TCP has long been praised for its time and attendance software. After its acquisition of Humanity, we soon discovered that this vendor also has an impressive employee scheduling product.

There is a great deal of flexibility for both account-wide and employee-level customization in the employee scheduling tool.

From the ShiftPlanning settings, we could easily enable employees to trade or drop shifts, with or without managerial approval. This feature allows us to tailor policies based on team needs. Also, the ability to have custom leave types, such as Sick Days or Maternity Leave, and enable them at the employee level made it trouble-free to accommodate various leave policies across teams.

The vendor also knocked it out of the park with its employee availability management features. Employees are set to be available 24/7 by default, but they can update their specific availability via the Humanity app or desktop interface. They can also use the one-time availability feature to communicate temporary availability changes, like doctor appointments or picking up extra hours.

Not to mention, there’s an auto-fill schedule function that, in our test, helped us quickly fill shifts with available team members while also flagging potential conflicts with a red warning icon. With this feature in hand, we'd argue that there would be minimal scheduling conflicts.

We tested the Time Clock feature and loved it. It gives employees options for clocking in through the app or physical terminals and supports Geofencing.

Managing leave requests was straightforward. Employees could request partial or full days off, and before approving leave, we could easily see which shifts needed coverage and who was available to step in.

Manually double-checking each schedule to ensure we met specific labor requirements is indeed not an enjoyable task, so knowing that we could define the minimum and maximum hours our staff could work in a day or week right within Humanity by TCP Software was nothing short of impressive.

Despite its many features, we noticed a few drawbacks. Humanity keeps its user interface simple, but compared to competitors like Homebase or Deputy, it’s doesn’t feel as modern and intuitive.

This vendor's hyper-focus on US-based companies is, in some ways, double-edged. While it’s well respected in North America, it has limited capability in the global market. Also, we’re not a big fan of its lack of pricing transparency, especially considering that most good brands are upfront about their costs.