DRoster Freeware Standard 5.1.4

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on April 20, 2011

These days, small businesses can use a break wherever they can find one. Free business software that performs as well as pricey packages seems a good place to start looking. We've found one: DRoster Freeware Standard from Kappix. It's a full-featured employee scheduling suite that happens to be free. It's highly flexible and almost completely customizable. It has the ability to create, schedule, and track assignments; create, print, and export reports; plan shifts and schedules; and back up data to an included Firebird database. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but DRoster is far from intimidating, thanks partly to a user-friendly design that avoids the dull look and feel typical of business ware.

DRoster's installer prompted us to enter employee titles, names, and other setup data, all of which is easy to change later on as needed. The business end of DRoster's colorful, cleanly designed interface is the Home tab, which anchors five planners: Shifts, Hourly, Detailed, Employee, and Manage. DRoster opened in the Employee Planner with the Employee roster displayed, including spaces for each employee's address, home and cell numbers, e-mail, hours, and notations. Under Manage, we could access Positions, Recurrences, and Views; while the Shifts, Hourly, and Detailed Planners offered easy customizability. In fact, most fields can be changed or customized to suit specific needs. DRoster also generates highly specific reports in HTML, e-mail, or print form, or it can export data. The Reports options include Attendance, Duties by Positions, Employee Duties, and Employee Absences & Reasons (our favorite!) as well as a Duties Calendar and Overloaded Employees.

DRoster's motto, "It's about time," seems to apply just as well to its function as its functionality, since everything we tried worked well. The program's helpful wizards and other tools not only reduce the learning curve but also the time and keystrokes required to get the job done. If "personnel manager" is one of your many hats, DRoster Freeware Standard can take a load off your head as well as your sore bottom line.

Publisher's Description

From Kappix:

DRoster is a powerful intuitive employee scheduling software tool. It's flexible and meets the needs of a wide range of people who have to manage shifts, schedules and rosters. With DRoster you can: schedule assignments quickly and react instantly to changes in your rosters and shifts, know your employees' availability times, print schedules in a variety of reports and export them in any format. There are no limits to the number of employees you can manage with it. DRoster is highly customisable: change any fields to fit your needs. With DRoster employee scheduling you have complete control of your staff rostering needs regardless of your organization's size. Easy to install and use. Kappix offers you quality support at support@kappix.com DRoster Features: One screen shows you all your employees' availability times and days 100% Customizable: Define unlimited sets of properties and events for every shift yourself A filtering out of persons to duties according to their availability (time) and capabilities A fixed shifts or free-hand shifts mode of working A flexible availability time for every person A rich set of out-of-the-box reports A variety of formats for exporting reports (txt, htm, rtf, xls, tiff, gif, bmp, jpeg, pdf) A recurring shifts template for faster scheduling of peak hours, holiday schedules and more A set of user-defined views to arrange the roster layout to your needs A set of adjustable planners to give you the granularity of time you need. A client server version to share data over a network (visit Kappix) A color coding system A choice of working with or without overlapping shifts A standard Software industry database (Firebird).