How To Create A Time Schedule In Excel

November 19, 2018

Should you schedule your employees in Excel?

Scheduling your employees can be intimidating, especially if you have a lot of them.

There are a lot of employee scheduling apps out there to make the job easier, but if your employee schedule isn't too complex or time-consuming Microsoft Excel can do the job fine.

The free and reusable Excel employee schedule attached below allows you to:

Add employees
Assign them shifts & split shifts
Add unpaid breaks
Calculate labor costs
Easily make changes to the work schedule

Click here to download the schedule

How to make a schedule in Excel:

1. Getting started with the template

- Download the file on your computer and open it

Click "Enable editing" and "Enable content" as these prompts appear

2. Select the start day of the week

Enter the start date of your schedule in format mm/dd/yyyy
The day of the week will change automatically depending on what start date you enter

3. Select how many days you want to schedule for

The default number of days you can schedule for is 8
To add more days copy the whole last column and insert the copied cells to the right of the last column as many times as needed
To reduce the number of days you want to schedule for simply delete as many columns as you'd like

4. Add your employees

- The default number of staff in the schedule is 20

- If you'd like to schedule more than 20 staff, copy the whole last row and insert the copied cells below the last row as many times as needed

If you'd like to reduce the number of staff simply delete as many rows in the schedule as you'd like

5. Assign employees their shifts

- You must enter shifts into the schedule in the format 9am-5pm

If one of your staff is working 2 or more shifts in one day enter split shifts by entering the next shift separated by a slash /

Regular shifts

Split shifts

6. Add unpaid breaks (optional)

If you want to deduct an unpaid break from a shift, enter the break separated by a slash
You must enter it in this format: X minute break

7. Calculate labor costs

Enter each worker's hourly rate
And Excel will calculate their pay for the schedule

8. Finishing up

Save the schedule under any name you like (e.g. Schedule 1)
Send it your employees when you're ready
And you're done!

9. Next time round

When it's time to make the next employee schedule simply:

Open the last schedule you made
Build the schedule as you did last time (following the above steps)
And save it under a new name (e.g Schedule 2)

But wait there's more!

If you think you're spending too much time every week managing your employee schedule try OpenSimSim's FREE employee scheduling software .