From manual to digital shift scheduling — what we learned
Lue suomeksi →Active Entertainment operates seven experience venues. Each has staff working in shifts — from mornings to evenings, weekdays to weekends. Seasonal variation is dramatic: summer requires several times the staff compared to winter.
For years, we planned shifts in Excel. This is the story of why we moved to a digital system — and what we learned along the way.
The Excel era
In the beginning, Excel was perfectly adequate. One venue, a small team, familiar people. The roster was built in a spreadsheet, printed, and pinned to the break room wall.
Changes were handled over WhatsApp. “Can you come in for the morning shift tomorrow?” “Sure.” Done.
This worked because everyone knew each other and the whole picture fit inside one person’s head.
When Excel stopped being enough
Three things changed almost simultaneously:
Venues multiplied. One became three, then five. Each venue needed its own roster. Different opening hours, different staff, different needs.
Seasonal variation forced scaling. Dozens of seasonal workers were hired for the summer season. They needed shifts, onboarding, and payroll — under the same TES (collective bargaining agreement) rules as permanent staff.
TES errors started showing up. As headcount grew, rest period violations, overtime calculation errors, and missed premiums became more frequent. Checking a single roster against TES rules was feasible. Checking rosters across seven venues — every week — was not.
First lesson: changes dominate scheduling
Building the roster is not the hardest part. Managing changes is.
Sick leave on Monday morning. An evening shift cancellation. A seasonal worker who does not show up. Every change requires a new roster — or at least a new WhatsApp message.
In Excel, every change is manual: open the file, edit, save, share. And hopefully everyone is looking at the right version.
In a digital system, a change updates everywhere immediately. The employee sees their own shift on their phone — always up to date.
Second lesson: seasonal variation needs a system, not heroes
Summer season scheduling had been a feat of endurance for years. One person, two weeks of intensive Excel work, a result that was out of date on the first day due to changes.
Managing seasonal workers in Excel meant:
- New rows in the spreadsheet — each with new contracted hours, pay levels, availabilities
- New contact details scattered across different places
- New TES interpretation situations: part-time arrangements, young workers’ working time rules, special rules for first weeks
A system where all staff data is in one place and the roster is built on top of it made seasonal variation manageable. Not easy — manageable.
Third lesson: payroll is a different thing from scheduling
In Excel, the roster and payroll were two separate processes. First planning, then collecting actual hours, then calculating premiums and overtime, then entering into Netvisor (payroll software).
Every step was manual. And every intermediate step was an opportunity for error.
In a digital system, the chain is continuous: planned shift to actual hours from the kiosk view to automatic TES calculation to Netvisor export. One process, not four separate ones.
This was perhaps the biggest change. Not because any single step was automated — but because the entire chain became unified.
What we would do differently
We would start sooner. The same story as with inspection management: we postponed the transition because “Excel works.” It did work — but the cost was invisible.
We would include seasonal workers from day one. The first time around, we only added permanent staff to the system. Seasonal workers came later. It would have been smarter to start with everyone — because seasonal variation is precisely the hardest thing to manage.
We would trust the automatic TES checks more. At first, we still checked manually, because “what if the system calculates incorrectly.” That was unnecessary double work. Once trust developed, we stopped — and saved significant time.
The outcome
All seven of our venues now use digital shift scheduling. Seasonal workers, permanent staff, part-timers — all in the same system. TES compliance checked automatically, payroll running as a unified chain.
The biggest change was not in the technology. It was that shift scheduling was no longer one person’s heroic effort.
Read more about automatic TES interpretation and shift scheduling.