Planday review

What Planday actually does

Planday is workforce management for businesses that run on shifts. The centre of it is the rota: managers build a schedule from templates or from staff availability, publish it, and let the app handle the swaps, no-shows and last-minute cover requests that follow. Around that sit the pieces that make a rota useful downstream, namely mobile clock-in, timesheets, absence and holiday tracking, and reports that translate hours into staff cost. Now owned by Xero, it has been sold into hospitality, retail, care homes, hotels, leisure and fitness for well over a decade.

What separates it from the many lightweight rota apps is the plumbing on either side. On the payroll side it connects to Xero, QuickBooks Online, ADP, Paychex, Sage 50, TriNet and several European systems, so approved hours become a pay run rather than a re-typed spreadsheet. On the revenue side it connects to point-of-sale systems including Square, Lightspeed, Clover, Zettle and Mews, which lets a manager compare planned labour cost against forecast takings before publishing the week rather than discovering the overspend afterwards. Delivery is browser plus native mobile apps, with a thirty-day trial and no card required.

Key features

The product is narrow by design and the feature list reflects a decade of shift-work edge cases.

• Rota building from templates, staff availability and AI-assisted shift suggestions, with published schedules pushed to phones
• Mobile clock in and out, timesheet approval and overtime tracking that feed payroll reports directly
• Absence, holiday and leave-balance management, including time off in lieu and configurable overtime policies
• Staff cost and revenue forecasting reports, broken down by site, department and period
• Shift swaps and cover requests handled between employees, with manager approval rather than manager coordination
• In-app messaging, SMS and a newsfeed, plus employee document storage and basic HRIS records

Who it's for

The fit is a business with somewhere between a dozen and a few hundred hourly staff, one to several sites, and a payroll deadline that currently costs somebody a day of copying hours. Restaurants, cafes, shops, gyms, hotels and care homes are the recognisable buyers, and the labour-cost reporting is genuinely useful when margin lives or dies on rota discipline. Multi-site operators get the most out of it, because that is where manual scheduling breaks down first.

It is not the right tool for salaried teams with fixed hours, for project-based work where people are assigned to jobs rather than shifts, or for a field service business that needs dispatch, job costing and customer records. Very small teams will also feel the minimum seat counts and the annual commitment more than the product benefit; a five-person cafe can run a rota in a group chat and lose nothing.

How it compares

Deputy is the closest rival and matches Planday on scheduling and time clock while going further on demand forecasting and North American compliance, at a higher per-user rate. Connecteam undercuts both on price and bundles training, checklists and internal comms, which suits deskless teams that want one app for everything but leaves its scheduling shallower. 7shifts is sharper for restaurants specifically, with tip pooling and sales-per-labour-hour built in, and correspondingly less useful outside food service. Planday's advantage over all three is the breadth of European payroll and POS connections and the Xero relationship; its disadvantage is the contract.

Verdict

This is a solid, unfashionable system that does the shift-management job properly and hands clean hours to payroll at the end of it, which is most of the value a scheduling tool can deliver. The reporting is good enough to change how a manager staffs a quiet Tuesday. The reservations are practical rather than functional: reviewers keep flagging a sluggish mobile app, the pricing page hides real numbers behind regional variation, and the standard annual term means a bad fit is a year-long one. Trial it properly, on phones, during a busy week, before signing.