Questions about care staff scheduling
Including the answers that cost us something. If this product is wrong for your agency, the cheapest place for both of us to find that out is on this page.
Setting it up
How long does it take to set up?
An afternoon. Add your locations and positions, add your staff, then build the first week — or save it as a recurring pattern and let the following weeks fill themselves from it, including every-other-week rotations. You can paste a staff list in from a spreadsheet, but you don't need to import anything to try it.
Can we trial it with our real schedule?
That is the intended way to use the trial. Fourteen days, your real locations, your real staff, the whole product, and no card to start. The useful test is whether next week's schedule comes out right, and you cannot run that test on demo data.
How do staff get their logins?
You invite them, and you send them the link — by text, or by showing them on the spot. Links are single-use and expire after a week. We cannot email invitations yet, which means getting fifty staff signed in is fifty messages you send, and that is the honest shape of it today.
What happens at the end of the trial?
Everything becomes read-only and the schedule shows the next three days. Nothing is deleted, nobody is locked out, and the moment you activate it picks up exactly where it was. We don't think a group home should lose sight of tonight's roster over an invoice.
Running the schedule
Can it handle overnight shifts?
Yes, and this is the thing general-purpose scheduling tools most often get wrong. A shift that runs 10pm to 6am is one shift, not two, and it counts towards the day it starts — so hours totals, overtime and availability all agree with each other instead of splitting a person's night across two weeks.
Can it do every-other-weekend rotations?
Yes. A master schedule can run on a one-week or a two-week cycle, so an every-other-weekend rotation is a pattern you save once rather than something you rebuild every other week. There is a shortcut for exactly that arrangement, because it is the most common one in this sector.
Do we have to build every week by hand?
No. Save a week as a master schedule and future weeks can be generated from it. If you switch it on, the product also tops up the weeks ahead overnight, so there is always a draft waiting rather than an empty grid — you decide how far ahead, and it writes drafts rather than publishing anything on your behalf.
What happens when somebody calls off at 5:40am?
Recording the call-off reopens that shift as a hole that needs covering, and logs the event against that staff member with the date it happened and who entered it. The shift does not quietly stay assigned to somebody who is not coming — which is the thing that turns one call-off into an uncovered house.
Does it stop us double-booking somebody?
Yes. Two overlapping shifts for the same person is refused outright, as is scheduling across approved time off, or scheduling more hours than that person has agreed to work. Overtime is a warning rather than a refusal — agencies run mandatory overtime, and software that forbids it is software people work around.
Can it fill the open shifts for me?
Yes — one click on a half-built week. For each opening it ranks the roster on position held, whether they work that home, availability that day and those hours, hours already assigned this week (counted as it goes), how far past their own preferred hours it would push them, whether they're already on that day, whether they've asked for extra hours, and how loaded they are next to everyone else.
Then the same engine that governs a manual assignment decides whether each pick is actually allowed — so double-booking, approved time off and a hard hours cap are refused outright. It only ever fills; it never moves or unassigns anybody. Anything left open comes back with the reason nobody could take it.
There is no language model in that path, on purpose. Who covers Saturday's overnight is arithmetic with auditable rules, and a plausible-looking guess about staffing is worse than no answer.
Can I type changes instead of clicking the grid?
Yes — you can write something like "move Maria to Tuesday at Westmoor" and it will show you the change before applying it. It only ever proposes; the change is applied by the same code, with the same checks, as a change you make by hand. It sends that sentence and the names needed to read it to an outside service, which the security page spells out.
What if we're audited?
You can print any week for any location or any individual, and every call-off and late arrival is recorded with the date it happened and who entered it. It's a staffing record, not a compliance product — but it is a real record rather than a whiteboard somebody wiped.
What staff see and do
Can staff see each other's shifts?
No. A staff member sees their own schedule and how many colleagues are on with them — never who. That's enforced on the server, not just hidden on the screen. Schedulers and administrators see everything, as you'd expect. There is more on why in what staff get.
Is there an app to install?
Not from an app store — it installs straight to a phone's home screen from the browser and then opens full screen like any other app. Three taps on iPhone, one on Android. Nothing to approve on a managed device.
Can staff pick up open shifts or swap between themselves?
Both, if you turn them on — they are off until you do. Staff can ask for open shifts they're qualified and available for, and can hand a shift to a colleague. You choose whether a supervisor approves each hand-over or a qualified colleague can simply take it, and offers close a set time before the shift starts so an unclaimed one is still the original person's responsibility.
Can staff request time off in the app?
No — a supervisor records it, the way you probably do now, and once it's in the system refuses to schedule across it. Staff-submitted requests are not built yet. This is the single most common thing people expect and don't find, which is why it's answered here rather than left to be discovered.
Will staff be logged out while they're looking at it?
No. Office logins — schedulers, administrators and owners — time out after 60 minutes of inactivity, because those sit on shared computers showing an entire agency's roster. A staff member's phone shows one person's own shifts and is not timed out.
Cost and billing
What does it cost?
$20 a month plus $1 per staff member per month. A 46-person agency pays $66. No tiers, no minimum, no annual contract, and no call with anybody to find out. The worked examples at three agency sizes, and exactly which staff are counted, are on the pricing page.
Do we pay for administrators and schedulers?
Only if they also work shifts. The $1 is per staff member on the roster — an office administrator or a director who never appears on the schedule is a login, and logins are unlimited and free.
Is there a contract?
Month to month, cancel by not paying for next month, and no minimum headcount. There's no annual option today. If paying annually would suit how your agency budgets, say so — that's a conversation worth having, not a no.
What it deliberately doesn't do
Does it do payroll or a timeclock?
No. It schedules who should be where, and records when a supervisor marks somebody late, called off, or absent. It does not clock people in and it does not pay anyone.
Do you store anything about the people we support?
No. No residents, no patients, no diagnoses, support plans, care plans, service notes or medication records. There is nowhere in the product to enter that information — it's a design decision, not an unfinished feature. The full inventory of what is stored is on the security page.
Does it do EVV, billing or claims?
No, none of the three. It also doesn't track license or certification expiry — you mark somebody as an LPN and the product makes sure LPN slots are filled by people you've marked as one, but whether their credential is current is yours to know.
Do you have SOC 2, single sign-on or two-factor authentication?
None of them yet, and we'd rather say so on the page than in week three of a procurement. If any of those is a requirement rather than a preference, this isn't the right product for your agency yet. What we do have is written out in full on the security page, including the things we don't claim.
Can you text staff when a shift opens up?
Not yet. It's designed and priced at $1 per staff member per month, and it is not built, so today staff check the app. It's priced on the pricing page because the price is decided, not because it's sellable.
Who you'd be buying from
Who is behind it?
A registered nurse who has worked this field from the floor to the top of it — direct care first, then all the way to Director of Nursing. So the problems this fixes are not ones anybody described second-hand: the 5:40am call-off, the nurse who cannot go one minute over her contracted hours, the overnight that payroll counted on the wrong day.
That is also why the scope is narrow. Someone who has had to build a schedule at 6am knows what a scheduler needs and what it should stay out of — so this does the schedule properly rather than nine things adequately.
How many agencies use it?
It is new, and we're not going to put an invented number on a page. There are no testimonials or customer logos here for the same reason. If being an early customer is a risk you'd rather not take, that's a reasonable position and the trial costs you nothing to find out.
What happens to our data if you disappear?
Ask and we'll send you an export — that isn't a special favour, it's a nightly file that already exists for each agency. Everything in the product is your locations, your staff and your shifts, and it comes out in a form you can read.
Something not answered here? sales@delegynshift.com — and if the answer is "no, it doesn't do that", that's what you'll get.
Try it on next week.
Fourteen days, your real schedule, no card. The worst case is you print one clean schedule and walk away.
Start a free trialQuestions first? sales@delegynshift.com