vs Deputy

Deputy has been building one thing for over a decade and it shows. The auto-scheduler will fill a week against forecast demand and a labor budget; ours will not — you build the rota. Its compliance layer encodes breaks, overtime and Fair Workweek rules so the schedule refuses to break the law; ours flags exceptions on the timesheet and expects a manager to read them. Staff can swap shifts and pick up open ones inside Deputy with manager approval; with us, publishing a shift and having the employee confirm it is as far as the workflow goes.

Its native apps are better than our web app, its integration list is two orders of magnitude longer than ours, and you can start a trial this afternoon without talking to anyone. If your stores are otherwise well-served and the specific pain is scheduling, the honest recommendation is Deputy. We have said that to people on demos and we will say it to you.

Here is the shape of the business that leaves Deputy. Scheduling in Deputy. Punches exported to a spreadsheet. A payroll workbook re-typed by hand every week, with a separate section per store because each one bills under its own LLC. Write-ups on a photocopied form in a filing cabinet. Handbook acknowledgements in a binder. Quotes for a custom job worked out on a calculator and a paper pad at the counter. Stamp inventory counted into a notebook. Nothing talks to anything, and the owner is the integration.

Eco Systems replaces the whole stack, not the scheduling slot in it. The same platform that holds the rota holds the PIN time clock, the timesheet, the payroll workbook, the signed documents, the write-ups, the recurring inspections, the counter quoting, the returns log and the stamp counts — and on retail tenants, the loyalty program and SMS marketing too. One login, one roster, one set of stores, one permission model. When a manager is scoped to two stores, they are scoped to two stores everywhere at once, not in five separate admin panels.

The second difference is that the surfaces get built to match your paper. Deputy gives you a very good general-purpose product and asks you to adapt. We take the write-up form your managers already fill in, or the payroll sheet your bookkeeper has used for years, and build that — down to the column order. That is a small-vendor advantage and it is the one we actually have: there is no roadmap committee between an owner asking for something and it shipping.

And there is no per-seat scheduling ladder. You do not pay $5 a head for basic scheduling and then $6.50 to get advanced, then another $2 for HR documents and another $1.95 to let staff message each other. Workforce pricing is quoted per site and headcount — see pricing — and what you get is the whole product. More on the operational side at the workforce & store ops hub.

An eight-store retail shipping franchise with 32 employees was running Deputy. They are now running Eco Systems, and the 32 employee records were imported from their Deputy export file.

What replaced Deputy, specifically: a time clock on each store's counter tablet where every punch starts with the employee's own 4-digit PIN; punch pairing that nets breaks out of the day and flags a missing out-punch; a weekly timesheet export in the exact template their bookkeeper already used, with rows split by the store the punch happened at; a multi-store rota where you pick the stores you want to see, drag shifts between days, copy last week forward, publish, and watch employees confirm; and a payroll workbook that comes out as a real spreadsheet laid out like the one they had been filling in by hand for years — a section per store LLC, leave columns left blank for hand-fill where they wanted them blank, loans and mileage carried per person per store, and any row that changed since last week highlighted.

Alongside it, things Deputy was never going to cover: the counter quoting their staff do for custom boxing and freight, with photos and a customer signature on the tablet; the returns cartons they scan and export; the stamp inventory log that matches their monthly workbook; write-ups on their own form with a phone acknowledgement; and handbook documents employees sign from their phone. One platform, one roster, eight stores.