Shift Scheduling Software for Police Departments and Law Enforcement Agencies

Personnel scheduling for police departments, sheriff’s offices, law enforcement, campus police, and other public safety agencies presents many challenges. Most of these law enforcement agencies have a variety of job positions that require different shift schedules. The police patrol division may work a 24/7 10-hour shift system while administrative personnel may be on an 8-hour, 5-day-a-week schedule. Some police agencies prefer to schedule police officers according to the time of day based on work load patterns.

Union and FLSA rules may place restrictions on police officer work hours, overtime compensation, call back, as well as the types of shift rotation that can be implemented. You must consider job training, time-off requests, skills, labor rules, and shift coverage requirements when scheduling your police officers. When necessary, you must find qualified backup personnel or substitutes to fill a shift as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Using spreadsheets, documents, online calendars, or paper to schedule officers and support personnel may be familiar. Perhaps it’s the way your organization has always done personnel scheduling. While these methods may be sliding by, they lack the capabilities and features needed to increase efficiency, reduce labor costs, and promote employee work-life balance.

Snap Schedule Scheduling Capabilities

Snap Schedule shift scheduling software helps law enforcement agencies meet these challenges. It is packed with powerful shift scheduling features and gives you instant access to key decision-making criteria, including staffing requirements, regular, overtime and on-call hours, labor costs, employee skills and certifications, employee availability and preferences, and more.

Easily schedule an unlimited number of police officers and shifts

• Drag & drop to easily assign shifts, mark time off, move or copy assignments.
• View shift assignments and schedule police officers from three different views. Use whichever view is easiest and most effective for your police scheduling tasks.
• Create rolling shift schedules – from days to years.
• Automatically generate work schedules using industry standard shift patterns or user-definable schedule plans. Snap Schedule software comes with pre-designed compressed work week, 8, 10, 12, and 24 hour fixed and rotating shift schedules that meet staff scheduling needs of most law enforcement agencies, campus police departments, and correctional institutions. Preview work schedules and make changes as necessary.

Improve communications by empowering officers and staff with online scheduling self-service access

Available online 24 hours a day/7 days a week and accessible to employees whether at work or at home, Snap Schedule 365 self-service features cut scheduling and administrative time by making employees more pro-active in the process.

• View Work Schedules: View employee's shift assignments, time-off, shift trades as well as co-workers’ work schedules. From this planner, employees can filter what they want to see, request time off, bid on open shifts, and trade or pick up shifts from co-workers.
• Request Time Off: Employees can make time off/vacation requests, and schedulers can track, manage, approve, or deny those requests. Employees can see the approval status and are automatically alerted when their request is approved or rejected via an in-app notification.
• Trade/Pick Up Shifts: Allow shift trading between employees with or without a scheduler’s approval. Employees can post their assigned shifts to trade with coworkers who are eligible to work the shifts.
• Punch In/Out: Employees can punch in and out of their assigned shifts, and schedulers can see the punch data in real-time in the Punch view or run reports to see the variances between planned vs. actual work hours and costs for any date range.
• Self-scheduling with Open Shifts: Empower employees by letting them self-schedule with open shifts. Schedulers can simply create an open shift for a position and specify the number of employees needed and the required skills.
• View Time Card Information: Employees can view their planned and actual work hours for the current, previous, or next payroll cycle. On-call, overtime, paid and unpaid time-off hours are also presented.
• Look Up Coworkers: Employees can look up coworker’s contact information to call, text, or email. Schedulers decide whom to include or exclude from the directory.
• Update Availability: Save time and stay up-to-date by allowing employees to update their own contact information and availability. Employees can enter their availability information for each day of the week, and in multiple time segments as needed.

Flexible multi-location police scheduling

• Define work locations (stations, patrol routes, events, etc.) for your police deprtment and designate authorized work locations for each police officer. The Schedule Planner will alert you if any police officer is assigned to an unauthorized location.
• Know instantly where police officers are assigned from a single computer screen. No need to flip through pages of paper to see absentees, on-call, training, or overtime situations. Show shift and rotation scheduling for any location on any date.
• Use standard reports to gain visibility into scheduling activities and cost data at all locations, groups of locations, or a specific location.

Multi-skill police scheduling is a breeze

• You can identify applicable skills and certifications for any police officer. Define skills and certifications related to special training, experience with canines, executive bodyguard work, firearms usage, etc.
• The Shift Coverage Planner lets you know if there are enough police officers with the right skills to staff a shift.
• The software's Staffing Overview graph displays the number of scheduled police officers having a specified skill by location, shift, or hourly coverage.

Work around your schedule constraints with ease

• Define each police officer’s availability, desired work hours, daily work hour constraints, and weekly work hour constraints.
• The software's Schedule Planner alerts you to availability conflicts, duplicate shift assignments, overlapped shift assignments, and conflicts with scheduled time off.
• The Daily Assignment Validation report identifies all discrepancies and constraint violations.

Manage labor costs and avoid over/under staffing

• Set overtime policies for your organization.
• Define hourly cost, overtime exempt status and work hour constraints for each officer.
• Use the software's Shift Coverage planner to monitor under/over staffing conditions based on position, skill, and assignment reason.
• Adjust police officer's shift assignment start time, end time, and payable hours as necessary to reflect actual work hours.
• Standard reports provide labor cost, over-time details and summary data associated with the schedules you created over any specified period.
• Export labor cost data for payroll and accounting purposes.

Easily publish schedules to officers and supervisors

• Print schedule views, lists, assignment calendars, and reports to communicate schedule information to management and police officers.
• Easily publish work schedules, calendars, and reports in PDF and a variety of other formats.
• Automatically email work schedules (in text or iCalendar file format) to police officers and/or their supervisors.