Bank Workforce Management Software for Branch Teams

A branch day is not flat

Footfall arrives in waves that are almost entirely predictable and almost never planned for. The half hour after opening, the lunch hour, the day benefits and pensions credit, the final working days of the month, the week before a public holiday. Between the waves the counter is quiet and the diary is full of appointments that could have sat elsewhere.

Branches keep drawing the flat week because the alternative takes longer by hand than anybody has on a Friday afternoon. Half hour cover, two separate roles and a rule about who may stand at a till alone are all answerable questions, just not in a spreadsheet.

Two rotas in one building

The counter and the advisory side share a door and almost nothing else. One is governed by queue length and has to be covered minute by minute. The other is governed by a diary booked days ahead, where an empty slot is a lost mortgage conversation rather than a queue.

Planning them as a single pool is why an adviser ends up on a till at half past nine while the customer booked for ten waits. Keeping them apart, on one screen, with a floor under each, is the whole of the difference.

The hour the doors open

Opening needs a particular pair of people rather than any two. A rota that knows who holds keys and who holds authorisations avoids the morning where everyone present is qualified for everything except unlocking the door.

Constraints that are not preferences

Cash handling carries requirements a rota either respects or quietly breaks: dual control at the safe, a second signature above a threshold, a period of uninterrupted leave each year so that anything hidden cannot be sustained. None of these are matters of taste and all of them are checked.

Held inside the rota they are ordinary constraints and the week is drawn around them. Held in a manager memory they surface eighteen months later as a finding, discovered from the same records that could have prevented it.

Answering for a date

The question is never what the rota says today. It is what it said on the fourteenth of March, who clocked in against it, and who amended it afterwards. That is a storage problem, and it can only be solved before somebody asks.

The region is where the money is

A single branch cannot fix its own staffing. A region can. The queue at one site and the free afternoon at another are the same problem, and both are paid for while nobody is looking at them together.

A shared board shows it on the morning it happens, which is the only morning anything can be done. An adviser covers a branch for a day, a regulatory training day is planned instead of absorbed, and a pattern that works at one site is copied rather than reinvented. The Shifton feature set brings the rota, attendance, alerts and reporting into a single account.

Staff who are not at their own desk

Branch people are at a counter, in an interview room or travelling to another site. The rota that matters to them is the one on the phone, and the amendment that matters is the one that reaches them before they set off.

Swaps, leave requests and uncovered shifts belong in the same place as the rota itself. What used to be a printed sheet, a phone call and an argument about which version was current becomes one record that everybody is reading.

What this does not do

This is not a core banking platform and it never touches a customer record. It holds people, hours, qualifications and cost. Institutions tend to start looking when the network passes about four sites, or when an audit asks a question the spreadsheet cannot answer.

Getting started

The first ten people are free and stay free, with the rota, the basic clock, the phone app and reporting included. Beyond that, modules are priced at $0.50 per employee a month, each with a trial of up to 60 days, which is long enough to run a full quarter of month ends through the cost reporting before anything is decided.

The contact centre and the counter are one workforce

Most institutions plan the two apart and then wonder why an adviser is idle at eleven while the telephone queue runs to nine minutes. Often it is the same demand arriving through a different door, and the people who could answer it hold exactly the same authorisations.

Putting both on one board does not merge the teams or change who reports to whom. It makes the overlap visible: the hour when the branch is quiet and the line is not, the afternoon when somebody trained could take calls from a desk instead of waiting for a walk-in that the weather has already cancelled.

The days that repeat every single month

Benefit and pension credit dates, the final two working days, the first Monday after a bank holiday. None of these arrive as a surprise, and every one of them deserves a saved pattern rather than a fresh discussion about cover that reaches the same conclusion it reached last month.