A When I Work alternative for group homes
If you run round-the-clock residential care and you are weighing up a general-purpose shift scheduler, this page is the list of things to check before you commit — and an honest account of when you should stay where you are.
You will not find claims about another company's product on this page. We have not audited When I Work, their feature set changes, and a page that told you what it cannot do would be out of date and unverifiable — from a site whose entire argument is that its claims can be checked.
What follows is the checklist instead. Eight questions worth asking of any scheduling tool if the building is never empty, what a good answer looks like, and how this product answers each one. Take the list to whatever you are comparing and check it yourself.
Eight things to check if the building is never empty.
These are the ones that decide whether a scheduling tool actually replaces the spreadsheet or gets used alongside it. Most general-purpose products are built for a workforce that goes home at closing time, and that single assumption is where the differences come from.
| Ask | Why it matters in a group home | Delegyn Shift |
|---|---|---|
| Is a 10pm–6am shift one shift? | If an overnight is stored as two pieces, hours totals and overtime disagree with each other and one person's night lands in two different weeks. | One shift, counted against the day it starts. |
| Can a pattern repeat every other week? | Every-other-weekend is close to universal in residential care. A tool that only repeats weekly means hand-building every second week, forever. | One-week or two-week cycles, with a shortcut for that rotation. |
| Is an unfilled slot visible as a hole? | You need to see the four uncovered overnights out of eighty-four without counting. A tool that only lists who is working cannot show you who isn't. | Open is a slot's default state, per position, per house. |
| Can it refuse an assignment, not just flag it? | Some rules are hard: overlaps, approved leave, an hours cap somebody agreed to. Others are soft: overtime. A tool with only warnings trains people to ignore them. | Hard refusals for the first three; overtime is a warning. |
| Do hours total across sites? | A float working three houses is one person with one weekly total. Per-site totals let two coordinators each stay under 40 and put somebody on 52. | One total per person, across every location. |
| Can staff see each other's shifts? | In a five-person house, whose hours were cut and who picked up six extra shifts is not neutral information. Most tools show the whole roster to everybody. | A count of colleagues on shift, never names. Enforced server-side. |
| Is there a draft you can work in? | Moving people around at 6am must not notify staff of a schedule you have not committed to yet. | Draft and publish are separate; staff see published weeks only. |
| Will it print the week for the binder? | Houses run on a sheet on a wall. A tool that cannot produce one gets printed from a spreadsheet somebody maintains in parallel — and then that spreadsheet is the real schedule. | Print by week, by house, or by person. |
If whatever you are comparing answers all eight, that is a genuinely good sign and you should weigh it seriously against a product as new as this one. The list is not rigged; it is the list we would want somebody to use.
What an established general-purpose product will beat us on.
This matters more than the checklist if any of it is a requirement for you. A large, mature scheduling product has years of work in places this one simply does not:
- Timeclock and payroll. This product has neither, and does not integrate with a payroll system. If you want scheduling and time-and-attendance in one place, that is a real reason to choose something else.
- App-store apps. Ours installs to the home screen from the browser, which works well but is not the same as a native app your staff download the usual way.
- Enterprise sign-in. No single sign-on, no SAML, no SCIM, and no two-factor authentication yet.
- Compliance paperwork. No SOC 2 report, no third-party penetration test, no business associate agreement.
- A support organization. No 24/7 line, no account manager, no uptime guarantee in the terms.
- Being proven. They have thousands of customers. We are new, and we are not going to put an invented number on a page to hide it.
Those are not things we are about to ship. They are the shape of choosing a small product, and you should price that in.
When you should not switch.
Four cases where the answer is no, and we would rather say so now:
- Your current tool is working. If your coordinators are not maintaining a spreadsheet alongside it, the migration is not worth it whatever this page says.
- You need the timeclock or payroll in the same product. Splitting those apart to gain a better schedule is usually a bad trade.
- Somebody has to sign off on SOC 2, SSO or a BAA. Those are absent, and a trial will not change that.
- You are mid-audit or mid-survey. Change the staffing system afterwards, not during.
The one clear case for switching: your schedule genuinely lives in a spreadsheet or on a wall, or you are paying for something whose overnight and every-other-weekend handling you are working around every week. That is the situation this was built for.
What moving over actually involves.
There is no migration service and no implementation project, because at $66 a month there cannot be one — and it turns out not to need one.
- Add your houses, positions and staff. An afternoon. You can paste a staff list from a spreadsheet; you do not have to import anything to start.
- Build one real week — next week, not a sample — and save it as a master schedule. That single step is where most of the ongoing saving comes from.
- Run it in parallel for a week and compare it against whatever you use now. If the two disagree, one of them is wrong about tonight, and you want to find that out while you still have both.
- Then invite staff. Last, deliberately — and be aware that invitations are links you send yourself, so fifty staff is fifty messages. We cannot email them yet.
Fourteen days, no card, and nothing to cancel. If you decide against it the schedule goes read-only rather than disappearing, so you can still print the next few days while you go back to what you were doing.
The price is on the pricing page with worked examples at three agency sizes, and what we do and don't hold is on the security page. Neither needs a call.
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