Simple Planning
A complete staff scheduling platform for hospitality businesses. Manage shifts, staff, availability, time tracking, sick leave, swaps and payroll across multiple locations — on web and a native mobile app.
Scheduling
A schedule builder that survives a busy week
Weekly schedule builder
Drag-and-drop grid across 7 days, multiple locations and sections like Kitchen, Bar and Floor. Click any empty cell to create a shift.
Month view
Full month calendar per location with a day detail panel, plus a staff sub-mode showing one person's entire month — shifts, vacation and availability.
Shift templates & copy last week
Save a week as a reusable template and apply it to future weeks in one click. Or copy last week with conflict detection and undo.
Auto-fill & AI generation
Auto-fill suggests staff from availability, 8 weeks of history, co-worker pairings and hours balance. Or generate a whole week with AI, tuned for cost, fairness or coverage.
Publishing & real-time sync
Publish per location so staff see the final version. Draft / Editing / Published states, and every edit syncs live between managers.
Bulk ops & keyboard nav
Select shifts across the grid to bulk-assign or delete, create shifts in patterns, and move through the grid with arrow keys.
People
Staff, availability and time off in one place
Staff directory & profiles
Roles, hourly rates, contract hours, photos and status. Search and filter, invite individually, in bulk by CSV, or with a shareable link.
Availability
Recurring weekly availability plus date-specific overrides, and a monthly colour-coded calendar of who's free when.
Vacation & time off
Requests with dates and reason, manager approve/reject with notes, a stats dashboard and CSV export. Approved leave blocks scheduling.
Shift swaps
Staff offer a shift, co-workers respond, managers approve an offer and the shift reassigns — or assign a replacement inline.
Sick leave & wait days
Register open-ended sick periods from the schedule or profile, with configurable unpaid wait days, impact preview and a full audit trail.
Role-based access
Business Owner, Account Admin, Planner, Staff and HQ Admin — five permission levels across multi-business accounts.
Hours & money
From checkout to payroll
Shift checkout
Mobile-friendly checkout for staff to confirm worked times and breaks, with break-aware hour totals.
Time entries
Managers approve checkouts into time entries, edit clock-in/out and breaks, and review 30 days of history.
Exports & payroll push
Filtered CSV export of approved checkouts with hours, breaks, rates and gross pay — plus per-period push of hours and leave to NMBRS.
NMBRS integration
Full OAuth connection: employee, contract and leave sync with a match-review dialog, push hours, push leave, and clean disconnect.
Subscription & billing
Plans with feature comparison, trial countdown and self-service Stripe billing portal.
Public API
REST API v1 with per-business API key management for programmatic access.
Insight & control
Reporting, rules and validation
Reports dashboard
Shift totals, staff counts, reliability and fairness scores over week, month or custom ranges.
Charts & heatmaps
Team activity trends, a peak-hours heatmap and per-location analytics to inform staffing.
Workload distribution
Fairness analysis of how hours and shifts spread across the team, so imbalance shows up early.
Automatic validation
Every shift is checked against max duration, rest hours, daily limits and split-shift rules.
Conflict detection
Availability warnings, overlapping-shift prevention and contract-hours tracking, with manager override and acknowledgement.
Audit trail
Every creation, assignment, time, break, section, status and note change is logged with who and when.
Mobile
A staff app, not a shrunken dashboard
Native app
React Native (Expo) staff app in the Mist design language: shifts, availability, checkouts, swaps and vacation on iOS.
Staff web app
Mobile-first web interface with my shifts, shift details, checkouts, availability, vacation, profile and work history.
Push notifications
Staff get notified about published schedules, swap responses and approvals.
Locations & sections
Multiple physical locations each with their own grid, sections and location-specific rules overriding business defaults.
Want Simple Planning for your business?
We onboard operators directly, and we also license the platform to partners who want to run it themselves.
Talk to us