About ShiftPlanning

Why this exists

Most shift-scheduling software is sold as monthly SaaS, asks you to upload your team to a cloud database, and locks core features behind a paid tier. For a five- or ten-person café, a small clinic, or a retail shop running two shifts a day, that is a heavy ask. The result is that thousands of small operators end up doing their schedule by hand — often in a spreadsheet that has slowly accreted formulas, conditional formatting, and tribal knowledge known only to one manager.

ShiftPlanning was built as the alternative we kept wishing existed: a tool that does the assignment maths for you, respects skill and leave constraints, and then steps out of your way. It runs in your browser, your data stays on your device, and you keep your config in a file you own.

The philosophy

The product is shaped by four principles:

• Free, with no fake walls. Every feature works for every team size. The site is supported by ads, not by upsell pressure inside the tool.
• No login, no database. You should not need to create an account to use a free tool. Everything happens client-side. There is nothing to breach because there is no central record to breach.
• Excel is the format. Your team configuration lives in a standard .xlsx file. You can open it in Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice. You can put it in version control. You can hand it to a colleague. There is no proprietary lock-in.
• The algorithm is open. We document how slots are assigned, how fairness is measured, and how rebalancing works. If you ever look at a generated schedule and wonder why a particular shift went to a particular person, you can read the rules that put it there.

Who it is for

ShiftPlanning is designed for small and mid-sized teams that schedule by skill and shift — cafés, restaurants, retail, clinics, salons, and similar service operations. It works well when:

• Your team is between 3 and 50 people.
• You have one or more recognisable shifts per day (morning, afternoon, evening, night).
• People have different skills or roles, and not everyone can cover every position.
• You publish the roster monthly or weekly and need it to be visibly fair.

It is not aimed at very large enterprises with complex collective bargaining rules, nor at gig-economy marketplaces. For those, dedicated workforce-management software is a better fit.

How it is built

ShiftPlanning is a Next.js application that runs entirely in the browser. The scheduling algorithm uses a greedy assignment pass followed by a fairness rebalancing loop. The data format is a plain Excel workbook with one sheet per concept (employees, skills, shifts, leave, schedule). You can read more about how it works in the User Guide and the algorithms explained article.

Get in touch

Suggestions, bug reports, and feature requests are very welcome. Email tharathip.kul@gmail.com — we read everything that comes in, even if a reply is not always immediate.