7shifts: Employee Scheduling

Review by eFreeware

7shifts is a team management app from 7shifts, Inc., built for restaurants rather than for offices or retail chains. It handles the parts of running a shift-based crew that usually get spread across spreadsheets, group texts and a whiteboard by the kitchen door: schedules, time clocking, tips, payroll and staff messages. The app comes with a restaurant's 7shifts subscription at no extra cost, and that shapes everything else here.

The main reason to consider it is that managers and staff get different views of the same information. Managers build and publish schedules, approve trades and time-off requests, and watch labor against sales. Employees check their shifts, see who they are working with, request changes and message each other. For a restaurant where the schedule changes weekly and half the crew is part-time, that shared view is the appeal.

It has been on Google Play since August 2013 and carries a 4.6 average from 9,084 ratings, with more than a million installs. Those numbers suggest a settled product rather than a new experiment, though the rating is a broad signal and tells you nothing about how it fits your particular floor.

Built for restaurants, not general workplaces

The app assumes a restaurant's rhythm: shifts that start and end with service, staff whose availability shifts around school or second jobs, and a labor budget that has to line up with how busy the dining room actually is. Auto Scheduling and drag-and-drop shift editing are aimed at that weekly puzzle, and the developer pitches the interface as a way to publish a schedule in minutes rather than hours.

Managers get the tools that keep the schedule honest. Time-off and availability feed into the schedule automatically, trades and time-off requests come to a manager for approval, and the app tracks lates and no-shows so patterns show up rather than being remembered. Overtime alerts flag staff who are close to crossing the line, and real-time sales and labor figures are there to support decisions about cutting or adding hours.

Staff get a simpler set of screens. They can see every upcoming shift, who else is on it, their hours and estimated earnings, and they can submit availability or ask for time off without hunting down a manager. Chat supports GIFs, pictures and emojis, and managers can push team-wide announcements instead of repeating the same message five times.

The recent update adds manager review and approval of training tasks, which fits the same pattern: routine checks that would otherwise live in a binder or a group chat.

Scheduling and shift swaps

Scheduling is the core of the app, and the developer's claim is that a manager can create, edit and distribute a schedule in minutes. Auto Scheduling is the tool that does the heavy lifting, filling shifts while keeping labor cost in view, and shifts can be dragged into place when the automatic result needs adjusting. Availability and approved time off are already factored in, so the schedule starts from what staff have told you rather than from last week's version.

Staff get an automatic alert by email, text or push once a schedule goes live. That matters more than it sounds: a shift change that nobody sees is worse than no change at all, and the app removes the need for a manager to chase people individually.

Shift trades run through the app as requests rather than back-room agreements. An employee asks for a trade, and a manager approves or denies it. Time-off requests follow the same path. The result is a record of who agreed to what, which is useful when a shift is covered badly or not at all.

For employees, the practical benefit is knowing where they stand. Upcoming shifts, the coworkers on those shifts, hours worked and estimated earnings are all visible, so a question about pay or a swap does not have to wait for a manager to be free.

Time clocking, tips and payroll

The app covers time and attendance alongside scheduling. Clock-ins, breaks and overtime are recorded, which feeds the payroll side rather than leaving managers to reconstruct hours from a paper timesheet at the end of a pay period. The developer's summary lists payroll, tip pooling and tip payouts among the things the app supports for restaurants.

That combination is what separates it from a plain scheduling tool. When hours, tips and payroll sit in the same system as the schedule, the numbers a manager checks at the end of the week should line up with the shifts that were actually worked, not with the shifts that were planned.

Labor cost control runs on the same data. Budgets, sales forecasts and labor cost percentages are presented so a manager can see whether the schedule is affordable before the week starts, and overtime alerts give a warning while there is still time to move a shift.

Communication and reporting

Messaging is built into the app rather than bolted on. Managers can chat with an individual or send an announcement to the whole team, and staff can talk to each other with GIFs, pictures and emojis. For a restaurant with a young crew, that informal tone is likely to get more use than a formal notice board.

Reporting covers labor costs, employee performance and scheduling trends, with the developer framing the goal as data-driven decisions about how the restaurant runs. Read alongside the real-time sales and labor figures, those reports are the manager's side of the app: less about the next shift and more about the next month.

The app also connects to a restaurant's existing POS system or payroll provider, and settings can be adjusted to match how a particular restaurant works. That integration matters because scheduling data is only useful if it reaches the systems that pay people and record sales.

What the app costs

The download is free, there are no ads, and there are no in-app purchases. Those three facts are worth stating plainly, because they are unusual for a business app of this kind.

The cost sits elsewhere. Teams pay nothing extra for it, since access comes with the restaurant's 7shifts subscription, making it a companion to a paid service rather than a standalone product. A restaurant that is not on that subscription is not really the audience for this download, whatever the price tag on Google Play suggests.

For a restaurant already paying for 7shifts, the calculation is straightforward: managers and staff install the app and use it at no extra charge. For anyone else, the free download is not the whole story, and it would be a mistake to treat it as one.

How it compares with the alternatives

The realistic alternatives are a general-purpose scheduling app, a spreadsheet, or a messaging group. A spreadsheet is free and familiar, and a manager who already runs a tight schedule in one may not see the point of switching. What the spreadsheet cannot do is notify staff automatically, collect availability in one place, or show labor against sales while the week is still running.

A general scheduling tool can cover shifts and time off, but it will not know about tip pooling, payroll or the labor percentages a restaurant watches. That is the trade: a broader tool fits more businesses, while this one is shaped around restaurant work specifically. The developer's own framing is blunt about it, describing the app as the only all-in-one team management tool built specifically for restaurants.

A messaging group is the other common substitute, and it is where shift swaps and announcements often end up. It works until someone misses the message, a trade is agreed verbally and then disputed, or a manager needs a record of who was asked. The app replaces that informal channel with requests that can be approved and tracked.

A scheduling app for restaurants that already use 7shifts

This is a well-established app with a strong rating and a clear purpose, and it does the job it is built for: keeping a restaurant's schedule, hours, tips and messages in one place, with separate views for managers and staff. The features that stand out are the ones that remove chasing, such as automatic shift notifications, availability feeding straight into the schedule, and trades that go through an approval step rather than a hallway conversation.

The condition attached to it is the subscription. The app is free, but it is free to teams whose restaurant already pays for 7shifts, and that is the deciding factor. Managers and owners at restaurants on that subscription have little reason not to install it; staff at those restaurants get a genuinely useful set of tools for checking shifts, hours and earnings.

Anyone running a schedule without that subscription should treat the app as a preview of the service rather than a free scheduling tool in its own right. For the audience it is built for, though, the combination of scheduling, time clocking, tips, payroll and communication in a single app is hard to match with a spreadsheet and a group chat.

What's new in version 2026.38.1

* Managers can now review and approve training tasks