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Planning and Scheduling Software: Mid-Sized Business (101-2500)
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How-To Guide from WORK.COM
By Toni Klym McLellan
Find affordable, functional software to keep your business on track.
As businesses grow, they also outgrow desktop calendars and dry-erase boards. This is particularly true if you or your staff frequently work off site. Whether you need to touch base occasionally or frequently, good planning and scheduling software ...
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Business Size (Employees)
Your choices for planning software by business size (number of employees) include small business (0-100), mid-sized business (101-2500) and enterprise business (more than 2500).
- If you have a small business (0-100), look for small business scheduling software that tracks attendance or schedules work or service calls.
- A mid-sized business (101-2500) needs more robust business scheduling software and can use planning software to collaborate on strategy or project workflow.
- Once your needs cross over into enterprise business (more than 2500), business scheduling software can be vital to communicating major initiatives and forecasting sales and productivity.
Your choices include appointment management, employee time tracking, project management, and task management.
- Appointment scheduling software is very good for appointment management -- keeping a calendar and setting up meetings and events within your company or with external parties.
- Clocking in and out is now done completely electronically, and employee time tracking software coordinates it all.
- A project management planning tool for project workflow is usually deadline-date oriented and thus a good use of planning software.
- Day to day, use planning software for task management (like a to-do list) to keep on top of short-term goals.
Your choices include web based, desktop and mobile options.
- Web-based software allows the deployment of complex applications without having to buy a server or the actual software upfront. Such an online planning and scheduling system can be software-as-a-service (SaaS) from an application-service provider (ASP), which are variations of the idea of on-demand or utility computing.
- Larger businesses with investments in servers would likely buy desktop software versions of scheduling systems, which come pre-packaged on a disk to install and control locally.
- Increasingly, an important feature of planning software is its ability to be manipulated on a mobile device, be it a handheld computer or mobile phone.
Your choices include collaboration, remote access and multiple licenses and may include a demo available.
- Depending on the software, collaboration -- the ability to adjust and plan in the context of dozens of others -- has become a strong new feature set.
- For employees on the road, PC remote access software is absolutely essential when considering planning and scheduling software. The ability to log on from a laptop while traveling keeps distant people in touch.
- Software is normally sold in terms of "seats" or number of registered users with copies. Multiple licenses allow more than one person to use the same copy of planning and scheduling software programs.
- It's important to ask if there is a demo available of scheduling programs to test their usefulness and compatibility with your systems. Demonstration licenses are free and typically last for 30 to 60 days.
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