This article is for users with System Administrator or Advisor access to Deputy and will cover:

• How are SMS notifications used with Deputy
• How to enable/disable SMS notifications for your entire Deputy account
• Publishing your schedule with notification
• How to turn on detailed SMS notifications
• SMS notifications during the Deputy free trial period

Deputy gives you the option to send an SMS notification to team members when publishing shifts or when Open shifts are available.

The SMS notification sent to your team members will look something like this example:

When SMS notification is used, extra charges are incurred for each SMS sent from your account. Please see https://www.deputy.com/pricing for more details on these costs.

The ability to send SMS Notifications is turned OFF by default for all Deputy free trial accounts.

System administrators can enable this setting in their Deputy account during the trial period or at any point after that to allow scheduling managers to choose SMS as an option for shift notification (which will incur a cost).

If you choose to block SMS notifications being sent from your Deputy account, your team will still receive notifications via the Deputy mobile app and email, without incurring any extra costs.

Disabling SMS notifications will block all SMS notifications from being sent from your account. This includes, but is not limited to, open shifts and empty shifts.

To disable ALL SMS notifications, login as a System Administrator :

1. Select Business Settings from the drop-down menu under your name.

2. On the General tab under the Workplace details section, toggle OFF the "Allow SMS Notifications" setting and click Save.

Note: When turned ON, extra charges are incurred for each SMS sent from your account. Please see https://www.deputy.com/pricing for more details.

Please note that if you need to do this for multiple businesses in Deputy, you must manually toggle ON or OFF each business via the Business Settings. 

Why can't I see this setting in my account in the US?

The setting you have chosen to apply in the Business Settings will override any publishing options you select when publishing your schedule.

When publishing shifts, you will see the following pop up:

If you have disabled SMS notifications in Business Settings then this will override the options when Publishing the schedule.

Even if you select one of the first two options shown above, Deputy will block any outgoing messages via SMS, and will not charge you for these messages.

Your team members will still receive email and Deputy mobile app push notifications regarding their shifts, which are free of charge.

If you have already enabled SMS notifications for your business:

You can configure this setting by Location:

1. On the Location page, select the Location you wish to configure

2. Click on Scheduling from the left-hand side menu

3. In the Creating and Publishing Shifts section, toggle ON the option to Display location and area name when publishing shifts via SMS.

Note that higher SMS charges may be incurred when selecting this option due to the extra characters sent in the detailed message.

An example of an SMS sent with this option toggled ON is shown below:

Note: this example shows the Location notes are sent along with the shift notification however please be aware that no attachments will be sent via SMS. To view any files uploaded to a Location's notes section, the team member would need to log into Deputy web or mobile applications.

SMS notifications during the Deputy free trial

When you start a free trial with Deputy, the setting to allow SMS notifications in your account will be turned OFF by default.

This is to ensure that System Administrators who turn the setting ON will be aware of the costs associated with allowing SMS notifications to be sent from the account.

System Administrators can choose to turn ON the setting to allow SMS notifications to be sent from their account either during the trial or at any time after.