shifts as you need to cover your standard start and end times.
To make a new shift, go to Manage > Shifts > New Shift. Set a Shift Name and the Start Time and End Time.
Under Additional Settings you can also manage how the shift should be treated when employees clock in and out:
Strict Start - When ticked, employees who clock in early will have their start time snapped to the Shift start time rather than their actual clock in time.
Strict End - When ticked, employees who clock out late will have their end time snapped to the Shift end time rather than their actual clock out time.
Default Break Duration - If an employee clocks in and out for this shift but doesn't take a break using the time clock, the default break duration will be applied. If they do take a break using the time clock their recorded break time will be used instead.
The Skills tab allows you to view and create skills. Droppah uses skills as criteria in building your roster - these might be a specific role, task, or skill that will be assigned to your employees within a shift.
To make a new skill, go to Manage > Skills > New Skill. You can then add details like the Skill Name and assign a Skill Colour to colour code the skills for quick role identification in your roster. At this step, you can also add employees to the skill.
Alternatively, you can add skills separately to employees in the People tab.
The Teams tab allows you to set up the teams you'll be rostering - you need at least one team in order to load a roster, or if you're rostering for different departments or store locations you may have multiple teams. When loading your roster, you'll load separate rosters for each team. Alternatively, put all employees into one team to make one single roster.
To make a new team, go to Manage > Teams > New Team. Add a Team Name and add the People you need in each team. Click Save.
People must be included in their appropriate teams in order to be rostered.
In Droppah, People are your employees. The People tab in the sidebar is where you can add and view your employees. (note - if you're using the PayHero payroll integration your employees can be synced to Droppah from PayHero instead).
To make a new Person, go to People and click the green New Person button. Alternatively, click an existing person to edit them. Here you can enter and manage their basic details.
Enter the employee’s contact details. It's a good idea to add the Email Address in particular, as this is where the roster will be sent when published if you choose to email the roster to your employees.
The Coste per hour is used to assess which employees fit into your priorities for a roster based on the cost of assigning them to a shift.
Start Date ensures employees aren't rostered before their start date.
Max Hours Per Week ensures Droppah won’t roster your employees more than their preferred hours per week.
Once you've setup Skills (see the Skills section above for more info) you can click + Skills to add skills to your employee as required. On each skill you can apply a Rating out of 5 stars which will be used when creating rosters which are optimised for high employee ratings, or add hours of Experience at the skill which will be used when optimising for experience. Hours of experience will also increase automatically as employees clock in and out with Droppah.
To set your employees Weekly Availability, you can simply toggle the green ticks under each day into red crosses, or for more detail click Edit Weekly Availability. In the Weekly Availability option list, you can also set part day availability if your employees are only available for certain shifts or working hours each day.
If your employee has any upcoming unavailable dates, add them by clicking + Unavailable Dates. This will stop Droppah from rostering on your employees when they are away on leave or are otherwise unavailable.
Important: If you are creating a new employee at a later date, make sure you add them to the correct team they will be rostered for, otherwise the new employee will not be rostered.
The Roster Plans tab in the sidebar allows you to create plans for each of your rosters. Plans outline the requirements for each day of your upcoming roster, including the number of shifts and relevant skills needed.
You might have plans that differ depending on the season, or to manage one off events. Alternatively, if your plan is fairly regular you may just have a single plan.
To make a new Roster Plan, go to Roster Plans > New Plan. Add a name for your plan, and click + Shifts on Day 1 to add any shifts that apply for that day.
Then add the required skills for each shift.
You can change the number of staff members required for each skill in a shift by using the + and - buttons, or you can click on a skill within a shift to edit how many people are required and add your preferred people for that skill/shift.
You can add additional days to you plan by clicking + Days and selecting either New Day to create a new day from scratch, or Copy Day to copy one of the days you've already setup in the plan.
Once you're happy with your plan, click Save.
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