HotSchedules vs. Lightspeed Restaurant

HotSchedules can be implemented in any organization that has to staff a store with varying hours. I have recommended this to my colleague who has 8 employees, yet he has seen great results with the shift swaps and availability tracking/time off requests. I do wish we could see some more attention to general staffing and training VS. the heavy emphasis on restaurant businesses. It feels HotSchedules has grown into many more areas and should work away from marketing so directly to restaurant businesses. Some training programs for other business would be a welcome sight.

Incentivized

Upserve POS is well suited for any restaurant, bar, or coffee shop. We've utilized this system for full service, quick service, and bar service and it's been perfect for all of it. I can't think of food or beverage service application that Upserve is not well suited to handle

Incentivized

• All the information needed for your employees can all be found in one place. From the availability of an employee to their pay rate to their phone number. It's all just a click away. Before HotSchedules all of this information was kept in different places and the managers would need to open several documents and contact lists to find what they were looking for about a single employee.
• Control over how indepth you use the product. The possibilities of this service are seemingly endless. However if you are solely looking for a specific feature HotSchedules offers you have the ability to soley use that feature. HotSchedules can simply schedule, or it can automatically schedule, or you can assign a specific job to a specific person on a specific day. For us, we have employees who are doing a specific job/task one week and then they are needed for a different job/task the next week. HotSchedules allowed us to narrow down our options starting with department, moving to location, moving down to the job they would be preforming for that scheduled day.
• The ease of changing/releasing shifts. If an employee wants more hours they can go in and select shifts that are up for grabs or request to work on a specific day at a specific time. The opposite is also true. If an employee is worried they will have too many hours that week, they can release their shift and put it up for grabs by a different employee. And of course, all of this is fairly customizable to what you want your employees to have the ability to do, with or without your intervention and approval. In our case, if a shift lead releases a shift we only want other shift leads to be able to pick up the shift. HotSchedules allows us to do just that.

Incentivized

• I love all the backend reporting features of Upserve. It's really robust and helps me manage our restaurant by staying in touch with labor, best selling items, etc.
• The customer service is great. I had a question and used their chat feature and my question was answered within 5 minutes.
• I'd highly recommend this product.

Incentivized

• I find that the system of assigning jobs and rates is a little tedious, but understand the need for it.
• I'm not familiar enough with the copy and setting the next week's schedule, but it's not necessarily hard to use.
• The whole assigning welcome letter and with log in and password is difficult with the Spanish speakers even though you have a Spanish version.
• Many of our employees do not have email or smart phones, so I find that HotSchedules is not as useful to them or us.

Incentivized

• There are a few minor bugs in the reporting that should be fixed.
• Check out reports could improve by showing each transaction detail.
• There is not currently a way to check via the reports how many online orders come through since they are processed as a credit card/cash.

Incentivized

Ease of use, efficiently creating and posting staff schedules.

Incentivized

6 Years of Experience provides me the insight on the upgrades and changes that HotSchedules has done to improve the experience of its users. There are so many features that we still have not started or used to the fullest, but we believe that we are currently getting a strong value out of the money that is paid for this product.

Incentivized

Upserve is very intuitive. It utilizes a tab system along the left side of the screen for easy access to menu categories. After choosing the tab you want to view (i.e. Food), all the food items and/or sub categories show up instantly on the screen. once your items are chosen, you are a card swipe away from starting the payment process. Very easy. That said, there are a few minor issues with usability. For example, splitting checks is really quite difficult. You have to create new checks one at a time, then have to go searching for the checks to ring guests up. Really not intuitive on this front. Thankfully, it's not incredibly inhibitive

Incentivized

Always cheerful, informative, and educated staff. Each person seems to want to find a way to help us with any issues or questions we have. I love that all the staff is friendly and in a good mood when you call, I have never had a rep be unhelpful or short tempered, or ever less than accommodating to our needs!

Incentivized

Seriously, if I could give a 12 rating I would. Upserve support is 24/7 and completely free. No extra fees on evenings or weekends and they are fast. You can actually start a chat support straight from your ipad screen. 90% of our support issues have been solved in just a few minutes from the chat screen. That said, I prefer the phone. Calling into Upserve support is just as easy and everyone is always friendly and fast

Incentivized

HotSchedules was the first to tie into a POS to control clocking in and out for employees compared to a canned product from major POS providers. HotSchedules is more widely used by hourly employees in the industry, so there is less of a training curve.

Incentivized

Upserve [POS (formerly Breadcrumb)] offers more functionality than Square, which is the only other restaurant POS I've used. Upserve has intuitive employee time tracking, and helpful labor and sales reporting features. I know my data guy would prefer more detailed data reporting abilities (for instance, you can't pull reports that show modifiers - so when we have Happy Hour and want to track how happy hour modifiers are doing compared to normal price, we have to do this manually wtf?). But overall Upserve is better than the other POS systems I've tried.

Incentivized

• Saving time on scheduling means our managers can focus more on guest experience, managing the floor and other areas that contribute to the success of our business.

Incentivized

• Bestsellers and slower items rise to the top in reporting features, making analysis quicker.
• Dramatically reduced server error
• Posed a challenge to continue face-to-face contact between servers and cooks; the POS tends to end conversations about special orders, special customer requests or restrictions, and generally conveys the nuances that contribute to excellent service. So we have to make a conscious effort to continue talking to each other.

Incentivized