Homebase Reviews

Scheduling & Labor Costing

Comments: Years of working with Homebase have shown that they constantly improve their product, and make it easier to use with integrations with common applications (via API access).

Pros:

Quite honestly, one of the first things I recommend to businesses that want to schedule employees and know their labor costs that are up to the minute.

Cons:

The one feature that I do wish was available, would be a calendar view that showed the entire department or business, so that it could be displayed on a monitor or web-based application.

Homebase is the way to go!

Pros:

I love homebase! I can keep track of my schedule, hours,paycheck and all kinds of other things through the app! It's perfect!

Cons:

The only thing I don't really like is the cash out feature. It uses plaid to link banks and cards but all of the cards I use are not supported.

Honeymoon phase is definitely over........contemplating a "divorce".

Comments: Heartbroken, disgusted....and anything else I didn't mention above.

Pros:

In 2018 everything was so great and at an incredible price, by my second year as a monthly subscriber I upgraded my plan, in spite of the problem integrating homebase timecards with my QuickBooks payroll, and had to manually enter the data personally. I loved being able to see the total hours per employee when creating a schedule, until one day it disappeared. Still undeterred, I loved the ability to access the app from any mobile device and desktop. Only androids & Desktops access the app easily and iphones or ipads come with headaches. I fell in love with the ease, simplicity and it's sexy platform look of this time tracking/management app, until one day everything changed and I lost my ability to view time cards all on one screen. Little issues were just an alert in the far upper right corner like a nudge. Now they scream in double size that takes up half the monitor, leaving only an inch or two to view time cards accompanied with a lot of scrolling. Nowadays I'm afraid to login and be greeted by a scowling dashboard with a list of issues nagging to be resolved. Issues caused by employees that can't log in or out and got tired of uninstalling and reinstalling the app as a temporary fix. I knew my relationship with homebase was reaching a bitter end when without so much as a "heads up" warning there would be an increase to my subscription (almost $20.00 more). When I said "Oh h#!! NO!" and lowered it to essentials...

Cons:

I was denied the ability to manage my PTO mandated sick leave pay feature that never matched QuickBooks anyway, and the feature to assign different roles/rate of pay for different jobs among my existing employees. I now have a default pay rate/role homebase deems as "fitting". After a 5 year relationship with all the little things I loved, I can have back if I pay $20.00 more a month. Out of some "disturbed" sense I felt I owed to Homebase, I emailed support with an offer to pay a small increase but not at their ridiculous price with it's 15 features included that I would never use. If they can't find my request reasonable and let me pay only for what I use, I will fly into the arms of another app that gives me the basic features for free. The email was sent last week and long past the "24 hour" promise to respond. I never called out their promised "money back guarantee" after 5 years and the inability to integrate their application with my payroll system......Seriously? How much alimony is it worth? No, it's too late now. I'm divorcing homebase from my company forever.

New Start Up

Comments: One con would be that the ability to find answers to questions on youtube and online need more current updates. either way, to call was very helpful when you get phone help with a live rep. Some feature are still a little hard to find and, such as like creating unpaid time on clock.

Pros:

The hiring feature was great for us for hiring. All the scheduling and time features and just about 99% of everything was really good. We are glad we found Homebase and would recommend it for any small business starting up.

Cons:

Due to interviewing at other locations instead of our home where we are based from, it would have been nice to enter other locations for an interview instead of having to select our home address which we really didn't want to have out there.

Ease of Use

Comments: The best thing Homebased has done for finance has stop the physical tracking down of employee's hours that were on sticky notes, white boards, and Day planners. It also, took the complicated or tedious bi-weekly payroll complication off excel and into a computer software.

Pros:

The price for the product and ease of use.

Cons:

I wish the geo fencing in homefase was a little more intuitive like Tsheet a Quickbooks product. We have two buildings that employees run back and forth too, I would like to see, how much time employees waste when they go to the other building, or when they go pickup a customers vehicle. Do you know if this option is available or going to be available in the future?

Easy solution to the nagging of Employee Management

Comments: Great! Excellent place to start when creating employee schedules and handling timesheets and requests.

Pros:

I have one place to handle all my employee's schedules, timesheets and requests.

Cons:

I would really like to be able to choose two weeks to view at a time when making schedules.

Great tool

Pros:

I can easily schedule the work shifts for my store.

Cons:

All applications have ways to improve, but I find Homebase a great tool for what I need.

Time Clock Review for Homebase

Pros:

The free app for clocking in and out. was able to provide accurate time in and time out for employees and get rid of the sticky note system that was in place before hand. Each employee had a personalized number they used for the clock in and outs

Cons:

overall just using the clock in and out system I had no complaints. the system solved a problem that at the time we were having.

Ease of use

Pros:

I love how easy it is to view the schedule/ calender. If changes to the schedule are made, we are notified immediately view alerts on phones instead of waiting for the manager to call about schedule changes

Cons:

I have no problems with this program. Ive had nothing but good run ins with this program.

Great Choice for Payroll

Pros:

Homebase is easy to use and navigate. We use it for payroll of our small company, and it has been wonderful.

Cons:

So far I do not have any things that I like least about Homebase.

It's is a good app, but is constantly lagging, no matter what device and internet connection used.

Comments: See Above. I would like to say every time I have spoken with an employee from HB, they have been incredibly professional, polite, and knowledgeable. Homebase was also helpful during the early phases of Covid last year, with costs. I do wish there was an easier way than what I was told, to update myself to the admin of the account. Our current admin is an IT guy we used a few years ago, who does not have access to the email he used for HB anymore. I was told you'll need my [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] to contact, and provide bills addressed to Firefly with his name listed as well, showing he is the [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN]. However, we are DBA, so nothing, not even our paystubs, state Firefly. Our DBA, is "Wes Pac Inc", which is what mail, licenses, and invoices state. If there is an alternate way to handle this, please contact me. Thank you all so much for everything you do.

Pros:

Asking for time off is simple for my employees, the message option is convenient.

Cons:

Homebase since the beginning is constantly lagging. Whether it be to load pages, send or receive messages, especially sending images. Whether I am using the url on a desktop, or the app on my iPad or iPhone, it is extremely slow. I get message notifications long before the messages actually show up. It is like this for all my employee's that use the app. The iPad version is difficult to use, it is as big as the size of a small phone screen, I don't understand why the app can't take up the entire screen of the iPad, like every other app I use on my iPad. I don't know if this is an option, but for my restaurant in particular, as I'm sure is the case with many establishments that use your app, we have several different departments. I'd for one like to be able to only see my FOH employee's on the schedule, and have a separate for BOH. It would also be convenient to not just limit the amount of employee's that can request off for a specific day, but to be able to limit by department. For example, to be able to say, 3 servers, 2 bussers, and 1 hostess is the limit for any particular day, rather than only being able to say 3 employee's in general is the max. I hope I explained that in a way it makes sense. Additionally, working in a restaurant that is open nights and weekends, your support hours are not reasonable at all. There has been numerous times we've needed support and you have been closed, so we are just hopeless.

Overview

Comments: It has a lot of great features and I like how you can modify a lot of the notifications to your needs.

Pros:

I love how you can do the schedule out as far as in advance as possible but no one sees it until you post it. We have used other softwares that we would have to do a spreadsheet first and couldn't enter anything into the system until we were ready for anyone to see the shifts.

Cons:

I would say the only thing I don't like is that we have trouble with the clock in system at one of our locations. Which is weird because it works perfectly fine at our other 3 locations. It doesn't register clock-ins a lot of times so my employees have to text me to clock them in. I have reached out support about this several times in the past and they just say to delete the app and then reinstall. It works great for about a day and then acts up again.

Happy Manager

Comments: The homebase team has been nothing but helpful and supportive, and are always willing to take suggestions.

Pros:

I love that there is an app connected to the schedule and other features! A huge plus is my team being able to put in their own time off, and request shift trades or covers through the app as well.

Cons:

The scheduler can run slowly, and it would be nice to be able to organize job applicants a little better.

The Features I Need for Free

Pros:

I get to schedule employees and they get to see it on their phones, check schedules, ask for time off, trade shifts, and get reminded to come to work an hour before their shift starts! I can change timecards on the back end if I need to, see how many hours I have scheduled, and estimate what payroll will be. It's easy to clock in and out in the app and Homebase keeps up with the times for pertinent questions to ask when they clock in.

Cons:

Trying to shedule a shift from the app will make the schedule go off. You put in one time and then it changes it 2 hours for some reason, not a big deal, it usually schedule from my laptop anyway.

Good product with too much fluff and mediocre UX

Comments: Overall, we are still with homebase because everyone is now used to it and our system is setup this way. Writing this review though, it is certainly about time i checked the timeclock-scheduling-team market again. Because the product is quite slow and features are being added which i don't need.

Pros:

We decided to go for Homebase because it mostly resembled what i was doing in as spreadsheet before. The timeclock is rather solid, we have set up a dedicated tablet to clock in and out. This is the main reason i got homebase for my team - so that they would have a schedule and be able to clock in and out. Also nice is the fact that custom national holidays can be setup and automatically be shown in the schedule. The Homebase team has over the years implemented a few nifty features to save me time as an admin. Next is checking timesheets and correcting them when it comes to payroll - however this is where we stop with using homebase. We don't use any other features.

Cons:

We don't utilize the payroll feature at all - everything can only be set in dollars. Overall, the software feels like it is made for the US market - not internationally. I have feature requested over a year ago that custom currencies should be implemented and even the way time is displayed (24h instead of am-pm). To no avail. Even from their content marketing strategy it is clear that Homebase is only focusing on the US market, with no interesting content for me as a hotelier on the other side of the world. It is also sad to see that they have recently started adding a lot of fluff to their product like hiring, instead of making the core experience easier and faster to use. The new timesheets section looks nice, but i am 5 times faster with the old one (which could be faster still). I would love to see much more emphasis on a fast and easy to use product, with lots of features to get my work done quicker. Homebase is a classic example of software which gets better the less i have to use it. I would like to see the product move in this direction.

Great option for the price-point

Comments: Overall Homebase has been a great scheduling software for our business, ticking almost every box we were looking for. We especially needed a way for employees to log in and out of different departments (which they do as needed and not according to a clock) during a shift that IS scheduled. We've been able to make Homebase work for that specific need.
We appreciated the flexibility of allowing employees to clock in/out on a central laptop or tablet, or letting them use their phones through the app with a geo-boundary over our office, and then when the pandemic hit, we removed the geo-boundary to allow them to clock in and out from their homes.

Pros:

Pros: *Free option *Customizable - we're able to use it for employees to log in and out of the different unscheduled departments/roles they do within a scheduled shift. Makes it easy to track manhours and payroll by department when the people working in each department changes throughout each day. *The app *Easy to use *Great additional features like job posting and document storage/sharing, PTO tracking

Cons:

Cons: *Getting the PTO tracking to work for us has been a long wait. *Employees experience a lot of glitches of punches not going through. *Takes forever to enter a schedule in the separate "available" and "actual" schedules. I would like to take a posted availability schedule and just make it be their working schedule with one click. Scheduling takes a bit of time, but isn't hard.

we LOVE homebase.

Comments: Such a great experience - and they are so helpful too!

Pros:

We have a few off-site jobs, not another location - but we are a food truck. So our shifts, timing, and dates and regularity change ALL the time. Homebase allows you to create and manipulate shifts, their names, times, etc. A lot of other platforms do now have as much customization available. AND its easy to create and change templates, as well as create and change schedules from a computer, phone, or ipad.

Cons:

I wish we had options for printing, so that we could manipulate the format a little bit more. But its still quite strong. Also, sometimes the communication between our POS and Homebase has issues. Not too often, but it would be so, so nice if they spoke to each other and updated more smoothly.

A comprehensive, user friendly application that offers must-have features

Comments: This application was offered as part of our new Clover POS system. I began to use it to set up the employee schedules for a small (seven employee plus owners) business. The more I used it, the more impressed I was with it. It provides every function that a small business like ours needed, taking a very tedious and error prone process and making it easy and transparent to handle. Being able to delegate certain tasks to key employees, auto notices sent for upcoming shifts, notification if someone hasn't clocked in within a set period for their shift, labor rate vs revenue analysis, end of year tax information gathering...and this was all in the free version that came with Clover! All in all, I am both impressed and pleased with this package. It looks to me like the right team wrote the right code for the right objectives at the right price. How often does that happen in the software world?

Pros:

Ease of use, nailed key functions needed, intelligent navigation, visually uncluttered despite having a lot of functionality.

Cons:

It is not a shortcoming of the software but of non-technical users. The biggest problem I have had is bringing along the technophobes who are used to working with...wait for it...paper calendars and personal journals to keep up with. They yearn to be able to use something so powerful but blanch when they open the home screen and see what is available. It is about as user friendly as can be imagined but some still are so intimidated that it is hard to get them to dig in. When they do, they begin to appreciate the value that is provided. The key is bringing the shy types along S L O W L Y. This software will sell itself once it is given a fair opportunity to shine. Just grit your teeth and work with them. It's more than worth the effort.

Definitely worth it

Comments: Overall this product and customer support have been great!

Pros:

The reason that I started using g homebase was because it is linked to Square. However, even if I stopped using square I would still use homebase!

Cons:

Some of the reports are difficult to configure and very time consuming to drill down to the data we need

One of the best software tools out there for small businesses

Comments: Scheduling, Clock in and outs, communication with employees, hiring - I use Homebase for all these features. I've made a couple of suggestions along the way and their customer support is superior. I feel heart or they find a solution for me that I didn't think of. Hands down, this is one of the best software decisions I've made for my company.

Pros:

The scheduling feature and time clock were the two most important features in implementing this software. But since then, the Hiring feature has become so valuable. Honestly every feature they offer is superb and what a great value.

Cons:

Honestly, I can't think of anything I don't like about it.

Great Scheduler and Time tracker

Pros:

I use the free version and the functions and customer support are excellent. I have called them several times and they always answer and always solve the problem. For free you cannot get much better.

Cons:

The free version lacks a few features I would like to use, such as time card saving and managing how far before the shift an employee can log in. The problem I have is the paid plans are too expensive. The pricing goes from zero to expensive to very expensive. There is no mid tier pricing for someone like me that wants a few extra features.

Multitool for time and attendance

Comments: I am an early adopter and have watched the software development from version 1. It has grown quite a bit and I have referred 15-20 other businesses. Though they never mention me for a referral bonus.

Pros:

I love the scheduling and time and attendance features. I like the flexibility and the abilities of my team to control their own schedule and time off.

Cons:

I dislike that the only feature I require from the next tier (+$20 per month) is different job codes so I just don't use it. I renegotiate payrate and time to achieve payrate differential for alternate job descriptions. It it was a weekly issue, I would switch products... that's how serious of a flaw it it. Also, Shift Ratings are a good idea but the functionality to retrieve their comments is clunky and I only remember to search it out once a month. It just makes it a throw away feature.

Review

Comments: Out grew it. Seems like it is more for food services industry instead of Technology Consulting services. We got away with stretching the functionality for our needs (like having to make everyone a manager). It was good for the year we used it with about 8-10 people, but now that I have rolled out company wide, it just wasnt the tool for us going forward

Pros:

cost and initial functionality for what we needed

Cons:

Out grew it. Seems like it is more for food services industry instead of Technology Consulting services. We got away with stretching the functionality for our needs (like having to make everyone a manager). It was good for the year we used it with about 8-10 people, but now that I have rolled out company wide, it just wasnt the tool for us going forward

Perfect For Small Crews and Small Businesses

Comments: I came across Homebase after searching for an affordable, user friendly scheduling software that would replace my company's outdated system. It works very well with small handful of employees, and they improve their system over time.

Pros:

Homebase works much like an Excel spreadsheet...but easier and minimalistic. There are not as many services out there as one might think, and most of them are meant to organize hundreds of employees. Homebase seems to have been made for smaller businesses and crews, with an interface that is easy to work with.

Cons:

Printing. Printing the schedule directly from the program was, at first, a nightmare, and the same can be said for sharing the finished schedule with others. Now, however, Homebase has made their integrations more robust ,and there exist more format features.

Amazing Solution for Small Nonprofit

Comments: If it wasn't for the free option, as well as the Clover integration, we would still be manually recording employees' hours. Since we're able to use a digital solution, I'm can pull timesheets and submit payroll from anywhere. As a very small team, my day to day varies drastically — but as long as I have my phone or laptop with me, I never have to worry about accessing employee timecards.

Pros:

As a small nonprofit museum, the best part of the software is the availability of a free version. It has all the basic necessities of a digital time clock, plus it is integrated into our Clover register and employees can download the app to clock-in for remote work.

Cons:

Our pay schedule isn't normal. Instead of being weekly or bi-weekly, we run payroll twice a month (on the 15th and the last day of the month). THANKFULLY, there is an option for this in the settings, but the dates that our payroll periods begin on isn't the same from one month to the next. So, every pay period I have to go into the settings on a web browser and update the start dates. Unfortunately, the only solution that Homebase could provide is a more complex algorithm that would take into account what the last day of the month is, as well as adjusting the date if it falls on a weekend since our payroll company process the pay run on Friday instead of the exact date if that date falls on a Saturday or Sunday.