Employee Shift Scheduling Software for Security Guards, Patrol, and Protective Services

A variety of challenges makes effective scheduling for campus security and security protectione services difficult. Security officers, guards, and patrol officers are often assigned to work on multiple sites with varied shift times and rotations. When assigning shifts and posts, you must consider specialized training, credentials, skills, labor rates, vacations, and time off requests. It is important that all the details be easy to find, accurate, and correctly assigned.

High security guard turnover and fluctuating workload are common in the industry. Ensuring that the right security guard with the right skills is deployed to the right post at the right time will provide the required level of services, avert risks, and minimize potential liability. With the many time-saving features available in Snap Schedule scheduling software, these problems are easily resolved.

Using spreadsheets, documents, online calendars, or paper to schedule security officers and support personnel may be familiar. Perhaps it’s the way your organization has always done personnel scheduling. While these methods may be sliding by, they lack the capabilities and features needed to increase efficiency, reduce labor costs, and promote employee work-life balance.

Snap Schedule Scheduling Capabilities

Snap Schedule Employee Scheduling Software helps companies meet these challenges. It is packed with powerful employee scheduling features and gives you instant access to key decision-making criteria, including staffing requirements, regular, overtime and on-call hours, labor costs, employee skills and certifications, employee availability and preferences, and more.

Easily schedule an unlimited number of security guards and officers

• Drag & drop to easily assign shifts, mark time off, move or copy assignments.
• View assignments and schedule security officers from three different views. Use whichever view is easiest and most effective for your scheduling tasks.
• Create rolling work schedules – from days to years.
• Software automatically generates shift schedules using industry standard shift patterns or user-definable schedule plans. Snap Schedule software comes with pre-designed compressed work week, 8, 10, 12, and 24 hour fixed and rotating shift schedules that meet staff scheduling needs of most commercial, corporate, and industrial security businesses. Preview shift schedules and make any changes as necessary.

Improve communications by empowering employees with self-service access

Available 24 hours a day/7 days a week and accessible to employees whether at work or at home, Snap Schedule 365 self-service features cut scheduling and administrative time by making employees more pro-active in the process.

• View Work Schedules: View employee's shift assignments, time-off, shift trades as well as co-workers’ work schedules. From this planner, employees can filter what they want to see, request time off, bid on open shifts, and trade or pick up shifts from co-workers.
• Request Time Off: Employees can make time off/vacation requests, and schedulers can track, manage, approve, or deny those requests. Employees can see the approval status and are automatically alerted when their request is approved or rejected via an in-app notification.
• Trade/Pick Up Shifts: Allow shift trading between employees with or without a scheduler’s approval. Employees can post their assigned shifts to trade with coworkers who are eligible to work the shifts.
• Punch In/Out: Employees can punch in and out of their assigned shifts, and schedulers can see the punch data in real-time in the Punch view or run reports to see the variances between planned vs. actual work hours and costs for any date range.
• Self-scheduling with Open Shifts: Empower employees by letting them self-schedule with open shifts. Schedulers can simply create an open shift for a position and specify the number of employees needed and the required skills.
• View Time Card Information: Employees can view their planned and actual work hours for the current, previous, or next payroll cycle. On-call, overtime, paid and unpaid time-off hours are also presented.
• Look Up Coworkers: Employees can look up coworker’s contact information to call, text, or email. Schedulers decide whom to include or exclude from the directory.
• Update Availability: Save time and stay up-to-date by allowing employees to update their own contact information and availability. Employees can enter their availability information for each day of the week, and in multiple time segments as needed.

Assign security duties/posts within each shift

• The software's Task Schedule Planner provides a more granular level of control for assigning security officer duties/posts within a shift.
• Visually assign breaks and tasks (duties) of any length from 1 minute to several hours with a simple drag and drop.
• Standard reports provide detailed and summary information on assigned breaks and tasks for cost control, payroll, and accounting purposes.

Multi-skill scheduling is a breeze

• You can identify applicable skills and certifications for any officer. Define skills and certifications related to special training, experience with canines, executive bodyguard work, firearm usage, etc.
• The Shift Coverage Planner lets you know if there are enough security officers with the right skills to staff a shift.
• The software's Staffing Overview graph displays the number of scheduled officers having a specified skill by location, shift, or hourly coverage.

Quickly and efficiently fill a shift or find a substitute

• Quickly find and contact a substitute security officer to fill a no-show or cancellation.
• Tell Snap Schedule software your criteria and it will show you a ranked list of available candidates to fill a shift. Ranking can be based on many criteria including job position, skills, availability, labor cost, work hour limits, and seniority.

Work around your schedule constraints with ease

• Define your business operational constraints such as non-working days, shift start times, end times and applicable days of the week for each shift.
• Define each officer’s availability, desired work hours, daily work hour constraints, and weekly work hour constraints.
• The software's Schedule Planner alerts you to availability conflicts, duplicate shift assignments, overlapped shift assignments, and conflicts with scheduled time off.
• The Daily Assignment Validation report identifies all discrepancies and constraint violations.

Manage labor costs and avoid over/under staffing

• Set overtime policies for your business.
• Define hourly cost, overtime exempt status and work hour constraints for each officer.
• Use the Shift Coverage planner to monitor under/over staffing conditions based on position, skill, and assignment reason.
• Adjust officers' shift assignment start time, end time, and payable hours as necessary to reflect actual work hours.
• Standard reports provide labor cost details and summary data associated with the schedules you created over any specified period.
• Export labor cost data for payroll and accounting purposes.

Easily publish schedules to security guards, officers and management

• Print schedule views, lists, assignment calendars, and reports to communicate schedule information to management and your security officers.
• Easily publish work schedules, calendars, and reports in PDF and a variety of other formats.
• Automatically email work schedules (in text or iCalendar file format) to security guards, officers and/or their supervisors.