Before You Start
Create Your Retail Location(s)
Create Your Retail Scheduling Areas
Add Your Team Members
Customise your Scheduling Settings
Set up a Kiosk or Time Clock to Clock into your Retail Work Site
Use the Deputy mobile app for team members to clock in
Set up Smart Scheduling for a Retail

Before You Start

If you need some help with signing up for a free trial of Deputy please read:

Creating an Organisation and Getting Started with a Free Trial

When you sign up for a free trial of Deputy, we will ask you some questions about your organisation and your needs such as "What best describes your business?"

Please click on the Retail & Hospitality category and select the industry that most closely describes your business from the drop-down menu.

Note: if you signed up previously and want to log in again to continue setting up your account, please go to once.deputy.com and use the login details emailed to the address you used to sign up for the trial.

Creating Your Retail Location(s)

After signing up for your free trial, your first location will already be added for you.

You can add another new location by clicking Add Location. You can further update your location address and other settings by clicking Edit Settings.

You may create any number of new locations as necessary. Alternatively, once you have one set up you may like to duplicate it to save time.

When operating a retail business, you may have multiple store or warehouse locations your team works from, perhaps across different time zones. Be sure to set up each Location setting with the correct:

Address
Time zone
Operating Days and Hours
Location notes to help your team.

Go to Locations > General:

Create Your Retail Scheduling Areas

For each location, you will be asked to create your first scheduling Areas.

In Retail these Areas might include:

Sales
Cashier
Reception
Manager
Deliveries
Shop Assistant

Areas are used to separate your team members into the categories most useful to you for scheduling. You may add, delete or edit the Areas to create as many as you need in each Location.

Other settings you can configure in Areas include:

adding specific training requirements for team members to be scheduled in the area
nominated preferred team members to be scheduled in the area
setting up the area to have a physical clock on address away from the location using site scheduling
whether hours scheduled in this area count towards worked time.

Adding team members

After you create your first locations and areas you will need to add your team members on the People page:

There are a variety of ways you can add team members including:

adding individually
multiple add
share an invite link
file upload (such as from a spreadsheet)
via an integration connection such as payroll

When adding team members, it is not strictly necessary to enter their email addresses and phone numbers, however without at least an email address your team members will not be able to create an account with your organisation, meaning that they will not be able to login themselves via Deputy.com, or use the Deputy mobile app. For this reason, we recommend that your team members have an email address attached to their account.

If you do not want to invite your staff to the team yet, please toggle off the "Send Invitation Email" option. This will prevent your team members from logging in online unless you send the invitation.

If your team members do not have an email address or mobile phone number they can still be scheduled in Deputy but will have limited functionality.

You may come back to the People page at any stage and add more team members or edit the settings for the people you have already added. There is also a bulk update setting to make the same changes to multiple people at once.

Don't forget to set up your team member's pay rates, using Deputy's pay rate library and leave entitlements, if applicable.

Scheduling and Settings

Once you have added a location, scheduling areas and team members, you will be ready to start scheduling your team members into those areas at each location.

Before you begin scheduling, we recommend that you customise your settings first. You can access the scheduling settings for each location by going to your Locations tab, then click Edit Settings to the right of your location. Next, click Scheduling on the left. In your Scheduling settings, you may set options such as:

starting day of your week
default shift and meal break length
notifications
approvals for swapping and offering shifts
shift confirmation settings

When you have finished making changes, please click Save before you leave the page.

Scheduling functions in Deputy are quite extensive, so as a result, the subject has its own article. We recommend reading it to make the best use of everything available for you.

iOS Kiosk/Android Time Clock to Clock into your Retail Location

The Deputy Kiosk for iOS / Android Time Clock will allow you to create and maintain a dedicated time clock service onsite at your retail stores.

You can download the Deputy tablet app from your respective operating system's stores (iOS App Store or Android Play Store). Once the tablet is set up in your location, you may not use it in another location unless you reset it, however, you may have multiple tablets in one location if necessary.

Use the Deputy mobile app for team members to clock in

You may wish to set up Deputy to allow team members to clock in and out of the work location on their own mobile devices.

Once you have set the worksite address you can configure a setting to alert scheduling managers to team members that clock on or off away from the worksite location. The manager approving the timesheet will also see a warning on the team member's timesheet that they clocked on or off away from the work location

Smart Scheduling in Retail with Deputy's Business Insights Dashboard

Use Smart Scheduling to make informed business decisions, ensure optimal schedule coverage with clear and accurate data-driven insights.

With Deputy, it is possible to utilise known metrics such as actual or forecast sales volume to create labor modeling rules or implement fixed task demand planning that ensures your schedule has the optimum level of team members to cover the anticipated workload.

You can even connect your POS system to import sales data directly into Deputy.

Alternatively, you can add any other custom metric your organisation relies upon to schedule staff, such as foot traffic volume.

From the Business Insights dashboard:

1. Click on Sales under METRICS on the left hand side menu

2. Click on Edit data to enter your sales data as actual or manager forecasted. You can copy and paste it from an existing spreadsheet or connect your POS to have the sales data directly sync into Deputy.

3. Click on Labor model and then Add New Rule

4. Set the rule for the number of team members you require in each area to cover the sales volume (actual or forecasted as configured).

5. You can also set up fixed task based rules for Labor Modeling. You might use this feature for scheduling team members to cover off a regular known event such as unpacking a stock delivery or performing stocktake.

6. Click on Run Labor model to calculate the required staff.

7. In Schedule you can click Auto build shift structure to create a schedule that provides the required coverage.

8. Then click on Auto-fill to have your team placed into shifts to complete the schedule.